What a journey we’ve all been. I feel that everyone can agree that the last six months has not only been challenging but what a learning journey we’ve been on. With the quick onset of COVID, we had to learn to adapt so much of our life in such a short time frame (hours even), we simply had to learn how to adjust and make changes.
With Victoria going into a strict lockdown for almost 12 weeks, no one could underestimate the impact that this had on how consumers would fulfil their basic needs.
When you look back at the changes, the forced migration to online shopping and purchasing was huge. This meant that businesses had to adapt so quickly, for some even turning on shopping carts or building entire websites in a short period of time. It was such an amazing achievement for so many small operators to be able to do this but it was a matter of survival of the fittest. By moving on to an online environment, you were removing the personal and local experience which poses such a risk to small business but without having a website, many businesses were potentially going to lose not only sales (which was inevitable any way) but customers as well.
Now that all of these changes have made and customers have spent so much time at home, it’s now time to think about the ongoing impacts that this could potentially mean to your customers.
One of the greatest outcomes that many businesses have seen is that customers have actually enjoyed the added benefits of convenience and time that they have received as a result of migrating to online transactions. The result of this to business is that the way consumers shop in the future is likely to be different and small businesses are going to need to adjust and understand exactly the impact that this will have on them.
If you switched on online shopping, it’s likely that you will have some customers who will want to continue to use that. But what’s right for your business?
Understanding YOUR post COVID customer
The most important part of understanding what’s right for your business is not going to be the same as the coffee shop next door – it needs to come down to what YOUR customer wants.
To establish what’s right for you it’s best to look at what actually happened and how your customer changed, for your business alone.
- Did your customer move to shopping online with you?
- Were purchasing habits similar to offline or did it change (increase / decrease)
- Could you easily fulfil / service your customers through online?
Once you’ve looked a the results of what actually happened, the next steps is to look at what is needed:
- Have your customers expressed / asked to continue to be serviced in online?
- Can you continue to support online without negatively impact your offline experience?
- Can your business financially afford to resource / fund the online part of the business without jeopardising it’s viability
- Can you maintain a competitive position online
- Is there opportunity for strategic growth by maintaining an online presence, whilst still supporting existing business
The change that businesses have faced in the past 12 months is nothing short of monumental but the need to continue to manage the changes that were made need to be carefully considered before launching a completely new business model. If you look at it from two practical examples of a coffee shop:
- A local truck stop coffee shop, relies completely on drive-by traffic, probably don’t need to consider any business changes.
- An inner-city coffee shop, suffering challenges with being able to fulfil orders during peak times due to the restrictions on patronage and space, customer experience is suffering and having a negative impact. During COVID restrictions, customers were calling through orders and they were ready to collect when they arrived. A consideration for this business may not be a full website but an app that customers could download and pre-order their coffees to collect at a particular time. You could even potentially set a recurring order which allows for pre-pay credit to be utilised. The result of this is not only a better customer experience but also a more streamlined process for the business, managing potential peak times with greater ease.
So, in summary, we know that businesses achieved so much in the COVID period, adapting to customer needs and ensuring survival. The next part is assessing whether those changes are going to continue to add value and help to grow the business before continuing to maintain.
The most important part here is to make sure that you look at everything from both a customer perspective and also a business viability. The last thing that your loyal customers want is to put your business at risk – no one benefits from that.
Good Luck and stay safe!
The Marketing Elf
©November 2020
The Marketing Elf 