To something misfortune is good says the adage. The COVID-19 crisis has disupted the practices of the world. During the Covid-19 crisis, the confinement imposed by the public authorities to limit the spread of the virus forced companies but also public administrations to promote work from home. So it was the emergence of teleworking. Similarly, consumers have massively migrated to digital channels to shop online. Let’s not forget, teleworking is still a recent practice in the world of work and very few employees teleworked before the health crisis.
To meet this new demand, companies have had to digitize at full speed their offer of products and services, and their mode of distribution.
The pandemic has therefore been a real challenge for all companies: administrative closure, teleworking, partial activity, imposition of holidays… In short, a daily struggle to survive this unprecedented crisis… but also a trigger of digital transformation for many organizations. A question of survival: several sectors of activity have not been able to do other than modernize by digitizing some of their processes. Many companies have passed the digitalization milestone during the Covid-19 crisis to gain agility and flexibility and thus ensure remote performance.
In short, teleworking has completely changed working methods and digitalization has greatly helped to maintain the performance of teams, even remotely.
A leap forward for digital
According to McKinsey, 55% of customer interactions are now digital in Europe, which represents a 3-year leap forward compared to pre-crisis forecasts. While it takes on average more than a year to set up teleworking in a company, the first confinement revealed a surprising ability to adapt: the McKinsey study observes an average implementation of only 11 days!
This unprecedented period was therefore the trigger for companies lagging behind in their digitalization. In numbers, the health crisis has accelerated the digital transformation of companies by about 7 years.
CASE OF AFRICA
The world is increasingly going digital, but there is still much to be done on the continent, especially to increase Internet penetration. According to the International Telecommunication Union, in 2019, only 28% of Africans used the Internet and online shoppers are still relatively few. For example, Kenya, Mauritius, Namibia and South Africa are the only countries where the share of online shoppers exceeds 8%. In most other countries, it was less than 5%.
