How to cut costs with Digital Technology as leading brands do it?
Digital technology is reshaping the entire business environment as we know it. With the arrival of the internet and the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), many traditional business models are no longer viable. The change also impacts customers. From a business perspective, the most significant difference in regards to customers is their rising expectations.
In today's day and age, customers have a lot of expectations. For starters, 70% say that connected processes are the key to winning them on your side. Likewise, some 59% also say that engagement specifically tailored to past interactions and purchasing behaviour is equally as important. Statistics also reveal that customers are more than twice as likely to see personalized content as relevant, than the traditional one.
Also, some 56% of consumers are looking to do business with innovative companies that actively and consistently introduce new products or services based on the customers' needs and pain points. Over 63% of people expect this model while two-thirds say that it will take even more than that to impress them.
Now, even though the market anticipates it, digital technology can also be used to cut costs, not just satisfy the market's increasing expectations. No matter how profitable a business is, there is always something that can be streamlined, optimized, or eliminated to improve overall efficiency concerning day-to-day operations.
It's always positive to start cutting unnecessary expenses when everything is performing well. This way, you will have more leeway, and the cuts will not affect you as much. Digital technology offers you multiple ways of doing this. And as it so happens, leading brands provide the best examples.
Decreasing Operational Costs - Georgia Technology Authority
Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) is an institution that provides numerous services for both state and local governments. Among the offerings are computer services, Citrix access, data storage and backup, change of address, content management, web application maintenance, etc. There are some 80 websites under their control and 430 active content managers. Even though, they were beginning to experience lower user conversion rates, editorial issues, and increasing operational costs.
But once they've transitioned their websites from the state's data centre and onto an open source cloud platform, their average update time dropped from roughly 15 minutes per edit to just one. It translated to approximately a 65% reduction in operational costs. Likewise, they also eliminated licensing costs, also decreasing their licensing and staff support costs by about 75%.
Better Site Performance - MLS
Major League Soccer (MLS) was experiencing frequent outages and an unresponsive server for its website as well as the websites of its 20 clubs. But by changing the type of server and reducing their overall codebase, they increased their user experience. They are now using a server that runs four times as fast and about 93% less expensive.
Standardizing Processes - Johnson & Johnson
Johnson & Johnson is a huge corporation that serves over a billion people on a day-to-day basis. It is for this reason why its content editors need to move quickly and react to the ever-changing customer demands with all sorts of branding messages and product marketing campaigns. They were, however, able to standardize their processes regarding content creation, thus, significantly reducing the cost of building and maintaining their websites.
These examples here are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the benefits of digital technologies and how they helped with cost reduction. If you want to learn more about the issue, we are at your service. Contact us today!
