On Saturday 27 June 2020, Benoît RENOUL (CMO of talkspirit) and Eva DUCRUEZET (VP Business Operations & Strategy at GoCardless) were the guests of Frédéric SIMOTTEL, journalist HighTech and Digital Transformation, on the set of BFM Business / 01 Business to talk about the digital transformation of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises).
Indeed, as mentioned in a previous article, Talkspirit contributed to a white paper published on June 10th and entitled “Digitalisation: French SMEs at a crossroads”.
Aimed at raising the awareness of SME managers and inspiring them with success stories of customers who have successfully completed their digital transformation, this operation brought together 7 business software publishers.
These companies, Aircall, GoCardless, HubSpot, Lucca, Skillup, Talkspirit and YouSign, offer SMEs (two business segments for which digital transformation presents many challenges) solutions that enable them to transform themselves gradually, at an optimal cost.
The two guests discussed the publication of the white paper, outlining the many issues and priorities for businesses exposed to the digital world, as well as expert opinions on the challenges of the post-COVID era.
Key elements of the interview:
- SMEs lagging behind: in 2019, Bpifrance estimated that “87% of SME managers still did not consider digital transformation as a strategic priority for their company”.
- Digitalization and growth: “a McKinsey Global Institute study shows that a SME that has successfully completed its digital transformation has a growth rate 4.5 times higher than others”.
- Digitalization (definition): “some people imagine digital as just a digitalization of existing processes, and are not enough in the transformation of their business, their customer relationship, their employee experience…”. Eva DUCRUEZET, GoCardless.
- Transformation: “Modernizing is not transforming”; indeed, the implementation of software / applications is certainly necessary but by no means sufficient: to be successful, a digital transformation leads to reviewing “operational processes, skills, business model … It really goes in depth. »
- Digitization and cash management: “SMEs that digitize themselves manage to relieve themselves of the manual management of payments and thus build long-term customer loyalty, as they no longer have late payments or unpaid invoices. “Eva DUCRUEZET, GoCardless
- Support for digital transformation: “in this study we mention the support structures and systems, first and foremost Bpifrance, which is making a major effort to help SMEs invest and finance their innovations in France.
- COVID and changing work methods: “Containment has led companies to switch to daily remote work within a few weeks. At Talkspirit, we have seen a tenfold increase in the use of chat and a 30-fold increase in the use of video conferencing. These are really uses that are changing extremely rapidly. “Benoît RENOUL, Talkspirit
- Digitalization and CIOs: “in the coming years, the information systems departments [CIOs] have a huge challenge in terms of digital rationalization, since there has been a multiplication and superimposition of many new collaborative software programs, with impacts in terms of costs and security.
- OfficeNow: “it’s a collaborative office suite that allows our users to create documents (text files, spreadsheets and slides) directly in our platform, to share them, to co-publish them remotely with their collaborators, without leaving the Talkspirit environment and ergonomics” Benoît RENOUL (CMO, Talkspirit) at BFM Business to talk about the digital transformation of SMEs
