Productivity 
Digital transformation uses the latest technology tools to help you improve business processes and systems. Organizations must adopt effective digital transformation tools to remain competitive, innovative, and efficient in their operations and communication.
With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, many companies are exploring ways to integrate AI into their business operations. Embarking on a digital transformation journey is an ongoing process that requires strategic changes and the adoption of new tools.
The main objective of digital transformation is to improve the experience of working with internal team members, external customers, and partners.
However, first, it’s essential to analyze the existing tech stack to identify what’s working and what needs improvement. Leveraging digital technology is vital in enabling digital transformation and improving overall business operations.
You can then explore these digital transformation tools to help you fill the gaps.
What Are Digital Transformation Tools?
Digital transformation tools are solutions that help companies augment technology to improve processes and deliver increased value. A digital tool is an essential component of digital transformation, enhancing communication, collaboration, data security, and productivity within organizations. These tools guide you through a journey of evolving with technology, transforming your workflows, and achieving higher efficiency across the business.
Digital transformation doesn’t have a precise endpoint, as it’s not a destination. When your environment keeps changing, you need to adapt and evolve consistently. A variety of digital transformation resources such as software, consulting services, and educational materials, are available to support organizations in their transformation efforts. For enterprises, digital transformation aims to enhance the end-user experience and employee productivity.
This transformation can include migrating data to a cloud service, leveraging new technologies with AI for process automation, and other changes that improve the current setup and processes. Ongoing transformation efforts are necessary to ensure a successful digital transformation and sustained business growth.
Types of Digital Transformation Tools
Multiple business aspects, both directly and indirectly, affect revenue. Digital transformation tools streamline these aspects using new approaches and initiatives. The most effective digital transformation tools are those that support business goals and drive measurable improvements.
Let’s look at various types of digital transformation tools that work to streamline various business aspects. These tools play a key role in supporting digital transformation initiatives within organizations, enabling them to adopt new strategies and technologies for better outcomes.
By leveraging these solutions, organizations can streamline business processes across the organization for greater efficiency and effectiveness.
Communication and collaboration software
Communication is the core of any business, directly impacting productivity, performance, and social capital. Social capital represents the shared values and resources that enable individuals to collaborate toward a common goal.
Traditional communication tools, like emails, present some challenges to businesses. For example, they’re uneditable. For effective communications, you need a transparent solution (like customer relationship management software like Salesforce or HubSpot) to help employees understand the context of communications and avoid miscommunication.
Communication and collaboration tools provide real-time messaging features to facilitate the exchange of information for swift decision-making. These tools feature file sharing, mentions, and platform integrations, making it easier for teams to sync across various platforms. Improved collaboration is a key benefit, as these tools enable seamless teamwork and more effective communication.
These platforms help teams streamline communications while collaborating on tasks and projects, creating a digital workplace that enhances productivity and efficiency. Marketing teams, for example, use cloud-based communication and collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams to discuss campaign ideas asynchronously. These cloud-based solutions are essential for supporting remote and hybrid work environments.
Related: How to Approach Enterprise Digital Transformation in the Age of AI
Digital Employee Experience Tools
Employee experience tools enhance how employees interact with technology and their work environment. These tools focus on improving productivity, engagement, and satisfaction by providing seamless access to applications, resources, and support.
Digital employee experience tools enable IT teams to support a distributed workforce and their digital transformation strategy, including device management, performance monitoring, and automated issue resolution.
They often include features like personalized dashboards, feedback mechanisms, and integrated communication channels, helping organizations create a more connected and efficient digital workplace. Companies can accelerate digital transformation efforts and foster a positive work culture that supports employee well-being and performance.
Video conferencing tools
Video conferencing software gained mainstream adoption in 2020, as it enabled face-to-face interactions, including remote meetings, presentations, and brainstorming sessions. This software increased in popularity after the COVID-19 pandemic, when many teams began working remotely. Before the pandemic, sales teams utilized these tools extensively to connect with clients who were globally distributed.
