Coronavirus and Digital Transformation: 5 Key Areas
Countless businesses are now faced with a serious choice: embrace digital or die.
We’ve written before on Digital Transformation, and how important it is for any company looking to compete in the modern world of digital commerce and business. And in light of the current COVID-19 crisis, that point has become even more true, and been brought into a sharper focus than ever before.
It’s already become clear that companies that have already undertaken extensive Digital Transformation, to reach Digital Maturity, have been the ones best-positioned to cope with the current crisis.
Consider Amazon – a company that holds digital maturity and transformation at its core: since the beginning of the year, on April 16th, its stock price had soared 28% while so many other companies have plunged into the red. This is unsurprising; the demand for home deliveries of goods is a given in current conditions.
However, not all companies are international, giant online retail corporations with millions to spend on constant innovation. Thought the ones that do make an effort to adapt and improve their digital infrastructure and offerings will be the ones that are best able to cope with these types of shocks.
Let’s take a look at five key areas that any company should be engaging with to secure their digital maturity now for future success.
1. Digital Communications
The importance of a digital presence for your brand is nothing new, but the current crisis has made it critical. At a time when most people’s interaction with the outside world is through their computer or mobile screens, it is of paramount importance to ensure that your online presence – whether that’s through a website, online adds, an app, or preferably all three – is robust, fine-tuned and accessible to your market.
2. Remote Work
Being able to continue your operations irrespective of you or your employees’ physical presence in an office is a huge advantage to have at the moment.
While many industries are being affected by the crisis in different ways, the ones that are able to continue delivering products and services by organizing digitally using online communication and management tools, are the ones that will be best equipped to survive and excel in the current climate.
We’ve written an article that explains how remote work can be take fully advantage of, both for now and in the future. You can read it here.
3. Scalability
We have now been confronted with the reality that almost overnight, a seemingly isolated national health crisis can spread to affect countries worldwide, in a way that leads to a near-total restriction of international travel and a severe restriction in cargo transport.
For companies that sell their goods overseas, this has created severe problems: not only is demand diminished, but it is hard actually getting your goods to the people who want them.
The COVID-19 crisis is demonstrating how important it is to have local supply chains, and also how beneficial it can be to have a local market base. For companies that have focused on foreign customers, this is a time for embracing digital transformation in order to secure and grow their local customer base.
Having a lean and adaptable infrastructure that leverages digital capability can allow companies to scale down to a local level when a crisis like this hits, which can mean the difference between staying afloat or going under.
Companies that are able to communicate and supply customers in their local areas using their websites and apps – from food producers to medical professionals, retail stores and more – will also be able to establish their brands and grow their markets in a way that will endure beyond the crisis.
4. Innovation
It goes without saying that innovation is going to be important for practically every company when faced with such a paradigm-shifting event such as COVID-19. However, innovation is a broad term, and its character will vary widely depending on the type of market and industry a business is involved in.
For a company undertaking a digital transformation strategy, aiming towards a model of sustainable innovation is highly recommended.
This can range from making sure software systems are built with a flexible architecture for adaptation to new situations, requirements and scaling responsively, to looking for new markets, ways to reach customers, and evolving product offerings in a way that meets needs in new and unexpected contexts.
5. Understand your digital ecosystem
As countless companies are now faced with the drastic choice of adapting to the new situation or floundering, what will separate the losers from the winners will be access to data, and the ability to act on it effectively. Big Data and analytics are going be more important than ever in providing the cues for what kind of adaptations are necessary and beneficial to a company in these special times.
Put simply, the companies that have a team or operation dedicated to understanding their market and industry ecosystem will be able to better respond to challenges, both now and in the future.
Are you or your company having difficulty reaching customers in this crisis? Get in touch with us to have a conversation about how Bocasay can help you take your digital maturity to the next level.
