June 2020. Detailed Business guide on How to Thrive in the new Rhythm of the World (Part 1: How did the major industries prosper and recover from the hit!)
It’s June 2020.
Dear Earth,
Are you still enjoying your nap?
For those of you who I am meeting for the first time, my name is Petra, content manager at Scaleflex*, and in the next minutes I will guide you through what happened, what we learned from it and how you can utilize the learnings and help yourself and your business not just survive but thrive and enjoy the world that we saw emerge this last couple of months.
*European SaaS Startup, that managed to thrive in the time of crises and help the world adjust and reshape the new normal that we started living in January 2020.
To start from the beginning. We rushed too much. Through everything, and COVID 19 was a means to an end which goal was to show us that the whole world needs to slow down.
Scaleflex’ main products Cloudimage and Filerobot have customers in over 10 industries and 3 different continents.
Taking the data from our database, and numbers of around the world I will show you what exactly happened to different industries in Q1 of this year, and how a significant amount of our clients managed to come out as a glorious winner from the circumstance we found ourselves in.
Let’s start.
eCommerce blossomed
People simply transferred to buying things online.
During April, not all eCommerce branches saw the burst.
In France, Spain, and the UK, only necessities like food, personal hygiene, and medicine product sales went up, while others were counting significant losses. One reason for that: LaPoste and other major mail suppliers drastically reduced their logistics and restricted the shipment to primary necessity goods only.
For the majority of the world though, 90% of eCommerce businesses saw a significant increase in sales.
Even old-fashioned bakeries started to allow ordering/reserving bread by email.
Online supermarkets and pharmacies were experiencing a surge in orders, according to a survey by Business Insider among its four major competitors, Amazon Fresh, Rewe Lieferservice, Edeka Bringmeister, and Picnic.
The boom has, however, caught the suppliers cold: their capacities could no longer keep pace with the flood of orders, resulting in long delivery times and bottlenecks in the range.
User Experience became the number one reason for customers, when deciding which brand/product to buy, and where to buy them.
To tell you the truth, now that we look back, most of the brands with great UX then turned their customers into loyal followers and supporters of the brand even now two months later.
I will tell you what exactly they did to keep them loyal a bit later in the article.
Real Estate, iGaming and Travel faced a major throwback
Next industries that we are talking about are the ones that require humans to move.
Yes, If you were engaged with any of these industries, the time for you probably kinda stopped.
Shut borders, unemployment and absence of buyers due to travel bans put large pressure on brands in these niches.
The ones that manage to survive are the ones who played the Corporate Social Responsibility card well, as well as the ones that were investing in product innovation and enhancement during and before the disaster.
Bet 365, as one of the leading iGaming operators, made quite a few headlines in the media with their care towards their employees.
WizzAir became the European largest carrier, according to Forbes, and offered innovative health measurement implementation, discounts and the possibility to change dates of canceled flights for free.
What our customers in these areas did involved a lot of “working on their product and processes enhancement”.
Together with Cloudimage, our world-class image optimization product, they managed to create digital experiences for their customers, which kept them engaged and secured their loyalty throughout the crisis, due to the fast delivery of quality visuals even in extreme traffic spikes.
IGaming industry affiliates prioritized casino and eGaming more than sports betting, and everyone will agree this was the right move since major events are severely postponed or completely canceled. Football is probably THE top segment in the betting industry, and almost all games were canceled, so the shift towards gaming was a smart way to secure revenues.
Again, digital experiences were and still are crucial here, especially when the entire experience is based on digital initiatives, so implementing optimized digital media is what kept the businesses alive.
Today, it is getting better but not all bans are lifted yet, and the brands that worked on their customer experiences since the beginning, are seeing shifts in customer behavior that will stay even when the lockdown finally is lifted in full.
The already high importance of online Media increased even more
Delivering correct and fast news is an imperative. Most of the digital media saw incline in traffic even from February.
April was the heat month when most of the bans started to get lifted, so people were naturally searching for the latest news and updates.
What we offered here to our clients from this segment was a price worthy upgrade to better face the traffic increase, as well as an opportunity to get the full Digital Asset Management package to better collaborate among their team remotely.
Outsourcing this was super relevant for all of the media industry clients, they spent the time in lockdown polishing and promoting their content as well as making sure the whole team can function properly through digital communication channels, which can be challenging when suddenly all employees are working remotely and still need to access those centralized resource centers.
This means that their content was made accessible remotely, stored, optimized, resized, and delivered in the right format, super fast to each customer at the right moment.
Their teams were very productive in using our DAM software — Filerobot, and managed to navigate around most of the communication and project management problems that you would probably expect with such a sudden and extreme shift in work conditions.
Their traffic spikes, which measured over 100% increase in traffic at some points, went smoothly and without crashing or jeopardizing the website speed delivery, in fact the website delivery times improved rather than getting delayed.
SaaS and Digital agencies went all in
The global software as a service (SaaS) market was already expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of nearly 14% between now and 2022, according to forecasts before the pandemic struck.
That was before everyone began working from home, seeking entertainment online, before all kids were introduced to online classrooms, and before video conferencing became a part of daily life for businesses, families and friends eager to stay connected.
Corona pandemic brought digital reality into every home and every job facing the crisis.
Example wise, you can see Cloudimage being implemented at scale with Wordpress, Magento, Prestashop, and many more PIM/CMS/DAM/Shops right now. Before the pandemic those were often just projects to be done at some point in the future.
Now those projects are realized and went live.
It’s still not too late to begin this kind of project if you still haven’t, feel free to drop us a message for possible collaborations.
Entertainment, Art and Healthcare became real-life examples of successful and ultra-fast digital transformation
As the tech analyst Ben Evans puts it: “We’re all online now, and, just as importantly, we’re all willing to use this for any part of our lives, if you can work out the right experience and business model. Today, anyone will do anything online.”
Signs of dramatic changes were and still are everywhere — even in healthcare.
The New York Times published an interesting report on how the work of hospitals and clinics in London is being transformed by the virus. “We’re witnessing 10 years of change in one week,” one GP told the paper.
“It used to be that 95% of patient contact was face-to-face: you go to see your doctor, as it has been for decades, centuries. But that has changed completely.”
Before the virus, video appointments made up only 1% of annual appointments with British healthcare workers.
But central organizations like the British NHS have urged thousands of clinics across the country to start switching to remote consultations and they fast-tracked approval of digital providers to ramp up their offerings quickly.
The demand for new directors, video artists and writers started to incline and fastly reached a peak. Production houses were using new technologies to finish the content that couldn’t be finished in the old-fashioned (traditional) ways.
Nevertheless, the demand for this kind of content kept growing.
Adopting a state of the art technologies and like web meetings and modern solutions like virtual reality enabled artists to continue producing and delivering their art worldwide.
Important note here, consistency as well as speed is everything.
TikTok — video-sharing platform, became the biggest trending hit worldwide. Their speed of video delivery and user experience algorithm pushed them high.
They were also one of the first platforms to take Covid-19 impact seriously and were constantly informing people about recent developments and ways to protect themselves.
So there you have. Everything came suddenly, without warning, yet great human minds managed to rise above the water.
How did you manage the crisis?
I do believe sharing can help us all go through this situation that is not yet over.
Do communicate your wins and struggles in the comments below.
Give this article a share and get ready for Part 2 and Part 3, where we will go into details of how to lead the new workspace digital transformation (we do have over 5 years of experience in this area) and the 5 steps every business should start working on in order to leave the pandemic as a winner.
Stay Tuned.
Stay Safe.
Stay Positive.
May the Force be with you!
