7 Benefits of Business Digitzation In Your Consulting Business

When governments around the world enforced a lockdown in the pandemic, every sector was forced to resort to digitalization. Surprisingly, a number of businesses not only survived but managed to thrive. E-commerce’s share in the worldwide retail trade, for obvious reasons, shot up from 14% in 2019 to approximately 17 % in 2020. Such is the power of digitalization. 

Undoubtedly, digital transformation helps businesses remain relevant and competitive, increases efficiency and productivity and ensures scalability. Digitizing positively impacts a business on all 3 fronts — operations, execution, and growth. Hence, most consultant firms are now increasingly advocating for business digitization. 

But are you, as a consulting business, keeping up with the recommendation? Experts are of the opinion that the consulting firms are yet to up the ante in business digitization.  

One can no longer deny the myriad benefits that digital business transformation brings to the table. Let’s look at some of the merits of digitizing your consulting business: 

1. Boosts efficiency and productivity 

What is digital business transformation? Digital business transformation involves automating integral business processes. Automating the time-consuming routine activities boosts your firm’s efficiency in three ways: 

• You free your human resources from repetitive chores. Hence, they can focus more on their main tasks of client management and consulting and make better utilization of their time and energy. This helps your consulting business perform more efficiently than before, resulting in increased productivity and higher revenue. 

• By using automatizing digital tools for repetitive tasks, you can reduce human error and attain remarkable operational speed. For instance, with Simply.Coach’s invoice and billing facility, you can easily create custom invoices and have them automatically mailed to your clients periodically and let the platform send automatic payment reminders as well. Online payment collection means the entire billing process can be taken care of digitally with minimal time spent by you/your team. 

• Digitizing ensures consistency. This, in turn, helps guarantee quality of service for your clients and higher margins for you.  

You can rely on automation when it comes to managing administrative chores, running the business seamlessly, and providing your clients with data-driven strategies and insights. 

2. Streamlines operations 

Whether you’re a one-man-army or a big firm, you need to take equal care of the administrative tasks necessary to run a consulting business. Running a business involves a variety of processes that sometimes have little or nothing to do with consulting. 

Take, for example, the sharing of resources – every consultant has plenty of documents constantly being shared with multiple clients. For a consulting business with multiple consultants, it makes sense to have a central repository of documents (either proprietary or curated) to pick from and share with clients. It also makes sense to have one dedicated space for content resources for each client, so they are easily located whenever needed. 

Automation takes care of details like these that help you streamline your operation as you grow.  

With integrated management platforms like Simply.Coach, all of these business operations are taken care of in one place, ensuring easy access to subscribers at reasonable prices. 

Looking for an easy-to-navigate, comprehensive platform for your consultancy firm? 

Why not check out the cool features Simply.Coach offers here? 

3. Reduces overall business expenses 

Cost reduction in the current economy is a priority. A sure-fire way to achieve cost cutting is business digitization. Research revealed that when businesses adopt digital tools and technology, it lowers the overall company cost by 5% as opposed to 2% that is achieved via conventional methods. Here are a few ways digitizing reduces consulting business expenses: 

• By lowering human error: “To err is human” but even a minor error in business (be it marketing, sales, operations, etc.) may result in a loss in terms of expenses. It is believed that business digitizing can bring down functioning errors by up to 90%. 

• Reducing number of missed deadlines: Handling multiple clients can be difficult, and missed deadlines don’t reflect well on your consulting business. Automation and digitizing help to streamline communication, reduce delays and enhance both productivity and customer satisfaction. 
• Significant reduction in everyday expenses: Consulting businesses are ideal for remote working. Digitizing eliminates hefty expenses such as renting an office building, water and electricity bills, costs on fancy furniture or other amenities. Running the consulting business via integrated cloud-based platforms like Simply.Coach makes it easier to collaborate and grow. 

4. Offers transparency 

Embracing digitizing can open windows to the nitty-gritty of your work, your data, your clients, business and so on. For example, consider how automating your sales pipeline or billing function can throw up key metrics and insights that can unlock new business decisions. This kind of solid visibility into your work can not only open critical doors at present but also enable greater pivots in the long-term stage. 

Greater transparency through advanced business digitization is a boon for leaders to get visibility into associates’ work, visualize processes, and help identify challenges to solve. 

5. Obtains data-driven insights 

One of the key benefits of digitization in business is that it helps in tracking minute metrics and enables businesses to take important growth decisions based on those. Business digitization also helps consultancy firms to move with the market and advise their clients in a quicker and more efficient manner – think insights related to audits, competitor landscape, organizational structures, and more. 

6. Better client satisfaction 

Clients today want to see ROI right from day 1. Through digitalization, consulting businesses achieve better client insights and gather vital information about their needs and requirements. You can, therefore, implement strategies that help deliver a smooth client experience right from the beginning. 

7. Ensures business scalability 

Digital transformation is at the heart of sustaining a business, helping it grow and enabling it to beat competition. Those who won’t embrace digital transformation can’t evolve in today’s markets. 

For example, converting a business’s IT infrastructure from on-prem to cloud can result in better speed, efficiency, and productivity of business processes at scale.  

Hence, it won’t be wrong to say that digitizing is the future of consulting business.  

In this case, digital platforms like Simply.Coach can enable you to optimize operations, improve client satisfaction, and explore new business models. 

Have you taken your consulting business digital yet? What are some ways in which digitizing has helped you? Let us know in the comments section below! 

Sources: Consult Port, Pointerpro, Xpertise Now, Theecmconsultant, Acreaty, Telekom, Thales 

FAQs 

1. What are the benefits of digitization in business?

Some of the benefits of business digitization are:

• Increased efficiency and productivity 
• Streamlined operations 
• Reduced operational cost 
• Better transparency 
• Enhanced customer satisfaction 
• Consistent data-driven insights 
• Sustainable business growth 

2. What is digital business transformation and why should I digitize my business? 

Digitization helps business transformation by enforcing critical strategies and enabling businesses to take insight-driven decisions. Business digitization also helps consultancy firms to move with the market and advise their clients in a quicker and more efficient manner – think insights related to audits, competitor landscape, organizational structures, and more. 

About the author

Jayashree Mukherjee

Content Specialist  @Simply.Coach

Jayashree Mukherjee is a content specialist by day and a content junkie (on OTT) by night. Passionate about traveling, street food and overturning the underuse of em dashes — she would have been a globe-trotter if she hadn’t been so lazy.