Digitalisation is a different challenge for companies than for people
Insight #1 from Frontira’s Breaking Inertia report
Thousands of consultants, marketeers, digital product designers, CEOs and CDOs kept their eyes peeled during the first lockdown months of the coronavirus crisis, expecting that this situation will bring the new age of ‘all-digital customers’. Many people called it the next ‘Black Swan’ event, using Nassim Taleb’s expression for outlier, impactful and post-rationalised events, that will digitalise industries and customers once and for all — and even more, including Taleb himself, dismissed these notions.
We at Frontira were curious right from the beginning — what effects will the lockdown really have on people’s shopping and digital habits and expectations? Will they turn into digital power-users? How will the restrictions affect their preferences? We realised that COVID-19 is as much an opportunity as a cause for frustration and dismay. Plus, we get to learn more about people at their extreme which is a very important tool in design.
In our Breaking Inertia research, launched in March 2020, we recruited 20 participants whose lives we followed through bi-weekly interviews over a period of three months. By regularly checking on their habits, behaviour and sentiment about the unfolding coronavirus situations and the related measures, we tracked how and why their shopping and online behavioural habits changed. Providing a massive amount of information in itself already, we complemented the more than 110 interviews with talks to experts from a wide range of industries, added survey data from Ipsos Hungary, and conducted an international trend analysis.
In a three-part series, spread out over 3 weeks we put one key finding per week in the spotlight. But if you can’t wait, go here to download and read the full report.
Insight #1: Businesses and people experienced the lockdown very differently
Our stakeholder interviews and research showed that companies faced a brand new challenge: they got out of their customers’ sight and the only way they could reach them was through digital channels. As a response, they defined digital availability as the number one customer need.
“The proportion of online purchases increased 30% compared to pre-pandemic levels, and it’s somewhere around 10% of offline purchases right now. It’s a challenge for us because it used to be in addition to our core business.” — Béla Sólyom, Praktiker
People, on the other hand, had an initial stark response but our respondents actually got used to the new circumstances, and later felt that their post-quarantine life was not so different from their pre-quarantine life. Even as their options for shopping, running errands or entertainment were strongly limited, they did not become fully dedicated to digital solutions for a range of reasons discussed in the report.
“In times of coronavirus, when you are trying to deal with things online or via call centre, we got to a point with [my mobile provider] that I can barely wait to visit a store because there is no way we will be able to deal with this other way.” — Nikoletta, 41
In fact, our interviewees did not think in binary terms about their online and offline activities, which is in contrast with the usual “how to digitise people” problem that often suggests a mutual exclusivity between online and offline behaviour.
This shows that digitalisation is a much bigger challenge for companies: it is long, messy, costly, and due to the coronavirus, unavoidable. For people, going digital is still a choice even during the pandemic, enabled by the abundance of options. Corporate digitalisation, thus, is necessary but not sufficient for people to become more digitally engaged.
So what influences whether people do things online or offline? Our research suggests we need to focus a lot more on the context!
Next week, we’ll discuss the problem-solving loop framework we developed to understand digital behaviour.
Can’t wait till then, or want the whole all at one? Then download and read the full report.
