New technologies change customer behavior and expectations. To counter new disruption players in your industry, whether you are a big enterprise or an SME, embrace a Digital Transformation for your organization will help you to become competitive and grow your business with confidence.

There are more than 1.7 billion websites on the internet and is growing. With powerful search engines (e.g. Google) available online, and, the proliferation of online searches, indeed, the first step of the digital transformation is to exploit the website as your business tool.

Digital transformation is a journey with multiple connected intermediary goals. It requires repeating the cycle of,

1. To set goals and strategy,
2. To transform it digitally to achieve the goals, and,
3. To monitor, measure and refine

Hence, your website needs to have a clear purpose and a defined objective, in concert with the overall business objectives. Many website designers produce eye-catching websites without considering functionality and business purposes, which, ultimately, the website simply floats in cyberspace without any use.

Small businesses usually use the website to recruit and retain customers. Larger enterprises likely use multiple websites to accomplish their businesses’ objectives – a corporate website for brand building to communicating to their stakeholders (shareholders, investors, partners, and consumers). Multiple promotional websites to market their products.

We focus here on how to use a website to recruit and retain customers, as, customers is the lifelines of businesses.

1. Recruit: there are three stages in a buyer’s journey - awareness, consideration, and decision. The company website plays a critical role in each of these stages, or, in marketing terms, as a sales funnel.
   • Awareness (or discovery): Search Engine Optimization (SEO), pay-per-click, email marketing, social media posts, content marketing, and print ads are all vital in raising awareness and interest. They serve to drive traffic to your website.
   • Awareness to action: Where your website will excel is to move your prospects from awareness to action, and convert to become your customers.
     • Educate/Engage (consideration): To create trust, engage with the visitors to prove that you can solve their problems – with factual, or inspirational information, and highlights the unique benefits that your product or service can offer. Supported by customer testimonials, informational video, etc., this will give you better chances to be shortlisted by the buyers.
     • Convert: Different businesses convert differently,
       • Lead generation: If you are selling services, when they arrive at your site, provide a special page (call landing page) with clear calls/clicks-to-action (CTAs). If they're interested and engaged, but not necessarily ready to buy, invite visitors to go deeper - to check out related content, to sign up for your newsletter, or blog digest, to attend a webinar or even register a physical event. On the other hand, if they’re ready to buy, puts them in direct touch with you - to call you, to sign up for a diagnostic, to have a web meeting, offering an online demo, to complete a form, or to make a phone call. Anyone responds to your call-to-action are quality and trackable sales leads.
       • To make a purchase: For e-commerce/online retailers (B2B or B2C), you may want to provide the incentive to encourage buying. E-commerce websites need to streamline customer buying processes to make buying easy and smoothly. Successful e-commerce websites move the visitor from one buying stage (shopping cart to checkout) to another clearly and uncluttered.
2. Retain
   • Understand your customer: With analytics, you can collect data points such as where they live, what they are buying and which pages they are. This is valuable information that can be used to leverage effective marketing.
   • Create loyal customers: Customer satisfaction should be given top priority. An increase in average consumer satisfaction, will decrease support calls and increase customer loyalty correspondingly.
   • Create a community: to continue to communicate with prospective and new customers through interactive forums or blogs.

You can extend the functionality of the websites to go beyond sales and marketing to improve your bottom

1. Support help desk: Because a website is available 24/7, you can offer useful information which can alleviate your businesses' support and reduce your help desk load. The idea of Customer self-service will reduce your support cost.
2. Human Resource (HR) Functions: you can implement your HR strategy here. Recruit and attract new talents to your company. Encourage your future employee to go onboard. Communicating with employees and co-workers using the website.
3. Personalize communication: With modern technology, this could be facilitated by a web or live chat room. Quick response makes clients happy and builds a healthy relationship with them. The latest development in AI “Chatbot” might be another opportunity for you to provide near human-like interaction.
4. You may also use your website to collect customer feedback or customer survey.
5. Web sites can be also multi-lingual to cover global sales.

As you see, websites today is more than a digital brochure or catalog online. Or, akin to digital yellow pages, shows your company location, contacts, and overview of their products and services. And after setting up the website, we pretty much left it alone.

We need a website to be a useful business tool. The next phase of the “Digital Transformation” is to the integration with back end systems to become the platform for an entirely unified enterprise system. For examples,

1. Integrate with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to nurturing sales. Integration can be bi-directional. You update sales leads captured by the website to the CRM. Match up with the sales campaigns, you update those leads as they mature through your offline sales process. Subsequently, the CRM report back to your site the latest sales progress information. With both sets of data, your online and offline sales efforts work together to complete the sales process - the transition from prospect to customer.
2. For online stores, integrate online sales transactions/orders to the back-end:
   • To manage your sales/tax reports and invoicing;
   • To monitor the latest online closing and provide upsell/cross-sell techniques;
3. Employee services: Companies can use the same technology (maybe intranet) to include company documents (or document management), standard operating procedures, payroll information, job postings, paid time off, company news, training programs, and other additional resources on the website.

There are many ways to build websites:

1. Hand code HTML/CSS
2. Popular website builders, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.
3. Content Management System (CMS)

If you are committed to “Digital Transformation” for your organization, we recommend that CMS is the way to go – as it can extend and customize your websites as you progress your “Digital Transformation” journey.