Digitalisation of SMEs: A survey of 435 respondents from SMEs and enterprises by software reviews and selection platform Capterra India, a Gartner subsidiary, on Monday noted that 88 per cent of respondents said their firm has a digitalisation strategy in place, indicating the growing significance of digitalisation and the reason why most respondents reported having an operational digitalisation plan.
In order to develop an efficient digitalisation strategy, the first step is to develop a clear digital transformation plan that supports the SMEs’ corporate objectives. “Outlining the intended results, identifying critical areas for digital adoption, and creating an implementation plan could all be parts of this step. For example, if a retail company wants to create a digitalisation strategy, they may want to list down which part of the fabric sourcing/manufacturing process they want to digitalise, how much it would cost, and how it would impact overall revenue,” the survey report said.
The survey was rolled out to a group of managers, senior managers, or CEOs/founders between May 25 and June 7, 2023.
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“The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a shift in consumer sentiment and behaviour across the world. Technologies such as blockchain, IoT, 5G, cloud computing, AI and Data Science have changed the global economy and being a cornerstone of this economic development, SMEs have also realized the need to digitalise their business models,” said Sukanya Awasthi, Content Analyst for Capterra India and Digitalisation of Indian SMEs survey in a statement.
82 per cent of SME decision-makers also said that digitalisation is very important or critical for their business growth while for 17 per cent, it was moderately important and for 1 per cent, it was minimally important.
Among various business segments, 46 per cent said they want to improve customer service and satisfaction through digitalisation, 40 per cent said they need to simplify operations and workflows, 36 per cent said they want to explore new business models and revenue streams, 32 per cent said they want to minimise human errors and 32 per cent said they want to ensure compliance with data security regulations with the help of digitalisation.
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“One of the prime examples of digitalisation for the purpose of improving customer service could be the introduction of chatbots. The emergence of certain types of generative AI tools could also possibly contribute to this shift in catering to customer queries through chat windows driven by artificial intelligence (AI) instead of traditional methods,” the report added.
Among the key benefits reported by respondents from improving or implementing digitalised processes were increased efficiency according to 42 per cent of respondents, improved customer satisfaction (41 per cent), higher profits (34 per cent), improved employee satisfaction (33 per cent), improved cyber security (32 per cent), and more.