We also asked our decision makers about the impact of the COVID-19 disruption on their investment strategy with respect to mobile for their frontline workers. Tablets, smartphones, scanners and applications, are key factors in the frontline workers ability to successfully conduct business and serve customers. The level of investment amidst the pandemic disruption provides valuable insights as to where these organizations’ strategic priorities lay.
Figure 5: The Pace of Mobile Tech Investment is Quickly Accelerating
The data shows a clear trend toward a growing “tech-enabled” worker as the pace of investment in IT/mobile technology project deployments rose to equip large decentralized workforces with effective mobile technology tools to ensure business continuity. Although the data in Figure 5 shows that the vast majority (80%) are either aggressively or moderately accelerating these deployments, there are more disparities between our respective classes of respondents. Consistently, 60% of Innovators indicated that they have embraced aggressive acceleration in their mobile strategies, while only 25.9% of Early Adopters and just 13.3% of Late Majority/Laggards have. The lack of embracing an accelerated pace of mobile adoption for the latter two segments is likely because they are hampered by the lack of flexible IT infrastructure in their respective organizations.
When examining the specific segments likely to aggressively accelerate the pace of their mobile rollouts, we found the most prominent are:
Finally, we asked our respondents how they would specifically address the disinfection and safety of mobile deployments and if they are considering changing the ratio of corporate owned devices per employee and how they would change processes. A full 41.6% of respondents said they will mostly likely switch to a 1:1 deployment model and an additional 42% will adopt a 1:Few model, so that fewer employees are touching devices. Upon further analysis of those who were aggressively accelerating the pace of change, 61% are most likely to move to a 1:1 model of device deployment.
Those organizations that had infrastructure and mobility in place, and the flexibility built into their IT resource model using MMS partners, were best able to truly provide effective support for the operations of remote or decentralized workforces. In short, it’s critical to be able to manage frontline employees as well as corporate employees suddenly working from home at scale. Employees need to be more connected with collaboration tools and enhanced mobile-enabled capabilities. There is also likely safety, training and productivity considerations that are driving the significant paradigm shift from predominantly shared devices to 1:1 or 1:Few.
The most innovative and effective approach is to view mobile technology investments as key to flexible workforces.
In order to gather further detail on how these organizations implemented sweeping changes, we need to look at how they prioritized various facets of their both their technical infrastructure and the way they support their frontline workforces pre- and post-pandemic. We asked respondents to rank the strategic priorities of their frontline operations and support in importance, before COVID-19 and afterward.
Figure 6: What’s Most Critical to Your Frontline Workforce?
The most telling insights here are the rather sudden shifts in significance for IT infrastructure, security and data collection. While these backend facets comprised a rather large portion of organizational priorities beforehand, the urgent need to pivot to decentralized operations amidst the pandemic made them much less of a consideration.
As workforces continue to become more decentralized and adaptable to working from anywhere, tactical measures that allow flexibility will only grow in importance. Accordingly, employers must equip them with the right mobile devices, services and collaboration tools to fuel both their productivity and efficiency in this “new normal”.
At the heart of any customer-focused enterprise is preserving the quality of the customer experience – even amidst unprecedented disruption. While executive-level strategic adjustments and technology infrastructure changes were necessary due to the pandemic, we also wanted to know how these respondents characterized the changes to their customer interactions.
A lot has changed – almost 23% strongly agree and another 55.4% of our responders agree COVID-19 and the related disruption has transformed the way their business engages with their customers. Thus, the new normal of doing business will take some time adjusting to.
Figure 7: Customer Engagement is Changing in a Big Way
Going further, we asked them to explain the ways in which their organization had changed the way they do business with their customers in response to the pandemic, and we asked them to express it in their own words. Quite predictably, what emerges in the resulting word map (See Figure 8) is a move to contactless, digital, online and remote engagement. Organizations are increasingly using mobile to cope, to stay connected and engaged with customers by leveraging mobile tech investments.
Figure 8: The Sudden Shift to Virtual Engagements
Unsurprisingly, you can see that the nexus between all enterprises is being able to provide remote or online engagements with customers in this period of COVID-19 disruption and public health concerns. It’s abundantly clear that this new normal of doing business demands a different outlook and willingness to pivot in order to adapt and thrive.
Across respondents we see a dramatic shift in technologies implemented before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. As shown in Figure 6, we can see that investments move away from Cybersecurity and Cloud Infrastructure in the short term to Contactless technology and Wearables that yield a safer, more productive experience for the mobile workforce.
Looking forward, Robotics, AI and Voice-based technology hold promise for efficiency, flexibility and productivity improvements that will impact their potential growth trajectory. There is a trend toward automation helping to drive a better return on investment on overall technology spend.
Figure 9: Shifts in Investments Emphasize Employee Productivity and Social Distancing
The fallout of COVID-19 will change the nature of mobile deployments, making them potentially more expensive and complicated to manage. A vast majority of organizations report making major changes to their device cleaning procedures. This will increase costs via cleaning supplies and increase the time needed between one worker finishing their shift and another worker coming in to use the same device to start their shift. Most businesses also say they will shift from a shared, 1:Many mobile device deployment model to either a 1:1 or 1:Few model. Accordingly, this will require increasingly greater resources and responsibilities to purchase, maintain and update these growing mobile fleets.
