Going Digital During COVID

By: Amanda Young

As we see many companies moving to the digital space during shutdowns, we wanted to highlight a variety of different ways a company can do so. Companies can go digital through using different technologies such as telecommuting, on-demand services, virtual events, and the cloud.  According to  book The Customer Of The Future Blake Morgan, the author, gives 12 tips for companies that are going digital: 

  1. Pursue company changes with keeping a focus on customers
  2. Organizational structure should include leaders that support digital transformation
  3. Have strong change management teams 
  4. Transformational leadership is essential for driving employees to make changes by implementing the changes from the top of the company ladder 
  5. Make well thought out technological decisions
  6. Integration – all systems that a company uses should flow well together
  7. Internal customer experience (employees) is important too
  8. Digital transformation has a lot of influence on logistics and supply chain 
  9. Protecting data security, privacy, and ethics is crucial
  10. Make the evolution of products, services and processes innovative
  11. Digitization helps eliminate the gap between digital and physical stores
  12. Take advantage of personalization opportunities

 

 

 

Telecommuting

During the coronavirus changes, companies have had no options but to look at their current technological infrastructures and come up with ways to improve them.  In order to keep their business running, most companies find that they need to look into introducing telecommuting to their business structures.  Enforcing telecommuting among employees can be very challenging. In normal cases, employees that work from home have a dedicated workplace in their home.  Now that companies are having no choice but to go online with all communication, companies must be patient with their employees and give their employees the chance to adjust to this new norm. 

On-Demand Services

On-demand services have been on the up and up; especially now that store fronts have been ordered to temporarily close their doors. These types of businesses give their customers their service immediately just by using the touch of their fingertips.  On-demand services with their customers immediate access to information, deliveries, services, connectivity, or food and beverage.  At this time, local business, such as grocery stores and restaurants, are taking advantage of using on-demand services to get their products out to their customers.   

Virtual Events

Millions of small and large-scale events have been cancelled due to Coronavirus.  Events include small gatherings like birthday celebrations and weddings to larger gatherings like business conferences, concerts, music festivals and sports competitions.  In the business world there are 4 main types of virtual events.  These types of events include webinars, virtual conferences, internal hybrid events, and external hybrid events.  Businesses are picking up on organizing events that fall under each of these categories to keep their employees up to date with internal business objectives and with the constantly changing trends in their industry. 

The Cloud

Companies with a cloud setup experience the benefits of saving money, having competitive advantage, gaining quick availability to information, increasing the level security of confidential information, and saving the environment.  Companies that have a cloud set up have made it easier for their employees to work from home. Today, the cloud allows employees to easily share and co-edit documents when not working from the same location.