The past twelve months have been tough. Most businesses in Singapore (68%) still haven’t seen revenue recover to pre-pandemic levels. Many budgets are down and you are likely to have a long list of spending options that might help you grow revenue and pull your business out of the pandemic-induced slump. Even if your business is doing well, the pressure on budgets is real.
Increasing your CX Spend
Despite the pressure on budgets Ecosystm data makes a strong case to not cut your customer experience (CX) spend! Businesses in Singapore that are cutting their CX spend are less likely to return to growth, more likely to be competing on price (hence cutting margins), not focused on their digital and omnichannel customers, and have lower levels of innovation. Funnily enough, these are also the businesses with complex, legacy systems which need more focus to provide an improved CX! To be quite frank, businesses in Singapore who are cutting CX spend are setting themselves up for failure. With other businesses increasing CX spend, the gap between the customer experiences will grow to a point where customers will leave and it will be hard to catch up.
Prioritising your CX Spend
So now that you have secured your CX spend, where will you get the biggest bang for your buck? Let’s look at where businesses in Singapore are focusing their CX initiatives in 2021.
Offering an omnichannel experience. Your customers expect more than just a great digital experience – they want the right experience at the right touchpoint. The CX leaders in Singapore (who, unsurprisingly are often the market leaders) are already offering great omnichannel experiences, so this is quickly becoming about catching up – and not about getting ahead. Providing a consistent, personalised, and optimised experience across your digital touchpoints needs to be a top priority for your business today. If you are not offering conversational commerce solutions, start that strategy as soon as possible – you need to be where your customers are today. Extending this to physical channels and broader ecosystem partners should also be on your agenda.
Improving knowledge systems. Your knowledge systems don’t do what they say on the box. They don’t provide answers to questions – for employees or customers. In fact, if your customer service agents get asked a question they don’t know the answer to, their number one source for answers is actually their colleagues or team leaders – NOT the knowledge management system! Start investing in systems – or ideally a single system – that help your employees get better, faster answers to questions. Make sure that the system is providing the same answers to both your employees and your customers across all touchpoints – physical and digital.
Migrating customer service platforms to the cloud. Over half the businesses in Singapore that we assessed have this as a top CX priority. Cloud solutions offer faster time to value, lower management costs, give access to more regular improvements and often provide the ability to easily integrate with partners who offer product extensions and customisations. This trend will continue in 2021 and 2022 as more businesses realise that their legacy customer service or contact centre platform is inhibiting their ability to innovate their customer experience. These systems also help businesses to stay compliant and reduce the reliance on internal IT – which has traditionally struggled to keep up with the fast-changing nature of the contact centre and customer service teams.
Investing in AI and machine learning. Many businesses are using AI to provide the personalised and optimised customer experiences they aspire to. AI and machine learning are allowing businesses to create personalised offers, offer a next-best action and automate services. Advanced banks in Singapore can create interest rate offers for each individual customer based on their credit profile and history. 46% of businesses in Singapore are already using AI to offer recommendations for customer service agents, 44% to optimise or test messaging and campaigns and 43% to provide faster, more accurate access to information and knowledge. 18 months ago, AI was a business differentiator – allowing your business to create a stand-out CX. Today AI is quickly becoming a standard practice – the battle now is around using AI to create personalised and optimised experiences.
A great customer experience will be the most important factor in lifting your business to pre-pandemic growth levels and helping your business remain competitive in today’s tough business conditions. When it comes to CX, there is no such thing as “saving your way to growth”.
Your opportunity to drive greater business success lies in your ability to better win, serve and retain your customers. Refresh your customer strategy and capability today to make 2021 an exceptional year for your business.
Much has been written (and discussed on webinars) about the demands of managing the work-from-anywhere experience. We were all thrown into this last year, and are still working our way through the challenges. For most employees it has been a positive experience – but there is still a lot more we can and should do to improve experiences for employees and their managers.
Workplace Analytics Gains Significance
At the start of 2020, my colleague Audrey William and I discussed the need for workplace analytics when predicting workplace trends for the year, but the pandemic delayed many of these investments. As working from home (or from anywhere) becomes a long-term trend, we are learning that managers need tools to better empower their employees to deliver what the business needs. There are many reports of employees working overtime; working longer days; not taking breaks; being in back-to-back meetings for days on end; skipping meals; and wearing themselves out.
