September 27, 2020
It’s coming to 6 months when COVID-19 almost home arrested the mankind globally. Some societies responded quickly and managed to control the spread of pandemic while many struggled and still struggling. The impact was same for most economies and most organisations globally. To ensure a smooth running, companies allowed employees to work from home. This global pandemic did not only change the working style but also the expectations, the way to work, the way to buy, the way to sell as social distancing became the new norm. This situation forced the mankind towards the “Isolation Economy”. The isolation economy is based on the principle that people will travel less for any kind of work, rather they will mostly work from home to complete their regular activities. In such a scenario, you don’t go out much to the marketplace for things, they rather come to you.
At first, the main challenge for any company was to develop the required infrastructure for their employees to work effectively and efficiently in a remote and secured environment. Most of the companies achieved this with some initial struggle. Both peer-to-peer and client-vendor remote audio-video meetings became the acceptable norm.
Since organization have realised that the isolation economy may be there to stay for long, even if things come back to old normal, certain changes in the human buying behaviour may be permanent. Hence, most companies have started looking into how they can change or adopt to these and grow their business during this difficult time and beyond.
One thing is universally accepted, that the digital transformation is no more good to have but a must for every organization, if they want to not only flourish but survive at first. As challenges are little different for various industry verticals for MNCs and SMEs in certain aspects of the business, the nature and speed of digital transformation need to be addressed accordingly. This may come with a mix of various available solutions.
The customer experience management aspect of their digital transformation journey, specially in the isolated economy, becomes the most crucial strategic decision for every customer centric company. Enablement of omni-channel digital touch points, bi-lateral communication enablement, enhanced user experience throughout digital channels, customer’s choice of communication channel, data driven decisions, automation of processes, enablement of digital channels for selling and buying, secured transactions, improved after sales customer service are some of the basic and current expectations of most customers that organisations are trying to meet.
There are various platform and solutions available in the market to help organization to start their digital transformation. Technology service companies and software vendors are available to work with the organisations to start and carry forward their digital transformation breaking into few phases to take the organisations to some respectable level of digital maturity. The digital transformation will naturally be an ongoing process as organisations will continuously need to invest in available and future technologies to standout and to meet “ever changing customer expectations” especially for the digital native generation.
Interested to discuss more, please feel free to contact the author at ashish.bhalla@dbppl.com
About Ashish Bhalla
Ashish has almost 30 years of industry experience in a wide range of business solutions primarily focusing on end-to-end customer experience management. He is the founder and CEO of Digital Business People (DBP), an omni-channel customer experience management company headquartered at Singapore with it’s development and delivery centres in India.