Not identifying how business is changing leaves them vulnerable
COVID-19 has become the global pandemic that has taken shaken organisations, without a digital strategy to the core and put a sharp focus on areas that businesses have not prioritised enough investment in emerging technologies.
Disruption is being felt across all sectors in all regions and countries. In response organisations are seeing businesses operate across three different phases survival, realignment and optimisation, as they evolve their operations to suit the new status quo and build long-term resilience.
David Bray regional vice president of PROS Australia and New Zealand told CIO Asia Tech, innovative technologies have become “vital components in everyone” of the phases listed.
The COVID-19 outbreak has triggered a period of global experimentation for all businesses. It has challenged the status quo and provided leaders with the opportunity, and the imperative, to adopt different selling models, technology platforms, and revenue management strategies.
According to Bray, during the survival phase, businesses were seeking solutions to better understand revenue and expense models while re-tooling and restructuring to respond to arising challenges.
“Once business leaders have navigated the first half of crisis, focus is realigned towards the better enablement of employee productivity to build business continuity,” he said. “This process might involve the virtualisation of face-to-face selling processes; or providing remote access to overcome the absence of in-person relations internally.”
The COVID-19 reality is putting a sharp focus on where businesses have not prioritised enough investment in emerging technologies. Among the many and mounting losses of this pandemic is one additional casualty – the status quo. COVID-19 is rewriting the rules for operations, seemingly daily, and businesses must demonstrate agility and responsiveness with all ongoing and future projects.
“By not identifying how business is changing, companies are left vulnerable to losing customers to better informed and more responsive vendors,” he said. “In the new world, businesses will be agile, adapt to rapid changes and engage with their customers through many channels, wherever the customer is. They will be better informed because they embraced the power of machine learning and AI.”
According to Bray one area that businesses must pay close attention to is the fact that when markets undergo such rapid and disruptive change, the things that customers valued in your product may change.
“They may now prize reliability of delivery over cost reductions, or the ability to split orders into smaller increments than bulk discounts,” he said. “Not identifying these trends leaves businesses open to losing customers to better informed and more responsive vendors.”
Customers also desire simplicity, transparency, and convenience and B2B buying is moving to a flexible and remote, e-selling format and businesses that have recognised this exhibit both resilience and success against competitors.
“Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, the Asia Pacific region was thriving with new and emerging opportunities for local businesses, and we have seen that trend bolstered,” said Bray. “Now more than ever, the role of a CIO in contributing to the digital transformation process, which has become far more important to maintaining long term continuity and resilience.”
Bray said post-pandemic “businesses will continue to leverage” these technologies, optimising pricing and selling through virtualisation, promoting greater transparency and competitiveness.
“We will see a renewed focus on the customer experience and digital eCommerce investment,” he said. “CIO’s will encourage the integration of evaluating tools to provide intelligence on market dynamics and insights into customer behaviour can help overcome the absence of in-person customer interactions.”
Bray believes CIOs will also search for opportunities to adopt digital models for customer engagement, especially in markets across Asia Pacific.
PROS provide price optimisation, sales effectiveness, and revenue management SaaS software, as well as software for travel management for the airline industry.
Tags: AI & Machine LearningCOVID-19digitalSaaSsoftwareTechnology
