Digital Business Strategy Post-COVID-19: Top 5 Goals to Accelerate Business

Quixy Editorial Team

August 10, 2023

This article (Digital business strategy post-Covid-19: Top 5 goals to accelerate business ) was first published on ITProPortal

Digital business strategy in organizations around the globe has made us see some major wrecking in 2020. The pandemic has very evidently left the phrase “business is as usual” in a faraway land and time. The idea of “normal” in these uncertain times has impacted not just “quarterly goals” but the entire visions and missions of businesses.

For many, the toughest times and leadership is now. We, as businesses of tomorrow, have to answer the most challenging questions now: How to strive, thrive, and drive goals through these times? What is our new business strategy that survives these times?

The time is to rethink, renegotiate, replace, revive, and re-innovate. That’s right, not merely surviving but reviving and building resilience all of us can count on, no matter what comes tomorrow.

An image has been circulating over the internet-

Some may chuckle, but for us, it’s funny because it hasn’t proven to be truer than ever!

The pandemic forced extreme changes in the world, but we think some changes represent the peak of innovation in a crisis. Businesses have reset workforces and work itself along with goals. It has forced organizations to migrate to digital more rapidly than ever!

Digital transformation is a top priority at the moment- especially workflow innovation and digital business strategy. Organizations need to focus on strategies to digitize processes and balance the immediate needs of their customers, employees, and communities while also thinking about long-term goals.

“Work From Home” is the new “normal,” and we all know that. But, what most organizations need to recognize is aligning their goals to ‘WFH’ with a new digital business strategy that is optimal and better suited for post-COVID-19 too!  Adopting the right way to transform, that’s also going to cater to long-term objectives and provide a competitive edge, is something businesses need to build intelligently.

2020 has given us enough reasons to re-think our business models, modes of operation, workplace practices, processes, and policies.

Obviously, some level of digitization has happened, well, it had to; but we all know and are very much aware that all the migration to digital workflows and operations has been on an extremely basic, bare-minimum functional level- a ventilator of sorts. A truly digital organization ensures long-term objectives, not just a “phase.”

Industry-wide digitization only shows how crucial a proper digital business strategy is.

Grocery stores have shifted to online ordering and delivery systems as primary drivers of the business. Schools have moved to 100 percent online learning and digital classrooms. Gyms and trainers are providing live sessions from home, as are banks operating transactions and other processes remotely.

As we can see, the pandemic has hit industries across the globe, across sectors. If the pandemic could hit us all, why can’t digital transformation? Of course, there are challenges before that, and we faced them too. Traditional benchmarks and insights used to manage and evaluate the business are suddenly obsolete. For instance,

1. Physical Workspaces and Manual Tasks

From the passing of pens and forms to conference rooms- everything is ‘from home’. Shops are online now, and so are clinics. All the physical manual processes in the office have to be done remotely and, most importantly, digitally. Businesses that hadn’t digitized their processes faced major challenges in this area.

2. Speed

Lockdowns, WFH, logistics, teams being scattered- and this isn’t even minuscule of the issues that are slowing down processes. Especially hands-on and on-field processes have suffered the most because most operations were carried out in-person on-field and required human intervention. From education to on-field operations like manufacturing and procurement processes have been hampered and slowed down industries majorly. Speed drives processes, but the pandemic has challenged us all with regard to speed. Scaling business from home at speed is not easy.

Functional and operational inefficiencies are likely to be further aggravated because of the unpredictability of consumer demand and uncertainty of timelines and service delivery as well.

3. Consumer Demands, Expectations & Unpredictability

There is no doubt about what has caused the economies to plunge- consumer demand. Organizations are rethinking their operating models based on how their customers are responding, and customers expect businesses to immediately adapt to a model they think they can trust.

Digitization expectations are at an all-time high at the moment, but there’s the question of customer unpredictability. Suddenly, it’s almost impossible to predict, forecast, and analyze consumer behavior and trends.

