In this age of consumerism, the center of businesses is the consumer. Thanks to the rapid development of the business-digitizing process, customer expectations have never been higher. Thus, simple automation of existing processes is barely enough; you need to accelerate to meet customers’ expectations and demands of your business. Customers want immediate access to services and products and they need the ability to access company information quickly and accurately.
What you need to know about digitizing businesses
Digitization means to simplify your company’s processes by getting rid of physical, such as paper and ink signatures. Digitization may mean applying more digital approaches to every line in the workflow of the company to meet consumer demands. However, more than that, you can also use digitization to have direct communication with consumers, ultimately using real-time communication.
What’s more, you can reap many benefits by digitizing information-intensive processes. This may help you to reduce up to 90 percent of your operational costs as long as it’s done effectively. To top it off, you can also accelerate the flow of information, automatically collect data by replacing manual processes with software, be it for communication or data-processing. It may help a manager to point to problems more efficiently with real-time reports on performance while at the same time solving critical issues immediately.
It is interesting to note that this phenomenon is attributed to the rising trend of mobile devices. So, naturally, it will be best for companies to optimize their transactions with mobile devices as well. It is highly necessary for companies to provide access to services and products in mobile devices and platforms. Customers need to interact with companies directly to ensure their satisfaction, making real-time communication services an inevitable addition. By going digital, you can create loyal customers and highly reduce costs at the same time. However, do not forget to maintain a personal touch to prevent losing customers.
The digital phenomenon in Southeast Asian countries
Particularly in Southeast Asia, we have to know that this region has already embraced the internet. As of 2016, there were roughly 30% more Internet users, an additional 80 million from formerly 300 million people who are active Internet users (especially mobile Internet). Southeast Asians are deeply in love with their mobile phones, with 90-95% of the population owning one.
With this in mind, digitizing businesses is not only seen as an acceleration process but also a necessity. Many of the companies we spoke to were already developing a seller application of their own to compete in the harsh digitizing business environment. What’s more, people in this region use a huge bulk of their time on social media and the Internet. A year ago, Indonesian and Malaysian users were spending five hours a day on social media and the Internet while the Thais were spending 30 minutes less each day. On the other hand, Singaporeans and Vietnamese were only using the Internet for about 2.5 hours each day.
With that, it becomes incumbent to combine chat messaging from both mobile devices and PC. It will be a great addition if it comes with forms of e-commerce and related content to attract consumers. Back before 2014, the web browser had the limelight of internet venue, but since after 2014, the chat applications and real-time communications, especially in Asia had become the central attention. Hence, combining digitization with the ease of real-time communications such as chat would be a huge benefit for users and companies alike.
