This ongoing pandemic has triggered an exodus of companies and consumers to accelerate into the digital space.
At the start of this crisis consumers elected to use those businesses they could deal with via the internet because they couldn't go out - a change in behaviour that's now become ingrained.
For many others it was an opportunity to satisfy 'curiosity with intent' that could be leveraged by eCommerce businesses - many of them that up until now had a 'good enough' customer experience mindset.
Growth, your agility and ability to deliver it at speed will make a key difference to your short, and medium to longer term sustainability.
The time to act is now, but before you get ahead of yourself and start dropping 'tech/digital' solutions into everything you need to remain focused on where the value is to the consumer in the first instance - cash saving exercises are also useful but if you have no customers what cash are you actually saving, so ensure your bias is towards revenue generation?
In the next 30 days CEOs should ask their business leaders and other 'changemakers' to assess how the needs and behaviors of their customers and the commercial environment continue to change by benchmarking their digital channels and operating model against those of their competition or closest disrupter.
TIP: If you view your competitor as an extension of your internal 'change team' it will help highlight and hopefully uncover previously unexplored opportunities.
I'm not saying you should become your competitor, but if you don't understand how they are taking business from you then why are they even classed as a competitor?
This information should form the basis of a renewed digital agenda that should take no longer than 15 - 30 days to establish.
Pre-Covid the 'journey' tended to be biased towards the internal goals of the company, post-Covid this needs to take an even greater customer bias in order the experience is one that amazes and encourages advocacy.
Many employees are already working fully remotely and are agile to some degree because they no longer have that silly commute you thought was vital.
Companies have already launched analytics and artificial-intelligence (AI) initiatives in their operations. IT teams have already delivered at a pace they never have before. But for most companies, the changes to date represent only the first phase of the changes that will be necessary.
Social media is a free to use, free to access medium that's helping to democratise 'share of voice'.
Once you have reset the 'Why' people should choose you over your competitor digital savvy leaders should start to think about what an enterprise wide 'social strategy' actually means.
We are already witnessing the 'Exodus to Digital: The world is switching to XaaS model, i.e., Everything as a Service, and no company wants to miss out.
Many companies are accelerating their shifts toward digital-first models—at warp speed. One European variety-store chain, for example, established a fully functioning e-commerce business in just three months. The online business was interconnected across all functions (warehousing, merchandising, marketing, customer support, et cetera) and improved basket size over physical stores by three times as well as delivering nearly 3 percent like-for-like revenue growth in its main market.
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