With 2021 well underway, there are many priorities emerging as pro AV companies move from responding to the pandemic to accelerating their digital modernization.
Although the pandemic may still create bumps along the way, businesses have the potential to progress.
In order to plan and push forward, organizations and their channel partners need to move these six actions to the tops of their to-do lists for 2021:
Adapt to a digital-first, virtual-first world
The pandemic forced us all to embrace a digital-first, virtual-first world, but 2021 will be the year it truly comes to fruition. COVID-19 divided companies – those who were ready to go fully digital and support a completely remote workforce and those who were not.
This year, companies and their partners will need to adapt to this new world and make permanent changes to their businesses to satisfy end customers’ business requirements and customer service expectations.
Make the move to hyperautomation
As end customer demands grow, channel partners should consider developing hyperautomation skills and service offerings. Hyperautomation takes away time-consuming and laborious manual tasks and enables services to be available faster, digitally.
This will be essential for delivering a digital service in a digital-first, virtual-first world, while also improving customer experience to remain competitive.
Spring clean your digital house of dust
Digital dust is everywhere, from the sites you look at to the forms you fill out, but companies are capitalizing on this left behind data, some commercializing it and others hacking it.
For 2021, pro AV companies need to make identifying, classifying and cleaning up this digital dust a priority in order to ensure compliance and privacy-aware governance. Don’t be tempted to sweep it under the rug!
Deploy content services to support privacy
With more digital dust (personal data) comes more data privacy regulations to protect this dust. These regulations give consumers the right to understand how companies store and use their data, and companies need to make sure they are prepared to deal with these requests when they come in.
Content services will be the key to establishing privacy-aware governance for organizations – giving them the ability to locate, delete, redact and archive this data, as needed. Content services should be a critical tool to deploy in 2021 for any organization seeking to remain compliant.
Embrace marketplaces
Customers are seeking more and more autonomy in their purchasing journey and companies and their partners need to make it a priority to support this. Companies need to enable this autonomy by supporting customers’ abilities to self-discover, evaluate and purchase from an online marketplace and have the product physically delivered to their desk or via the cloud.
Channel partners also need to consider where they can adapt to support this new way of operating to continue to make money and remain competitive.
Influence the Influencers
Profit models are changing and with them the traditional partner model of reselling. For 2021, vendors should consider evolving their partner programs benefits to reward partners that can influence decision-makers at potential customers – and help them realize value, which ultimately leads to purchase.
With channel partners influencing the purchasing decisions at end customer organizations, this will shift focus from sales and acquisitions to influence and retention.
By making these items top priorities for 2021, pro AV companies and their channel partners can make the necessary changes to adapt to the newly structured business world, remain compliant, provide the best service for their customers and support continued growth.