The COVID-19 pandemic has changed many aspects of life in general. How we X, X and X. And while we’ve all been living under incredible restrictions, businesses and brands have battled to control the manner in which they not only deliver, but engage with customers too.
Research by Twilio, the leading cloud communications and customer engagement platform, delved into this. The industry leader asked 2,500 decision-makers globally about their digital transformation and engagement strategies as they gear up for a post-COVID world.
This is how the UK stacked up against the rest of the world:
- A modest 28% jump in digital customer engagement: A rise from 48% before the pandemic to 62% during it
- 43 days to speed up digital change: UK organisations lagged behind when it came to accelerating digital transformation in response to COVID-19
- 48% plan to increase engagement funds: Nearly half of UK businesses will increase investment in customer engagement post-pandemic
- Britain has fallen behind in video: The UK is at the bottom of the league table for using video to engage with customers. France is at 87% while Britain is at 72%
- Crucial the UK builds for the future: Up to 88% of UK businesses say they are more likely to build their own communications solutions instead of buying pre-built alternatives
Added to the findings, 87% of businesses report digital communications are critically or very important to their survival during the pandemic and 96% confirmed that not digitising customer engagement would have negatively impacted their business. 43% report they would have been less competitive and the same figure added they would have lost revenue.
Driving the Agile Workforce
“In the Omdia Future of Work Survey conducted in August 2020, 2 out of 3 respondents plan to encourage certain teams or business functions to work remotely post-COVID-19,” Omida said in a statement.
The words could not be more true. Thanks to the pandemic, many office workers will never go back full-time. Every day more businesses announce flexible remote work policies. These changes open up employers to increasingly distributed teams and new talent markets. Accelerated migration to the cloud and adoption of remote contact centres are enabling a growing, agile workforce.
Cloud migration accelerated across every company, from 500-25,000 plus employees and businesses plan to now expand how and where they engage with customers, the Twilio report added.