There are many benefits of remote work – employees have the freedom to manage the day as they choose, they have no commute and (conceptually) more harmony between work and home duties. But there are also many processes that are harder. It is not as easy to find the right person to connect to or learn from, get the best information or answer to a question, and get coaching and new skills. Managers need to understand their employee work experience because they don’t sit with or supervise them all day. Self-service for employees used to mean walking around the office and having a conversation or meeting. Today, we need to make these outcomes easier for every worker regardless of location.
Microsoft Lauches Viva
Microsoft has announced the release of Viva – a new product suite to help businesses overcome these challenges. They have published a “Future of Employee Experience” video here as part of the launch – but don’t watch it – or if you do, be prepared to be disappointed when you see the actual products… The good news is that we have moved from oval-shaped phones in Future of Work videos in 2000 (because all web content is designed for round screens right?) to transparent phones in 2010 (who needs to be able to see what’s on the screen?) to virtual screens in Future of Work videos in 2021… Guess they’ll never become a reality either!
Based off the early reviews and commentary about Viva, I believe Microsoft is really onto a winner here:
- Managers need better analytics about how their team spends their days and employees need insights as to how to increase their productivity or find a better balance in their life.
- Employees need to find the people and information in their business to connect with and learn from – how often do employees reach out to others to ask for help or information when the answers they were looking for weren’t too far away. This information needs to be easier to find – even surfaced to employees before they go looking for it.
- Everyone in your business needs to keep learning within their flow of work – the formal training programs offered by most businesses today are useless if employees are too busy to take the course.
- Business leaders need to drive cultural change more effectively or support their broader business initiatives by linking employees with the information and insights that can help reinforce or change organisational culture.
Viva should support these outcomes. Microsoft is partnering with many other businesses to make this work (systems integrators, training providers, workplace and HR platforms etc). If the products deliver as promised, they might provide the missing link that many businesses need today to keep their employees safe, productive, happy and connected.
Learn about the factors that have been accelerating the shift towards the new ways of working. The top 5 Future of Work Trends For 2021 are available for download from the Ecosystm platform. Signup for Free to download the report.
Customer needs are changing. Quickly. In 2020 having a great digital strategy went from being a nice-to-have to an absolute necessity. And in 2021, businesses that have great omnichannel experiences will go from a small minority to a majority as customers demand that they are served on their terms in their chosen platform. Only 14% of businesses in Singapore offer a complete omnichannel experience today – serving customers on their terms regardless of the location or platform (Figure 1). These businesses are setting the benchmark that the rest of the market needs to meet soon.
The Growing Importance of Social Media in Delivering Customer Experience
Chat and messaging are quickly becoming the normal way to interact with businesses – the view of a few years ago that “no one wants to chat with a bot” has quickly turned around. Now virtual assistants and chatbots are the second most important self-service channel for businesses in Singapore (Figure 2).
In fact, Zendesk’s global study shows that most customers (45%) use embedded messaging over social messaging apps (31%) and text/SMS (20%). That might be great for self-service, but for commerce, boundless opportunities exist to move to where the customer lives, communicates, and socialises today.
Smart businesses understand that customers spend their lives in other chat and social media platforms – such as Facebook Messenger, TikTok, Instagram, WeChat, Discord and WhatsApp. More customers expect to be served in these channels; they expect to be able to transact with their brands of choice. Why should they go to a mobile banking app to find their balance? Why can’t they get it in WhatsApp? They are often learning about the next Jordan or Yeezy shoe drop from their social network in Messenger – so why not transact with them there? Consider all your own personal WhatsApp, Messenger and other messaging platform groups discussing social activities, sporting teams, school activities or the latest fashion – these are ALL opportunities for commerce (Figure 3).
And there are use cases now. Airlines – such as KLM and Etihad Airways – are engaging customers on WeChat, Kakao Talk, and WhatsApp, helping them reschedule flights and answering customer service queries. Telecommunications providers are allowing customers to raise issues on messaging platforms – and are also using them to upsell and cross-sell new services. Transportation providers are making it easier to find a car or the the next scheduled bus right there in the messaging platforms. Retailers – such as 1-800 Flowers and Culture Kings – are not only serving customers but finding new customers on these messaging platforms.
