As the coronavirus pandemic has quickly become the new normal, NDA wants to celebrate the positives of our current situation.
We talked to Justine O’Neill, Director at Analytic Partners to discover her reasons to smile.
What positive impacts on long term consumer behaviour shifts will the pandemic have?
It’s already clear that the pandemic has sped up the ecommerce transition. Purchasing online will become the norm, although we are not expecting brick & mortar stores to vanish.
At the same time, this increase in online purchase behaviour and social distancing rules outside stores might have increased consumers’ patience. People are getting used to more queuing and longer waiting times.
The Amazon Prime movement had made it necessary for almost all delivery services to strive for same – or at least next-day – delivery but now, it is currently ok for consumers to wait for an ‘non-essential item’ for weeks!
Almost all consumer typical behaviours have had to be altered in some way. Some experts say it will all go back to ‘normal’, some expect huge alterations, some believe that parts of it will stick. Whatever happens, the key is to stay agile and listen to what the consumers have to say.
What positive impacts have you seen on how your business operates?
Mainly, how surprisingly painless the transition to remote working has been! For years, we have worked with collaborative teams distributed amongst our worldwide offices, so we were used to staying engaged virtually.
However, like many other businesses, we enjoyed the social and collaborative perks of having an office. 6 months ago I wouldn’t have thought it would be possible for us to move to all working remotely and keep up productivity. But I am happy to say that we managed to adapt, evolve and thrive in this situation the same way we put it at the core of our strategic advice to clients.
What have you been most heartened about in how your staff, partners, customers or clients have reacted to the new normal?
The flexibility, humanity, and empathy of everyone working together to manage through the situation. I have seen countless examples of people in our teams going above and beyond to help both colleagues and clients in these challenging situations by adapting work flows and thinking outside the box.
Personally, as a parent to two toddlers, balancing child-minding and working full time has made this among the most challenging months of my career. Only the continuous support and understanding of my colleagues, partners and clients has made it possible.
What technologies have you been most impressed with during this new situation and do you think coronavirus will hasted their uptake or development?
We are no longer afraid to turn the camera on – the true power of video conferencing is coming into its own. I think voice calls may become a thing of the past as we are all enjoying making that visual connection with our remote colleagues and clients.
And even simple collaboration tools within Microsoft are being used to their full potential now, as easy and obvious as it may sound to others, like the sharing and simultaneous editing of documents.
We’ve also managed to continuously develop our own technologies. This time has accelerated our innovative thinking and is proving to be a powerful driver for tailored client solutions that take the current, unprecedented situation into account and turn it into future success.
