Recently my 74 year old father applied for net banking for his pension account; he is also getting familiar with QR code based contactless payments. Are we witnessing a digital tsunami?
Over the last decade, most businesses have made huge investment on ‘Digital Transformation’ and they even provided incentive to their customers to migrate to their digital platforms, yet customers’ adaptation to digital services remained low. Yearly companies spent $1.3 trillion on digital transformation projects and 70% of these initiatives did not reach their goals.
Suddenly, due to COVID-19, there is exponential growth in adaptation of digital-first customer interaction from every organization, as most times it is the only medium through which customers can communicate and do business with one another. It would otherwise have taken companies at least five years to achieve the current level of digital adoption. Now companies are able to handle similar volumes with far fewer front-end staff; for example bank branches are able to work with much less of their usual staff.
Hopefully next year COVID-19 will be gone and things will start unwinding back to normal. While we all want our regular lives back but, companies need to hold onto the gained digital momentum else the current digital normal will no longer be valid.
Earlier main reason for lower digital adaptation was customers’ reluctance to transition from human interaction, which is now taken care of. In order to sustain gains in digital adaptation, companies need to do a deep dive into their current procedures and improve their user Interfaces.
Business leaders need to act swiftly to get customer’s feedback and improve their current digital interfaces, as they have only eight to ten months before the situation goes back to normal. There are enough to learn from the interfaces of the startups with digital-first approach.
Author: Rohit Garg
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the policy or position of his current
