Trying to achieve digital transformation without investing in the right tools is a losing game. Because while you hold back, thinking you’re saving money, your competitors are speeding ahead of you. Companies that harness the power of automation technologies have employees that are 31% more productive, according to Automation Anywhere. And data from SnapLogic found that AI boosts work performance for 81% of employees. Just think of what that kind of productivity could do for your bottom line.
To reap the benefits of digital transformation, you need to know which technology is worth investing in. Below, we’ll go over the eight types of digital transformation software that can propel your business forward.
Communication
Instant messaging
Digital communication tools have already transformed work in major ways, namely, making remote work possible. Many remote and hybrid teams use Slack or Microsoft Teams to keep in touch with colleagues around the world via instant messaging (voice, video, or text).
Async messaging
Digital transformation tools like Twist take it one step further and help you shift your work model to asynchronous—meaning your team can work at completely different times of the day and still communicate, just on their own time. That’s because Twist removes the sense of urgency to reply immediately to messages. For example, Twist does not have status notifications displaying to teammates that you’re available.
Video calls
As we all saw in 2020, video meetings changed the game. From weekly stand-ups to monthly pub quizzes, conferencing apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet saw a huge boost in usage. And because remote and hybrid work are here to stay, choosing the right web conferencing software is crucial for any company’s digital transformation.
Async Video Messaging
Loom makes it easy to connect with people via video even when they’re not available. It lets you record a screen video while you talk over it, making it easy to explain a more complicated or visual subject—without needing to call a meeting.
AI-Powered Noise Cancellation
With the uptick in virtual communication comes the downside of more distracting sounds. More than ever before, employees are working from places where it’s difficult to control the environment—coffee shops, airport lounges, and even someone’s own living room can become a huge source of distractions.
When Zippia asked 2,000 American workers, “What annoys you about meetings?,” more than half chose “people with loud background noises.” That makes background noise the most common meeting nuisance, second only to meetings that could’ve been an email.
So you can see how AI-driven noise cancellation like Krisp can enhance and transform virtual communication, making meetings more productive and effective. Krisp uses the power of deep neural networks that have been trained to identify and remove unwanted noise in real time. That means every call your team makes can have crystal clear audio.
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Project Management
Project management software is one of the most beneficial digital transformation tools a company can have. It can improve efficiency and oversight, increase collaboration, ensure prompt completion, and enhance employee productivity and performance. But, one of the biggest mistakes companies make with project management tools is paying for a subscription, setting it up, and then not training everyone on how to use it. What ends up happening is that the project managers create tasks and deadlines in the software, but everyone else is using their own methods to keep track of their own progress. The result? Disjointed communication and missed deadlines.
Instead, ensure widespread company adoption by training everyone on how to use the software and creating a central hub of documentation in case anyone has questions.
Popular project management tools include ClickUp, Trello, Asana, Airtable, and Monday. Software like these include helpful features such as email notifications to remind task owners when a task is due, various ways to visualize a project (such as Kanban boards, timelines, or Gantt charts), and dependencies (so you know who to contact if a project is being held up).
Customer Experience
One of the latest digital transformation trends is that companies are taking a more customer-centric approach to business. There are plenty of digital tools that can completely transform the way you do customer service and even how you run your business or design your product based on customer feedback.
Customer experience software can help you do the following:
- Measure and track customer satisfaction metrics. Track metrics such as NPS, CES, CSAT, and more to gauge customer sentiment. Delighted, Hotjar, Nicereply, and AskNicely all have this capability.
- Gather customer feedback. Survey software such as Zonka Feedback, GetFeedback, and Qualtrics can help you gather feedback from customers through chat, email, SMS, and your website.
- Deliver customer support. From building a knowledge base for customers to find the answers themselves to embedding a live chat into your website—the right customer support software can make getting the right answer faster and less frustrating for the customer. Software like Front creates a shared inbox (combining email, SMS, and social media queries) to help your support team better track and manage customer requests. Similarly, Zendesk implements a ticketing system so all customer emails, Tweets, and Facebook posts get converted into tickets, making support easier to manage.
- Monitor social media for sentiment. Social listening software enables you to monitor social media for specific keywords or hashtags about your brand and use that data to take action and make meaningful decisions. You might find out that a particular software product has a bug you didn’t know about, so you alert your engineering team to fix it. Or you might discover that customers really love a particular store location, which might prompt you to emulate the layout for other stores. Social media monitoring software helps you decipher the overall customer sentiment regarding your brand too. Tools like Mention, Hootsuite, and Talkwalker are examples of social listening software.