Going beyond the messaging platforms, businesses are also looking to serve customers on their smart devices – such as Amazon Alexa/Echo and Google Nest/Home devices. Alerting customers to order updates, shipping details and product promotions is becoming standard practice for leading businesses. Digitally-savvy banks are allowing customers to not only track their balance but also make transfers and payments using these smart platforms.
Customers are more comfortable with these conversational commerce options – and they actually expect you to offer such services on your site, in your app, on their smart devices, and on their messaging platforms of choice. Your ability to provide outstanding customer experiences will not only be your ticket back to revenue growth but the recipe for long term business success. Meeting customer needs on their terms is a good place to start.
Delivering a Personalised Conversational Customer Experience
Customer experience (CX) decision-makers will have to rethink how they approach building richer CX capabilities to deliver personalised conversational interactions with customers.
Messaging should become part of a wider AI, Data, and Mobile strategy. Contact centre teams might feel that this is too ambitious a project and would prefer to continue to serve customers through the more traditional channels only. So, it is important to identify the key stakeholder/s who will drive the initiative. And the contact centre team should work with the Digital, Innovation and Marketing teams.
Designing the mobile experience and in app messaging for CX should have some of the following features:
- Ability to click a button to request for a service or escalate an issue that will, in turn, result in the company contacting the customer either by messaging or calling.
- Giving customers the option to contact through popular messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, and others. Unifying these systems in a single interface that integrates with your customer service application is best practice.
- Having one single interface to manage and make payments – within the app itself or on the social messaging platform. Conversational commerce is about creating an ongoing relationship with customers throughout the entire customer journey. Don’t just focus on the sale or the post-sales experience – customers expect to be able to interact with your business from their platform of choice regardless of their need or stage in the customer journey.
- Embed deep analytics into the communication services to help the organisation better deliver a personalised CX.
- Ensure you have a solid, unified knowledge management interface at the backend so that all questions lead to the same answers regardless of channel, platform or touchpoint.
Your opportunity to drive greater business success lies in your ability to better win, serve and retain your customers. Refresh your customer strategy and capability today to make 2021 an exceptional year for your business.
Last week Salesforce announced that they will acquire Slack in a deal worth approximately USD 27.7 billion in their biggest purchase ever. Salesforce aims to ease the communication and collaboration process for information workflow across business apps and systems by integrating Slack into Salesforce cloud – Slack is set to be the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360. The deal is expected to complete in 2021, after shareholder and regulatory approvals.
Slack has carved a market presence as an all-in-one platform for voice, video, and collaboration. The acquisition of Slack will help Salesforce provide a more comprehensive services offering in a fast-growing SaaS business market.
Salesforce Continues to Broaden Horizon
Salesforce has been diversifying their offerings steadily over the last few years. Salesforce launched Chatter, the industry’s first cloud-based enterprise social collaboration application platform in 2010 globally; acquired cloud based word processing application Quip in 2016 for about USD $750 million; acquired Mulesoft in 2018, to unlock an entry into hybrid deployments and on-premises software. In 2019, Salesforce acquired Tableau – a leader in data visualisation for nearly USD 15.7 billion purchase and recently announced Salesforce Anywhere as innovation across Customer 360 to enable remote working.
With the acquisition of Slack, Salesforce is making a move to further develop their presence in the enterprise space – an area where Microsoft has an advantage with their Microsoft Teams and a suite of enterprise solutions.
Ecosystm Comments
The challenges to make the Slack acquisition valuable for Salesforce are many and difficult (and the significant hit to their share price reflects the market perception of these challenges). Many believe that Salesforce will be able to better compete with Microsoft due to the larger enterprise base and the larger enterprise salesforce. But that didn’t help Google accelerate into the cloud collaboration space. They sell advertising into many millions of enterprises across the globe – but selling advertising and selling collaboration platforms takes a very different capability to a very different audience. Salesforce sometimes prides itself on the fact that their buyers are NOT from IT – they are the heads of sales, marketing, customer experience etc. Attend any Salesforce event and you understand that only a small fraction of their audience are technology professionals. But these technology professionals are the ones who buy communications and collaboration tools and suites. They were the ones who turned to Microsoft Teams en-masse towards the beginning of the pandemic.
