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97% Of Executives Say Covid-19 Sped Up Digital Transformation

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This article is more than 3 years old.

Sometimes it takes a burning platform, right?

Twilio recently surveyed 2,569 enterprise decision-makers about digital transformation, and clearly, Covid-19 was the burning platform that finally made laggards take the plunge. The result: a six-year acceleration in digital transformation efforts across the board.

Briefly:

  • 97% of executives say the pandemic sped up their digital transformation

  • 95% say they’re looking for new ways to engage customers

  • 79% say Covid-19 increased budgets for digital transformation

“We’ve had to rethink every type of interaction that consumers have with their favorite brands and vendors,” Twilio chief customer officer Glenn Weinstein told me in a recent TechFirst podcast. “One silver lining on this very, very dark cloud has been that it has accelerated companies’ impetus to do digital transformation, to make a change, and specifically to accelerate communications through digital means.”

One of the most critical changes companies had to make was to move to contactless transactions, Weinstein says. That includes SMS, payments, and multiple forms of communications like live chat online or even more old-school systems like interactive voice response systems.

In fact, one in three companies just started using live chat and IVR channels during the past few months because of Covid-19, Twilio’s study says.

Listen to the full interview behind this story:

In some cases, that’s been driven not only by newly necessary forms of client engagement, but also by massive boosts in inbound requests. That’s something the United Way had to manage, for example.

“The United Way has provided social services to communities through 211,” Weinstein says. “COVID-19 has not only dramatically increased the need for these social services, they’ve increased the breadth of the audience seeking these services, individuals that have never had to seek United Way assistance before, and don’t know what questions to ask, so the length of the calls was getting longer.”

That means the United Way had to offer a smart phone system that answered common questions and let people speak to agents when they had a question that couldn’t be answered. That may not be ideal — no-one likes talking to a machine, and United Way has a philosophy of people in crisis speaking to a real, sympathetic human — but it was the only way to manage the onslaught and help people who desperately needed it.

In the for-profit side of the economy, there’s another motivation.

“If a competitor is coming up with ways to have contactless transactions and you don’t, you could fall behind, again, in weeks,” Weinstein told me.

I have some personal experience of that. My sister runs a small retail location, the Chocolate Bear Shoppe, and invested heavily in a website and e-commerce functionality in 2019. It seemed to be a degree of wasted effort until March and April of 2020, as her store became one of the very few local shops that could handle e-commerce and contactless, safe transactions. The result: more business than even the previous year.

The good news for businesses that haven’t yet digitally transformed, Weinstein says, is that it’s getting easier and easier to leapfrog some of the technology stages companies have had to work through and quickly modernize with cheaper, easier-to-integrate platforms.

One major advantage now: the cloud.

“You can get stood up so quickly today compared to 5 or 10 or 15 years ago,” Weinstein says. “It’s remarkable the transformation that the cloud has had, not just to computing, but to communications, specifically.”

Read a full transcript of the interview for this story here.

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