Keep Pace or Lose the Race: Is Your Digital Strategy Ready for Tomorrow’s Marketplace?
Companies come and go every day—that’s just the reality of business. Not every company lasts for decades, and even fewer last over a century like Ford, which was founded in 1903. The kiss-of-death for a company is an inability to keep up with technology. It might sound surprising, but the life span of a Fortune 500 company today is significantly shorter than it was 25 years ago. Research in Motion, Nortel, and perhaps most spectacularly of all, Blockbuster, are all casualties of a failure to stay ahead of the technology curve. In fact, in its bid to remain viable, Ford itself recently replaced its CEO amid a tanking stock price. Investors view the automaker as lagging behind Google, Uber, and Tesla in developing technologically advanced, autonomous vehicles for the future.
Today’s business climate is dominated by companies that embrace technology and data to transform industries. Think AirBnb, Alibaba, Amazon, and Lyft. We live in a digital age, and leveraging digitization is the only way for a business to thrive in such a competitive landscape. Powerful digital communication tools can enable organizations to easily collect, process, and deliver targeted real-time information to optimize its operations. Digital communications allow for effective message dissemination and extends real-time, customized information to everyone within a company.
It’s critical that CEOs and C-suite executives encourage the wide adoption of digitization within a company. It’s a transformation that must involve every team and department to maximize success. Many organizations are slow behemoths, unable to nimbly respond to the fast pace of technological change, often resulting in poor customer experiences. Equipping people and processes with the right technology improves customer satisfaction, inspires innovation, and delivers greater value to all parties.
A successful digital platform is one that improves employee engagement, reduces costs, boosts productivity, improves safety, builds brand awareness, and elevates the customer experience. It will also allow employees and partners to better connect with customers to achieve business goals. When effectively deployed, digital tools will reduce costs by optimizing inventory levels and eliminating the distribution of printed material.
Digital communications enables organizations to share information while adding value and improving the customer experience. No matter your business, the perfect digital tools will free up time, labor, and financial resources so that you can focus on your core mission.