Possibly the biggest opportunity for Salesforce is to make Slack the default application interface for their applications and processes. One of the Salesforce’s ongoing challenges is the fact that – despite how easy to use or attractive their interface is – many users don’t want to use it! Salespeople want to sell; marketing people want to drive market outcomes. Salesforce supports these processes – but it can also get in the way (when not designed effectively). Slack gives Salesforce (and other application companies) a standard interface to provide the information employees and customers want or need in context. For example, instead of an email to HR asking for leave balance – or even needing to login to the time management systems – a user could ask a Salesforce (or other application) chatbot how much leave they have remaining for the year; a salesperson could ask what their best opportunities are. And in a chat or a collaboration session, Salesforce could feed data or insights directly into the conversation or alongside it.
Application switching is still one of the biggest killers of productivity. The era of the “zero-interface” application is quickly approaching – and the Slack acquisition gives Salesforce the ability to accelerate its move to this era. It also gives Salesforce the ability to extend the use of its core platform beyond the traditional users to the broader workforce.
Download Ecosystm Predicts: The Top 5 Cloud Trends for 2021
The full findings and implications of The Top 5 Cloud Trends for 2021 are available for download from the Ecosystm platform. Signup for Free to download the report.
Ecosystm recently partnered with Asavie to conduct a study into the opportunity and outlook for the “Branch of One”. One of the challenges was actually defining what the Branch of One is. Here’s what we came up with:
Branch of One enables Office Anywhere by delivering secure, frictionless access to all business resources, with full mobility – meeting the security and manageability requirements of CIOs and CISOs.
Basically it is all the data and systems you need to get your job done, in your pocket. Secure. Easy to manage.
What I really like about the idea is that it describes what business is trying to achieve and it gives a common language and outcome for IT and business leaders. Consider all the things that IT and security teams need to do to enable access to applications and data in remote branches – from connectivity to security to data and system access. Often it takes days, weeks or months to open a new office or branch, or to provision a new retail store. Now, imagine having the ability to roll out all of these systems and services in seconds. To a single user or to thousands. Without consideration for location. Business leaders will understand this benefits and will support it.
It also has the opportunity to help nearly every business today. Of the 1005 businesses we interviewed across the globe in our Global CxO Study 2020, 44% admitted to suffering cyber-attack incidents during COVID-19 due to employees working from home – and over half of these attacks were on mobile devices. Compromised devices were the number one target for cyber-attacks in 2020.
Businesses need a new way to manage the devices and applications of their remote employees. They need to be able to extend the benefits of the WAN to them without the downsides of VPNs. Every business we interviewed saw benefits of bringing devices, locations and offices inside the WAN. Turning every device and office into a Branch of One.
A few security and network technologies have promised this capability – SDNs can offer a similar service, but they require client software to be installed. 78% of businesses we interviewed are using VPNs to bring devices inside the WAN – but again, they require client software, and can be inconsistent (and insecure!) on mobile devices.
Companies that embrace the Branch of One can provision new users in a few clicks. No software to install, no cables to connect, no hardware to provision – it makes life easier for technology and security professionals. The Branch of One gives your employees the systems and data they need to get their job done – delivered securely across the mobile network.
Download the report based on ‘The Global CxO Study 2020: The Future of the Secure Office Anywhere’, conducted by Ecosystm on behalf of Asavie. The report presents the key findings of the study and analyses the market perceptions of Office Anywhere and the need for a ‘Branch of One’, which will be the foundation of enterprise mobile security in the future.
Telstra, Australia’s leading telecom provider has revealed its plans to split into 3 different units which would operate under the umbrella of the Telstra Group. The restructuring – scheduled to be completed by 2021 – is said to be the telecom giant’s biggest restructuring since 1997. The primary reason behind the move appears to be to spin off its infrastructure assets to realise their full value as competition intensifies.
In 2018, the Telstra2022 plan defined a four-pillar strategy to improve business, network superiority, cost improvements and respond to market dynamics for the next three years including the establishment of InfraCo and Global Business Services. Telstra established its standalone infrastructure unit, Telstra InfraCo to hold its fixed network assets. As a part of its recent announcement, Telstra’s infrastructure business InfraCo will split into two units – InfraCo Fixed which will run and manage Telstra’s physical infrastructure assets including data centres, ducts, fibres, undersea cables, and exchanges; and InfraCo Towers which will own and operate Telstra’s mobile towers and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the third unit ServeCo will focus on products and services for the consumer and retail businesses. The company is also investigating ways to push into renewable energy, with plans to exploit its renewable energy investments to re-sell cheaper energy to its customers.
