Robin Cook novels and Contagion movie were just fillers to pass our time. Whenever we watch Hollywood movies where aliens attack and try to capture the earth, we were sure that someone like Bruce Willis or Will Smith would save us for sure. With the advent of Covid19, we are made to look at scientists, and research scholars and medical professionals for their opinions, and the celebrity chart has changed its course.
A similar change is happening in the world of technology where organizations are highly forced to adopt digital technologies and amend their business processes to the new norm of the world order. Science & Technology has always offered helping-hands in the time of distress and there are many options for enterprises to leverage technology to overcome this challenging time. Following are three major focus areas that enterprises can leverage:
- Reach-out and smoothen customer experience
- Empathize and collaborate with workforce
- Reengineer & Venture ahead
Reach-out and smoothen customer experience:
The only thing available without limits during lockdown is the internet and data. During lockdown or post lockdown, your customers would be looking forward to consuming your services in a safe manner. It would be the appropriate time to make your services and information around that available for easy access.
- User-centric web portals and mobile applications
- On-demand applications to sell products or services
- Location-based services to meet specific needs
- Mobile platform with video chat and collaboration tools for hospitals, personal tutoring, and fitness centers
- Digital tools that ensure customers of your availability when they need you
Empathize and collaborate with workforce
- Provide digital tools and collaboration platforms
- Provide virtual tools to manage communication
- Onboard vendors on your core applications and integrate them as part of your core business process
- Remote workforce management with reoriented HR practices
- Periodic communication via different channels
Reengineer & Venture ahead
- Leverage analytics and artificial intelligence
- Leverage your historic data to manage cash flow and operations
- Sales/marketing tools to reengineer sales process
- Enhance process efficiency using vision/text analytics tools
- Identify automation opportunities and tools to accelerate the digital journey
We know that there is not a time-tested agenda to handle this unprecedented COVID-19 scenario. So, numerous uncontrollable issues and unanswered questions have haunted many industries forcing them to rethink and realign core strategies to ensure survival. In these circumstances, as we could obviously witness, technology plays the most crucial role in keeping organizations from collapsing. In light of this fact, we are sure that organizations can certainly tide over and even thrive beyond the trying times by equipping themselves with the aforesaid technological enhancements that are of all-time relevance.
About the Author
Prem Kumar is an accomplished IT professional and entrepreneur with 18+ years of experience in technology and general management/leadership across industries. Co-founded a series of entrepreneurial initiatives and currently managing OptiSol Business Solutions, an IT services firm with focus on digital technologies.