The Covid pandemic was a wakeup call for many industries. The transformation they had projected many years into the future was required overnight just for survival. Planned digital transformation projects were accelerated into life to en-sure that these companies were agile enough to survive the crisis.
The dust has still not settled. The ongoing debate over working from home (WFH) demonstrates that many companies are still unsure about how much of the emergency response to the pandemic will remain as the world returns to normal.
In the Philippines, the government has instructed companies running contact centres to send everyone back to the office.1 Lucrative tax incentives granted to those companies will be withdrawn if they don’t comply, but many of the cus-tomer service specialists are arguing that the world has changed. The concept of a Monday to Friday job inside an office is being replaced by a more flexible hybrid.
As the WFH debate indicates, we are experiencing a wave of change across almost every industry. Digital technologies have enabled new processes and many experiments in working culture were undertaken during the pandemic. There is now a wide array of decisions to be taken around how companies will chart a course into the post-pandemic era.
How much innovation can be normalised, and how quickly?
Research by McKinsey in 2021 found that accelerated digital transformation was a common response to the crisis.2 The McKinsey data shows that visionary companies with the ability to build a more robust digital platform are already seeing financial benefits from their preparation.
But why is there such a push towards transformation?
Customer expectations have changed rapidly. This was most acutely demonstrated in industries such as retail, where non-essential retail outlets were closed through the initial lockdown phase of the pandemic. With no stores to visit, customers had to move online. Companies with an undeveloped e-commerce strategy needed to respond immediately or face enormous losses.3
Companies across all industries are now three times more likely to agree that 80% or more of their customer interactions are digital than before the crisis.4 The McKinsey analysis details where the most important industrial or organisa-tional changes are taking place and the rate of acceleration:
- Remote working, WFH, and remote collaboration - 43x acceleration
- Customer demand for online services or purchasing - 27x
- Operations technology - 25x
- Business decision making - 25x
- Customer expectations - 24x
- Cloud migration - 24x
MIT Sloan summarises the challenge of post-pandemic digital transformation into four key areas that executives must focus on to avoid being left behind by more agile competitors5:
- Customer Experience (CX): CX is becoming more emotional and less transactional. Designing a CX strategy requires a plan for personalisation and a vision for a long-term relationship with customers, not just managing post-purchase calls. This requires insight and data analysis. Think of it as cus-tomer relationship management, not just customer service.
- Employee Experience (EX): automation and machine learning can remove mundane and repetitive tasks. In the customer service environment this can dramatically improve the role of agents - they can be elevated to the role of trouble-shooters, rather than just changing user passwords day after day. Workers need support so they can perform better.
- Operations: the Internet of Things and digital twins are creating dramatic new ways to manage operations more effectively - offices and factories can use this insight to become more productive environments.
- Business Model Transformation: data and insight can create new opportunities to improve your business, or even to transform it. Imagine how open banking standards can change lending processes or insight into driving be-haviour can change insurance quotes.
Success In A Post-Pandemic Digital Environment
The future is digital. Not every company uses digital processes or apps as their front end, like Uber or Airbnb, but digital transformation will affect all operational processes and business models. The important question is how to embrace this wave of change and succeed within a changed business environment.
Changing customer needs and expectations drive most business transformation. Your strategy needs to create a structured way for your business to remain relevant and desirable in the eyes of the customer.
Deloitte has published three very specific steps that can form the basis of a digital transformation strategy focused on customers6:
- Turn data into action: information is essential. Build an environment where everything you know about your customer can be analysed to create actionable insight. You need data from inside and outside the organisation. Just knowing what customers have bought in the past is not enough. What were they browsing? What did they look at, but not buy? What was the weather like when they bought a specific product? Create deep insight to the point where you can start creating predictions.
- Engage with customers: your product or service is helping the customer. They buy from you because you are a part of their life or lifestyle - they need your services. Think about the steps you need to take to engage the customer over a period of fifty years. If you are an auto brand then how can your post-purchase interactions be so engaging that the customer will never want to look at other brands? If you are a bank then how are you helping the customer to achieve their personal financial goals? Think beyond the provision of a basic service and engage with the customer from the perspective of already being an important part of their life.
- Build delivery capability: you can’t just throw technology at a problem and hope that a structured solution is the outcome. Think about the capabilities, skills, and approach that is needed to create a customer-centric future.
A structured approach to building customer-centricity and a focus on long-term customer experience are all key aspects of how digital transformation will affect every business. This means that your future success will be largely driven by your ability to transform your business to meet the changing expectations of your customers.
Your customer experience strategy needs to be at the heart of any transformation plan. Building a relationship that can last for fifty years is an entirely different proposition to engaging a company that will operate a contact centre for customer service calls.
Outsourcing customer service processes must be replaced by genuine partnership. Customer experience specialists, such as TTEC, can be an integral part of your digital transformation journey. The future is arriving faster than anyone expected, but you can be prepared.
The resources section of our website features a range of white papers, case studies, webinars, podcasts, and articles all focused on demonstrating how customer experience can be designed to meet the expectations of customers in the 2020s.
https://www.ttec.com/emea/resources
References
1. https://news.abs-cbn.com/business/03/28/22/as-govt-nixes-wfh-bpos-say-hybrid-work-is-the-future
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-new-digital-edge-rethinking-strategy-for-the-postpandemic-era
3. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jul/02/primark-loses-800m-amid-covid-19-lockdowns
4. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever
5. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/digital-transformation-after-pandemic
6. https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/consumer/articles/the-post-covid-19-world-is-digital.html