This restructure, should it go ahead as described, is likely to be the biggest legacy that the current CEO, Andy Penn, leaves on the business. Recent CEOs have left a significant legacy on Telstra. Sol Trujillo – who admittedly had a rocky relationship with the Australian Government, which culminated in the conception of the National Broadband Network (NBN) – drove significant changes in Telstra; rationalising mobile and fixed network investments, driving focus back into the business and building an economically rational business. David Thodey was the great peacemaker, driving pride back into the Telstra staff and customers; he turned Telstra into one of the most customer-centric businesses in Australia in his time, laying the foundation for its ongoing success. Andy Penn has made some significant changes to Telstra, further reducing the cost base to turn it into a more competitive business – but until now, he has not significantly transformed the core business.
This changes now. Telstra ServeCo will build on the customer-obsessed culture of the Telstra sales and service business – one that consistently scores above market average for NPS in both the business/enterprise and the consumer markets. One can even envision a day in the future where ServeCo will be in a position to sell the best network solutions and services in Australia – some of which might not even be owned or controlled by InfraCo. It already does that with the NBN – this may extend to reselling other telecom services too.
InfraCo Fixed will build on the strong engineering legacy that Telstra still has – and will give it the chance to flourish – and not be dictated by customer buying cycles. Ideally investment cycles can be separated from direct customer revenue, and the company can rebuild the network lead that it has traditionally experienced, but which has been eroded over the past 3-4 years (in mobile by Optus and in fixed telecoms by NBN).
InfraCo Towers should be well-positioned to become the core tower provider in Australia. This business makes the most sense to spin off in the medium term. The buildout of multiple – nearly identical – tower networks by the three major 4/5G providers is wasteful and inefficient. 5G in particular, requires a very different tower footprint than 3G or 4G – so having a single provider of shared tower infrastructure will reduce costs for all telecom providers while creating a healthy business for shareholders. As an independent provider of towers, InfraCo Towers should always be the most affordable option – Optus, Telstra and Vodafone would be foolish to attempt to replicate and manage their own similar tower infrastructure.
The NBN-Telstra Dynamics
While Telstra dominates the Australian telecommunications market, their business is also under pressure due to the state-owned NBN. In 2019, Communications Minister Paul Fletcher ruled out selling the NBN to Telstra. However, the new structure has likely been designed with this in mind – with perhaps the option to spin off the InfraCo Fixed unit and merge this with a privatised NBN or perhaps to even the separation of the business units enough to satisfy a future government of the merits of selling NBN to Telstra and merging it with the InfraCo Fixed unit. The question surely needs to be asked what the difference is between a private business with a monopoly on home broadband access and Telstra having that monopoly?
This restructure will help Telstra build a telco for the next ten years. One where agility will be core to its success. The challenge – like with any big transformation – will be to take the employees and the customers on that journey. Employees need to believe that this structure is the right one and that their skills are required and relevant. Customers need to see benefits from this restructure too – ideally, they will see that the service promise of Telstra is delivered in the network and capabilities. Hopefully, they will see a stronger Telstra that can continue to drive the levels of innovation and investment that digitally savvy customers demand.
The past 3-4 months have seen technology leaders move mountains to support their newly remote employees and 100% digital customers. Over 40% of businesses in the Asia Pacific didn’t formally support remote working – so these companies have made massive changes in support of their employees. You have rolled out new hardware, new data protection and compliance policies, new security measures, collaboration software and VPNs. You have also strengthened the IT Helpdesk to better support remote employees and digital customer processes. And you are embracing the public cloud to offer new services and capabilities to customers and staff. The pace of change has been breathtaking – and things are not slowing down.
Many countries or economies are now moving to a hybrid working arrangement. This ISN’T about “going back to the way things were”. Hybrid working is really an important step on the road to the Digital Workplace – which enables access to the tools, data and processes that employees need to get their job done regardless of location or device.