Employee Engagement
On the flip side of the customer experience is another aspect you cannot ignore: employee experience. With higher-than-usual attrition rates and a job market that favors candidates, businesses that want to thrive are investing in improving their employees’ engagement, satisfaction, and overall experience. This means leveraging software to rethink and reshape how you onboard and retain employees.
Employee engagement software can help you:
- Measure and track employee satisfaction metrics. Culture Amp provides your organization with turnover prediction based on engagement and performance data. Plus, it has science-backed surveys to measure employee engagement, diversity and inclusion, and more.
- Gather employee feedback. Qualtrics allows you to customize surveys to gather employee feedback that you can act on. These insights can drive changes in your business that affect performance and your organization’s bottom line.
- Recognize and reward employees. Help your workforce feel appreciated by implementing employee recognition software. Tools like Nectar and Bonusly provide online platforms for employees to earn rewards for their hard work and give shoutouts to colleagues.
Knowledge Management
According to IBM, knowledge management is “the process of identifying, organizing, storing and disseminating information within an organization.”
With proper knowledge management, your employees will feel empowered to do their job. They won’t waste time and energy asking for and hunting down essential information to carry out their role. Beyond improving efficiency and saving time, knowledge management empowers your organization to innovate. It helps you take existing knowledge and build upon it, driving action. Without it, great ideas and valuable information fall through the cracks.
And yet, 82% of organizations say they “need to do a better job of tying knowledge to action,” and 79% say they need to “be more effective at creating knowledge to jump-start innovations and launch new products and services.” That’s according to a 2020 Deloitte survey.
If knowledge management is a challenge for your organization, the good news is that technology can help. With software like Guru, you can build an internal wiki to store and maintain information, such as the company handbook. This creates a single source of truth that can easily and quickly be updated by your team. And software like Helpjuice can be used to create a knowledge base (a repository of articles answering common questions) for both customers and employees.
People Analytics and Assessments
People analytics software and neuroscience-based assessments are changing the game when it comes to recruitment and hiring. Instead of relying on humans (who all have unconscious biases), these tools allow organizations to lean on science to find the best fit for the role.
Pymetrics, for example, developed a series of 12 neuroscience-based online games that assess candidate soft skills. It’s part of Pymetrics’ broader platform that uses behavioral insights and AI to create a more fair hiring process. Rather than leaning on resumes and questionnaires (which are self-reported and can be biased), organizations that use Pymetrics can leverage objective cognitive and behavioral data to help them assess whether someone is a good fit for a specific role.
Zoho Recruit uses data and predictive analysis to help recruiters make faster, more optimized hiring decisions. It can identify the sources where you find your most high-quality candidates, optimize your sourcing process, and create reports to visualize progress.
Collaboration
Pre-pandemic, the companies that held out from allowing remote work often pushed the argument that the best collaboration could happen only in person. The innovative online collaboration tools that have since sprung up have proven those companies wrong.
Cloud collaboration tools like Google Drive, ClickUp, and Microsoft 365 make it possible to coauthor documents and slideshow presentations with teams across the globe asynchronously or in real-time. Whiteboard apps like Miro make it easy to visually present ideas and brainstorm remotely.
And as we’ll see in the next section, even more groundbreaking tools are on the horizon in the metaverse.
Metaverse
Defined by Meta (formerly known as Facebook), the metaverse is “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.” In an October 2021 statement, Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. … you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today.”
While the definition (and real-world application) of the metaverse is still blurry, we wanted to include it in this list because of its potential to contribute to digital transformation, enabling us to merge physical and digital in ways we’ve never seen before.
It’s worth noting that Meta is certainly not the only company innovating in the metaverse space. Microsoft, for example, announced Mesh for Microsoft Teams, which allows colleagues to “feel presence” and collaborate “in-person” through holoportation, holographic sharing, spatial rendering, and avatars.
Who knows what the future holds for the metaverse in the workplace?
Which Digital Transformation Software Will You Integrate Into Your Workflows?
Digital transformation isn’t about following the latest trends. Buying software that sits unused is a waste of resources for your organization. Instead, it’s about leveraging the right technology to fundamentally improve your product or processes, making you a more competitive, efficient, and profitable company.
Go back over this list of digital transformation tools and decide which one you want to try first, depending on your organizational goals. If you want to try one that takes less than a minute to set up and has a free version, check out Krisp. It’s an AI-powered noise-cancelling app that identifies and removes unwanted sounds during your online meetings—all at the click of a button.