Internal and client-facing teams currently utilize these tools to communicate with one another, partners, or clients.
Video conferencing apps, such as Zoom or Google Meet, offer numerous features that cater to the needs of these teams.
- Screen sharing: You can share your screen with all meeting participants, keeping everyone on the same page.
- Recording capabilities: Video conferencing software has recording features that make it easier to revisit a discussion after a meeting. Many AI tools have made using these recordings easier by generating meeting minutes that you can share with participants.
- Breakout rooms: You can easily divide meeting participants into smaller groups using breakout rooms, where they can collaborate as focused teams and return to the meeting whenever they’re ready.
These tools are ideal for businesses with remote or hybrid work settings, as well as for clients
Project management tools
When working on a project with multiple variables, timelines, people, deliverables, and processes, effectively keeping track of everything can be tricky. Your spreadsheet software will only help you to a certain extent when the number of variables increases.
Project management tools are invaluable in such situations. These apps make it easy to organize tasks and deadlines, fostering effective communication with project teams. They also simplify task delegation, progress tracking, file sharing, and milestone management, while keeping people and workflows aligned toward project completion. A key feature of these platforms is resource allocation, which ensures that tasks are assigned efficiently and project oversight is maintained.
Project management tools facilitate collaboration across the organization and within specific working groups. Transparency, security controls, and documentation all help close the loop. Additionally, these tools offer valuable insights that support informed decision-making and improved project outcomes.
Below are some notable project management tools on the market.
- Asana: Good for creative and marketing teams
- Notion: Best for founders and startups
- Jira: Good for software engineers
- Rocketlane: Best for customer success managers
- Basecamp: Good for marketing managers
- Hive: Best for graphics designers
By leveraging these project management tools, organizations can achieve greater operational efficiency through streamlined workflows and improved collaboration.
This classification is based on the job titles of reviewers of specific products on G2.
Collaborative workspaces
Collaborative workspaces let users work together on the same document, sheet, or board. This software enables efficient and effective collaboration with others while preventing version control issues.
You can share a Google Docs link with your team, and they can work on the same document simultaneously. Collaborative workspace features often overlap with those of video conferencing software, such as whiteboards. In video conferencing meetings, participants can collaborate to share and illustrate their ideas.
A collaborative workspace is a good fit for your business if you rely heavily on document-based collaboration and work in a remote or hybrid setting. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 offer numerous collaborative workspace solutions that you can explore to find the one that best fits your needs.
Social intranet platforms or internal wikis
Social intranet platforms, also known as internal wikis, utilize social feeds and employee forums to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing among employees. These tools are designed to enhance employee engagement by facilitating easier connections, communication, and participation in the company culture. They serve as an organization’s internal knowledge repository and assist with employee onboarding.
You can use these platforms to share company news, updates, and internal documentation to guide your people in following set processes. Human resources teams often manage these processes, ensuring smooth onboarding and efficient access to important information. Using this software, you can share employee awards and recognize people for their achievements, improving your team’s morale.
Confluence is an excellent example of this type of software. It helps you keep internal documentation, updates, and news accessible to authorized people.
Unified communications software
Unified communication consolidates conversations from various internal channels, including VoIP phone calls, video conferencing, messaging, and email, into a single interface. This simplifies communication management and empowers your team to be more attentive and focused on internal discussions.
Bringing channels together prevents critical communications or expected actions from slipping through the cracks. It also streamlines internal communication for teams.
Nextiva’s Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) is a reliable platform with an uptime of 99.999%. It maintains a trust page that shows the availability of all systems.
Live chat software
Live chat software enables businesses to provide real-time support to website visitors. People who land on your website can communicate their needs via chat to get the support and assistance they need.
This accelerates the resolution of visitors’ queries, improving customer experience on your website. By providing timely support, live chat solutions also contribute to customer retention by encouraging repeat business and building loyalty.