4. Operational Foundation

The biggest challenge has been maintaining stability or at least trying to steadily maintain an operational foundation. Companies have been forced to devise a holistic plan that is built on a robust and flexible digital business strategy. Forming a foundation that ensures operational continuity whilst anticipating and accommodating disruptions and fluctuations in demand patterns has been critically challenging.

5. Productivity

With teams dispersed and operating from home, with the pandemic hitting literally millions, productivity and operational efficiency have obviously dipped. Employees have been affected most from both fronts- customer-facing as well as organization-facing.

Today, the digital business strategy for businesses across has been compressed from months or years to a matter of days, and that change has affected productivity big time.

COVID-19 has hit us with a major lesson and represents a turning point for businesses. It is time to devise a completely new digital business strategy and lead businesses to transform into a digital workplaces with workplace innovation.

It is a time for organizations to shift to a digital-first, customer-first, and employee-first model and to prioritize and accelerate long-term digitalization goals. In order to operate successfully in a post-COVID world, companies need to pull their socks and masks up and pave way for digitization, their digital capabilities, and implement a robust digital business strategy.

Revisiting & Aligning Business Goals: Embracing True Digital Transformation

All this talk about transforming and revisiting goals and strategies, but what do we do exactly? What are the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely) Goals every organization needs to think of, and how must companies reimagine and re-purpose customer journeys to reduce friction, accelerate the shift to digital, and provide new safety requirements?

We have 5 SMART goals that will help focus on 5 fore-fronts:

• refocusing and accelerating digital investments for evolving customer needs,
• reducing employee- and IT burden in the process of transforming digitally,
• improving business operations,
• digitizing and modernizing workflows and capabilities to boost development velocity, and
• increasing overall organizational agility and scale business to deliver efficiently

These goals are

1. Adopting Citizen Development

We have an entire crash course on citizen development, but to keep our flow and focus intact, let’s talk about citizen development in terms of digital business strategy.

As organizations revive operational momentum and prepare for resilient growth, they need to comprehensively reassess their workforce strategy and prepare for a post-COVID-19 work environment with end-to-end digital efforts. For instance, the ways the workforce functions and the kind of tools they require to be more efficient and function collaboratively.

Citizen Development is a movement that enables the kind of digitization needed in these times. The burden on professional IT developers is more than ever and what citizen development enables is application development without professional training.

A citizen developer is a non-professional developer who builds applications for use by other people. Although they do not report directly to IT, they use tools such as low-code platforms that are sanctioned by IT.

Aiming for citizen development, businesses can ease IT, rapidly deploy applications suitable for very specific tasks, allows employees to build customizable apps that can access information in a fast and secure way, and effectively liaise with teams across.

It empowers the team to embrace innovation in times like these and supports their growth and development without being physically present.

2. Automate and Hyperautomate Now

COVID-19 threw everything into perspective. A report revealed that the Business Process Automation market was predicted to be $10 billion in pre-COVID forecasts with a CAGR of 10%. That has grown to 14.3% already.

Automation has gone up thanks to BPM technologies that have come in handy in the past few months, helping numerous businesses survive the slowdown. But why?

Automation is helping businesses use resources better as it takes care of tedious, repetitive tasks. Employees can focus on the important aspects of a business. This also eliminates the need to hire new resources for paperwork and manual roles.

Digital process automation and hyper-automation are added expenditures, yes, but with no-code platforms that are affordable coming into the market, businesses have it easy!

It is much cheaper and more effective to use technology than to hire human resources.

3. Digital Operations and Workflows

Hundreds of operational decisions and workflows get remodeled on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Organizations need to digitize the way their operating models are functioning to cater to an agile environment that optimizes operational efficiency- from enhancing supply chain operations to optimizing inventory and production processes.

Process automation enables it all within minutes and hours. It calibrates end-to-end visibility, which is essential to identify redundancies in processes and swiftly respond to changes in demand to minimize disruptions in fulfillment.

Also read, the processes you must automate today to improve digital operations and workflows. From supply chain logistics to procurement processes, we’ve got you covered.

