Now that businesses across the UK are preparing to re-open, many business owners are realising that re-opening requires more than a return to normal, and rather a re-imagination or transformation of processes.
It seems that the effects of Coronavirus on the British economy will shadow businesses for months to come; forcing re-imagination and re-invention which will form the foundation for much wider digital transformation across the UK.
“As the world’s businesses start to re-open its time to think about how we move forward.” - IBM
Before the lockdown, the average person in the UK spent more than a day a week on their mobile phone. Following the pandemic which has forced us all to isolate over the past few months, we have seen a massive spike in mobile phone usage with some users’ noticing that their screen time was up by more than 200% in just the first few weeks of isolation.
If businesses and organisations overlooked Britain’s mobile addiction prior to Coronavirus, they cannot overlook it now. It's fundamental that business owners look to invest in mobile solutions to add value to their business and offer ease of use to their customers. More than this, we must recognise customer anxieties at this current time and apps are a great way to keep your customers engaged and help them feel a little safer.
If we take the online food delivery market as an example, we can see that food-delivery apps have dramatically changed the way consumers purchase takeaways and restaurant meals in the Western world. Online food-delivery platforms are expanding choice and convenience, allowing customers to order from a vast range of eateries with a single tap on their mobile phone. Established businesses and startups have acknowledged the growth of the online food-delivery market and have already started to expand into the online food-delivery service to disrupt a rapidly growing sector.
The Coronavirus pandemic has had extremely damaging effects on the food and hospitality industry and the sector is in need of reinvention. In light of this, focus is now being placed on food order and delivery apps which will provide ease of use for customers and offer a safer alternative to vulnerable or high risk customers.
We partnered with Cafe2U to build an intuitive app for their mobile delivery service; bringing award-winning coffee directly to the customer’s workplace. Their mobile delivery services lacked visibility, making it difficult for customers to track and observe their drivers location and progress. Similarly, despite the popularity of their loyalty scheme, Cafe2U wanted to digitise their processes; offering a superior customer experience by moving away from pre-paid cards and their paper-based loyalty card scheme. The app will prove extremely useful now that we approach the end of lockdown and many customers return to work, as users can pre-purchase drinks on the app and receive notification alerts when their driver is outside, allowing users to adhere to social distancing measures once phased back into the workplace.
The Coronavirus crisis has taught businesses across the world that actively engaging with your customers and responding quickly is fundamental to business continuity. However, long-term success is dependant on the adoption of new technologies at a large scale.
Business owners will accelerate growth and revenue by moving commerce online in order to meet changing consumer needs as customer buying patterns are rapidly changing. More than this, making use of new technologies such as AI and chatbots will allow businesses to build more personal customer experiences as well as enhancing employee workflow efficiency by providing frontline staff with the data insights they need to personalise customer experiences.
It's important to consider the value of cloud based solutions by moving internal applications to the cloud at a large scale. Similarly, assess your internal security processes and look to reinvent these to provide more internal agility; transforming your existing operating model.
We must invest in transformative processes that will help businesses re-open and thrive post-lockdown. Digital transformation appears to be the key to ensuring that companies remain competitive, agile and resilient so investing in new and innovative ways to create agile and stronger long-term capabilities such as digital and cloud-based solutions will shape the way forward.
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