Many businesses claim that productivity has improved now that employees are working from home – some have even measured it and can prove it. We have to ensure that the move back to the office doesn’t negatively impact productivity. To drive continued productivity with hybrid working arrangements, consider:
- How will video calls work with employees in the office and at home? If employees in the office are docking their laptops, they immediately lose access to the camera. If they have monitors on their desk, they might not even be able to work with the laptop open. If they are in an open-plan office, the regular video calls might be distracting.
- What is the role of meeting rooms in the hybrid workplace? With social distancing an expectation in many countries today, the role of meeting rooms has changed. They will cater for fewer employees, and there is a growing need for them to be video-enabled.
- How do you manage hybrid meetings – where maybe 3-5 employees are on a single camera? How do you ensure every voice has equal weight – and that the right employees have their fair share of voice on the calls.
- How do you support employees who are moving between locations? You must focus on self-help services and automating as much of your Service Desk capabilities as possible.
- How can IT support social distancing in the office? Many companies are scaling back their hot desk environments to ensure there are fewer shared working environments.
- How will the changing location of employees impact business processes? Many of your processes were designed assuming employees were on site. You then redesigned many of them to assume they were not. Do you need to rethink them again?
- Does the application strategy work for all employees? There has been an increase in employees accessing applications from mobile devices – sometimes that was because it was a better experience, but too often it was because it was the only option. Is it time to rethink access and interfaces to make them relevant for all users?
- How do you keep employees and their data secure? Employees might move between secure and unsecured networks, work and home devices, on-premise and cloud applications. How do you keep them secure, backed up and synchronised – regardless of their device or location?
The move to hybrid working might not be a smooth one. The last thing you want to deliver is a poorer experience at one location versus the other, so you have work ahead in keeping your employees productive and secure – and hopefully, you’ll also move further down the path towards a Digital Workplace that can enable and empower all of your employees.
I’m really excited to launch our AI and Automation VendorScope! This new tool can help technology buyers understand which vendors are offering an exceptional customer experience, which ones have momentum and which are executing and delivering on their promised capabilities. The positioning of vendors in Ecosystm VendorScopes is independent of analyst bias or opinion or vendor influence – customers directly rate their suppliers in our ongoing market benchmarks and assessments.
The Evolution of the AI Market
The AI market has evolved significantly over the past few years. It has gone from a niche, poorly understood technology, to a mainstream one. Projects have moved from large, complex, moonshot-style “change the world” initiatives to small, focused capabilities that look to deliver value quickly. And they have moved from primarily internally focused projects to delivering value to customers and partners. Even the current pandemic is changing the lens of AI projects as 38% of the companies we benchmarked in Asia Pacific in the Ecosystm Business Pulse Study, are recalibrating their AI models for the significant change in trading conditions and customer circumstances.
Automation has changed too – from a heavily fragmented market with many specific – and often very simple tools – to comprehensive suites of automation capabilities. We are also beginning to see the use of machine learning within the automation platforms as this market matures and chases after the bigger automation opportunities where processes are not only simplified but removed through intelligent automation.
Cloud Platform Providers Continue to Lead
But what has changed little over the years is the dominance of the big cloud providers as the AI leaders. Azure, IBM and AWS continue to dominate customer mentions and intentions. And it is in customer mentions that the frontrunners in the VendorScope – Microsoft and IBM – set themselves apart. Not only are they important players today – but existing customers AND non-customers plan to use their services over the next 12-24 months. This gives them the market momentum over the other players. Even AWS and Google – the other two public cloud giants – who also have strong AI offerings – didn’t see the same proportions of customers and prospects planning to use their AI platforms and tools.
While Microsoft and IBM may have stolen the lead for now, they cannot expect the challengers to sit still. In the last few weeks alone we have seen several major launches of AI capabilities from some providers. And the Automation vendors are looking to new products and partnerships to take them forward.
Without the market momentum, Microsoft and IBM would still stand above the rest of the pack – just not as dramatically! Both companies are not just offering the AI building blocks, but also offer smart applications and services – this is possibly what sets them apart in an era where more and more customers want their applications to be smart out-of-the-box (or out-of-the-cloud). The appetite for long, expensive AI projects is waning – fast time to value will win deals today.
The biggest change in AI over the next few years will hopefully be more buyers demanding that their applications are smart out-of-the-box/cloud. AI and Automation shouldn’t be expensive add-ons – they should form the core of smart applications – applications that work for the business and for the customer. Applications that will deliver the next generation of employee and customer experiences.
