Four Benefits Of Digital Leadership For Your Business Digital leadership helps your business to leverage digital technology for solving lead acquisition, sales, and customer service challenges.

Every company needs leaders who can make decisions and embrace digital opportunities to further strengthen their brand. That is what digital leadership aims to actualize. The concept of digital leadership is simple: a company uses its digital assets (e.g., website, email, educational videos, whitepaper) to achieve business objectives and drive its culture.

Digital leadership helps your business to leverage digital technology for solving lead acquisition, sales, and customer service challenges. That said, let's discuss some of the benefits you gain in your business through digital leadership:

It builds a digital culture
To use digital innovations in your business, your company needs to cultivate a digital culture that enables your employees to get the best out of these tools. For instance, if you create social media accounts to allow fast response to customers' inquiries and complaints, this is a good move. A digital leader can put regulations in place or change the old regulations so that employees can get the best out of these tools. These regulations could be written guidelines and, in some cases, can be unwritten rules.

Digital leadership explains how employees can go about their interactions with customers, important data to record, and what to do with it. Part of building the digital culture involves the digital leader training other employees on how to use the digital tools available to them.

In an organization, different departments need different digital tools to improve their work. For instance, the tools needed by the marketing department will usually be different to that needed by the accounting department. The traditional culture of the workplace, which was supported by rules, will be changed by a digital leader to make digital innovations effective in your business.

Makes your employees more productive
One of the aims of using digital tools at the workplace is to increase employees' productivity. However, without digital leadership to drive it, employees can be overwhelmed and struggle to get the best out of these tools. Digital leadership ensures that your workers eliminate tasks that wasted time in the past. With the automation of some of these tasks, employees can spend more time on important matters like talking to prospects and attending to customers.

What are some aspects of your business in which digital leadership could help increase employee productivity?
i) Marketing: To gain customers for your business, you have to attract prospects. With digital platforms, there are more opportunities to meet prospects and interact with them. Through your website and on social media, your employees now have access to more leads which can only mean an opportunity for more customers.

ii) Online sales: Selling products online is now a vital part of most businesses. With tools like customer relationship management software, employees can track customers' past purchases with your business and are able to personalize future offers to suit these customers' interests.

iii) In-store sales: When customers come to your physical store, the present digital innovations help your employees to serve them effectively. Tools like Giant Tablets can make information like stock level and the position/placement of goods in the store easy to find for employees.

This means with the same number of work hours, they can serve many more customers. With the effective use of digital tools, Argos allows its employees to see the stock level of each product and its location in their stores. This improves the productivity of these employees.

iv) Customer support: In the past, employees can only provide customer support when the customer calls on the telephone or visits a physical store. Today, there are many more channels through which a customer care rep. can attend to customers' needs or complaints.

Customer support agents can now attend to customer complaints or questions on social media, email, and even live chat on the website. By taking this approach, your employees can make customers happier and reduce customer churn rate.

Improves customer satisfaction
For your business to survive and thrive in this competitive environment, one goal you must always achieve is to satisfy your customers. A satisfied customer will have no reason to leave your business for a competitor whereas a dissatisfied customer will have many reasons.

What are some ways in which digital leadership can help your business to satisfy its customers more?
i) Convenience: It is now a norm for customers to sit in their houses, place an order online for a product and get it delivered at their doorstep. They are able to buy your products no matter where they are or where your business is located. That's convenience! Digital leadership can give you a wider reach that you could only have imagined 30 years ago. With its service online and offline, Amazon allows customers to buy products conveniently. With its Amazon Echo smart speaker, customers can now order for products by talking to the device.
ii) Speed: With the improvement in technology, patience is a virtue that is slowly disappearing. If your business continues to be slow, it will be left behind by competitors and customers will leave. Why? Because customers now expect a faster service from your business. Anything less will keep them dissatisfied. Digital leadership helps you to implement tools like an efficient website, software that keeps the transport department updated about new orders, and other technologies that make you serve your customers faster.
iii) Customer support: For most customers, there is always a need to reach out to your business on an issue they're having with your product or service. Most times, this issue is affecting the level of satisfaction they are expected to derive from your product.

With digital leadership, your business can move swiftly to resolve these issues. And thus, increase customer satisfaction. Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos said, "Our customers are loyal to us right up until the second somebody offers them a better service. And I love that. It's super-motivating for us."

Increases revenue
When you serve more customers in less time, your business can make more money during the same period of time. There are many ways digital leadership can help your business to increase revenue. Some of them are:
i) Improving retention rate: When your business can serve your customers better with digital tools, these customers will be satisfied with your business and are less likely to leave your business. When you retain your customers and turn them to repeat customers, you're able to make more money from these customers.
ii) Increases the number of customers served: If digital leadership helps you to get the best out of your digital tools (e.g., social media, email autoresponder, CRM), it means you can now serve more customers during a period that can lower operational cost.

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