Nextiva’s live chat solution plugs AI into the chat feature, reducing the response time for visitor queries. Chat responses take an average of four minutes to solve and cost $20. With AI, you can respond instantaneously and lower your business costs.
Many live chat solutions encourage visitors to submit their details, resulting in lead capture and the collection of valuable customer data. This customer data helps improve support and sales by centralizing information for better relationship management.
Website chat solutions ask questions to encourage visitors to share what they need and to provide more context with additional information. It gives your inbound teams the necessary details to qualify leads and prioritize sales efforts for more effective customer acquisition.
Related: How to Add Live Chat to Your Website (Plus Best Practices)
Where Does AI Fit into Digital Transformation?
Businesses are eager to explore how AI can enhance their processes and systems, ultimately leading to improved efficiency. Intelligent automation, powered by AI and machine learning, is a key driver of digital transformation, streamlining operations and enabling smarter workflows.
The data suggest that almost half of companies today already use AI in at least one business function.
Source: Exploding Topics
Below are some ways AI tools act as a catalyst (through automation) to fuel digital transformation, including their ability to automate repetitive tasks and improve overall efficiency.
Improve collaboration
AI makes conversations more efficient and contextually accurate. Based on the data it acquires, AI helps write messages (or emails), thereby saving time for internal or external communication.
In video conferencing, AI summarizes meeting minutes, helping participants absorb the essence of a discussion while keeping them accountable for their actions. Here’s an example of how Reelay summarizes meeting minutes for enterprises using AI.
Source: Reelay
Personalize communications
AI uses employees’ interests and roles to help curate news and updates on their social intranet platforms. The algorithms track employees’ activity and adapt in real-time to deliver relevant content, thereby improving their work experience.
Intelligent algorithms track individual activity and preferences to curate a tailored hub for every employee. Personalized intranets adapt in real-time to map relevant content to each user, providing a smarter work experience.
Some businesses also deploy AI chatbots on their intranet to streamline internal communication and processes. In addition to chatbots, digital adoption platforms offer interactive in-app guidance and tutorials, enabling employees to adapt to new software.
Digitalization tools further automate internal processes, enhancing efficiency and productivity. These bots manage the high volume of IT questions people ask daily, reducing the number of tickets the IT or HR department needs to respond to and keeping them focused on more critical support queries.
For example, payroll management tools automate employee payment processes, reducing HR workload and ensuring compliance.
Expedite customer service
On the customer side, live chat solutions powered by AI provide relevant suggestions for troubleshooting steps, offering real-time insights that enable support teams to respond quickly and accurately.
They guide visitors to helpful knowledge base articles and promote self-service, while also enabling businesses to derive insights from customer interactions to improve their support strategies.
Customer experience improves with faster solutions. These chatbots can often hand a communication over to a live agent when the query becomes too complex or when the customer urgently wishes to speak to a human. This transfer is seamless and doesn’t cause friction in the interaction. By leveraging these solutions, businesses can enhance customer experiences through faster, more personalized support.
Related: 5 Incredible Examples of Successful Digital Transformation
Achieve Digital Transformation Success With Nextiva
The tools mentioned above will help improve your processes and systems, but improvement is not as simple as turning a key. A change will occur, and a change management process will need to be implemented as part of your overall digital transformation strategy.
You’ll need buy-in from various stakeholders, a shared understanding of goals, and new ways of working. Digital transformation is not just a technology shift; it’s also a shift in culture and overall strategy.
Choose the best digital transformation tool based on what best aligns with your business and how easily you can accommodate change. Selecting the right solutions can provide a significant competitive advantage by streamlining operations and enhancing customer experience.
If you’re looking for a reliable partner to improve communication, consider Nextiva.
Digital transformation can help your business gain a competitive edge in the market by leveraging advanced technology and optimizing your processes.
Related: Best Digital Transformation Companies & Their Key to Success
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