Ecosystm Vendorscope: AI & Automation
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The current state of the world is alarming. The COVID-19 virus is not only disrupting businesses and economies – it is taking away loved ones, it is separating friends and families, it is disrupting the education of young adults and children and it is seeding fear in communities. But while the media is dominated with doom and gloom at the moment – and we do need these reports – I believe it is worth stopping for a moment to consider the fact that if the pandemic happened ten or fifteen years ago, many businesses – and government agencies – would have closed down. You could argue that the world wasn’t as globally connected then as it is now. And to an extent that is correct – the numbers of air travellers increased up until the end of 2019. But even in 2005, the world was still a very global place – economies relied on cross-border commerce as much then as they do now.
Depending on your business or industry 10-15 years ago:
- Staff couldn’t have effectively worked from home. And if they did, collaboration would have been hard (if not impossible outside of the usual voice services). Teleconference services would have needed to be booked.
- Remote access would have been painful and slow – relying heavily on VPNs over slower internet connections.
- Software would have mainly been running in company datacentres – with very little SaaS-based applications. These applications were often designed for LAN access…
- Those lucky few with a Blackberry or iPhone might have had access to email – everyone else would have needed to go into the office to get work done.
But worse than this would have been our customer engagements. While eCommerce had healthy adoption by 2005, it often relied on very manual processes – and it was mainly focused on consumer products and services – B2B adoption was still a number of years away. And, for many businesses, it represented a tiny proportion of their revenue. Small companies didn’t often have the web presence to compete with the big players. But if I look at the big fast-food giants in Australia (e.g. McDonalds and KFC) – these companies didn’t have a web or mobile ordering until a few years ago, and even more recently for home delivery services. Any company that had to shut down their face-to-face contact would have likely fallen back on their contact centres – but even these would have been impacted as the ability to route calls to remote or home-working call centre agents barely existed then – so they would have been understaffed or closed due to an infection being discovered…
Today’s digital connectivity has the opportunity to save lives. Less physical contact means less people being exposed to – and spreading – the virus.
If this pandemic had happened 10-15 years ago, many small AND large businesses would have had to shut their doors very quickly. Very early in the cycle, businesses would have had to make the decision to shut their doors straight away, or risk accelerating the infection rates by having staff continue to attend the office or contact centre. So if there is one small positive we can take away, it is that our digital investments are paying off very quickly. The ability to continue to trade, continue to sell, continue to do business in such a market as we are facing today and tomorrow is priceless. I can purchase goods and services online, register my car without leaving my desk, upgrade or change my health insurance without speaking to a single human being. Most businesses have the ability to have their employees access many of their critical applications wherever they are located. Our accountants can still pay and send bills, HR can hire for open positions, product teams can continue to innovate on the products and services they offer.
Don’t get me wrong – business survival is not guaranteed. This is why I implored governments to aim their stimulus spending towards small and medium businesses digital initiatives – as cafes, retailers, bars and restaurants close down across cities, states and countries, many are now lamenting their immature online presence, their lack of delivery and their lack of pre-ordering. If you have any doubt about this, check your local Facebook group – it is full of small businesses putting up images of menus in the hope that customers will reach out directly to keep their businesses running. If these businesses are given incentives to build digital services quickly, they might see less of a slowdown in business.
COVID-19 will definitely stress test our digital assets and strategies. Just recently, the Australian government’s citizen-facing portal crashed as too many citizens logged on to register for welfare. This forced many people out into government shop-fronts – putting themselves, the staff and all connected families and friends at risk of catching the virus. I also heard today of a bank that called many of its staff back to the office as the VPN could not cope with the number of users and volume of traffic! If you have not already, you will quickly find out how your digital capabilities are performing – where you need extra capacity, where services are running smoothly, where you need to rethink process design or where you need to consider re-crafting this approach for the fully digital era.
But stay safe – listen to the advice of medical experts and act on that advice. A senior medical officer recently stated that social distancing is the only way that we will overcome this virus – so stay safe and stay home (if you can!). But also take the time to review your digital capabilities – start making moves now to ensure they help your business stay afloat – or your government agency to keep serving citizens in times of restricted trading or shutdowns.