4. Digital Customer Experience

With COVID-19, organizations faced a major loss of face-to-face interactions with their customers. It helped establish a personal connection between businesses and their customers- from industries like education to BFSI, be it businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C).

To provide personal interactions in a digital space, companies need to rethink their digital business strategy in a way that provides a seamless customer experience. Again, in order to quickly innovate and create new offerings to replace in-person experiences, automating customer-facing processes and providing digital services is the way to go. 

A digital experience platform enables that. It takes business across the customer funnel- from acquisition to building customer loyalty.  A digital experience platform recalibrates customer experience efforts that suit digital channels whilst incorporating safety across products, services, and processes. They put customers at ease and increase their satisfaction. This helps businesses long-term retain customer relationships.

5. Modernizing with No-code, Low-code & Driving Results

Aligning goals means adopting new technologies to meet current times and driving results with them. No-code application development is of such velocity and effectiveness that it drives the new business digital strategy. With organizations increasingly moving to online channels, there is an even greater need to automate processes from inventory to delivery management processes as well as boost results at scale.

The goal here is to ensure a fast and result-driven approach. And no-code application enables it. It mitigates the impact of the disruption of the pandemic through workplace innovation, forms automation, improving worker safety, driving operational efficiency, and enhancing operational quality.

What is No-Code Development?

We’re sure you must have heard about the booming no-code, low-code movement.

Even if not- this is exactly why we’re here to tell you.

No-code applications are the first and the utmost foundational steps to providing a seamless digital experience. So what is no-code in the first place?

No-code development is the process of using simple mechanics such as drag-and-drop and choosing from the given options to build an app. The platform is essentially a visual environment wherein individuals without coding knowledge can create a fully-functional and easy-to-use app.

No-code apps allow a hassle-free transition into remote working and respect social distancing policies. By building no-code apps for your processes, you can totally ensure the safety of your employees! Trust us, organizations are looking into no-code platforms to implement apps as quickly as possible and ensure business continuity to remain competitive and drive growth!

And no-code platforms can be used across any industry.

Don’t mask your excitement; just faces, please!

Manufacturing processes can be speeded up in diverse areas, including inventory management, equipment inspection, safety audits, and many more.

For Energy & Utilities, no-code and low-code platforms are a real game-changer as they allow the creation of important customer-facing apps that can fuel sales and customer engagement.

In Supply Chain & Logistics, teams can use no-code and low-code apps to handle supply chain visibility, procurement management, reporting, warranty management, and logistics.

In Services, teams can use no-code and low-code apps to automate workflows related to service delivery, e.g., case management for a financial or an insurance institution, customer management, contract management, reporting, billing, and invoicing, etc.

And that’s not even scratching the surface! The benefits are abundant: by digitizing manual, repetitive processes, massive spending and costs can be cut, improving turnaround times by several orders of magnitude. For instance, Assetmonk, an online real-estate platform, cut-down overall application processing time by 70%!

We all know 2020 hasn’t been easy on us. Let’s make it a point to drive self-growth, too, little by little. In some ways, you will be rebuilding your business in a new light and way.

And we are here for it. For you.

Quixy: For your Digital Business Strategy post COVID-19

Every crisis brings challenges but opens up doors full of opportunities. And we at Quixy believe in grabbing opportunities as they come, whenever they do.

Quixy is a cloud-based digital transformation platform that empowers business users with no coding skills to automate processes and build unlimited applications using a simple visual interface, ten times faster, using 60% fewer resources.

Automation is said to require dedicated IT resources. It also incurs multiple expenses. But that’s not true anymore, thanks to no-code platforms. Automating without having to write a single line of code seems like a dream come true, and that’s exactly what no-code is.

Quixy will help you enable the transformation you and your organization demand with processes and the pandemic disrupting our lives. Quixy can provide comfort amidst this crisis and help you shift gears to remote working.  Get Started Today! Empower your organization with automation and customized app development without coding.