Brave New World

In this Readers’ Platform, your author shares observations on the growing digital presence in the VT industry since the pandemic.

In this strangest of times, all of us in the elevator industry have had to adapt our business processes to keep operating. COVID-19 has been with us for so long now that many of the changes we’ve made are likely to become permanent. To put it broadly, I’d say the pandemic created relatively few totally new changes. Instead, it caused a massive acceleration of many business changes that were going to happen anyway. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our digital presence.

What happened during the pandemic was that, certainly at my company, we moved from seeing digital platforms as an important part of the marketing mix to becoming, essentially, entirely dependent on them.

The Importance of Digital Platforms

Well before the pandemic, digital platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook and LinkedIn were, clearly, already a massive part of how we all connected with our customers. But what happened during the pandemic was that, certainly at my company, we moved from seeing digital platforms as an important part of the marketing mix to becoming, essentially, entirely dependent on them. Our sales and marketing team started promoting our products using various digital platforms. This resulted in good leads, as well as a stronger social media presence.

In the Indian market, we now find that Facebook and WhatsApp are our No. 1 tools for managing customer relationships. LinkedIn is also becoming increasingly crucial. We have a renewed focus on our communications via these mediums, which we now see as our most important customer-facing outlets.
We also revamped our website. Again, this is something we’d planned anyway, but the pandemic accelerated these plans. We now have a dedicated page for our Indian business. The vast majority of our product documentation is now sent in digital format — often by email or even via WhatsApp. We will certainly print documents again in the future, but there’s a new focus on digital as a result of the pandemic, and it’s here to stay.

A Virtual Presence

As a result of COVID-19, virtual events have really taken off. I don’t think the focus on webinars, virtual trade shows and other virtual events would be anywhere close to what it is now without the pandemic. I’ve been particularly impressed by webinars, such as the one I attended last year that was organized by this very publication to discuss how the vertical-transportation (VT) industry was coping with the pandemic.

Previously, I think webinars were very much considered the poor cousin of live events. Now, I am not so sure. True, you don’t get the same opportunity to network, but what you do get is the opportunity to speak to a much more geographically diverse audience, as well as the ability to invite special guests from almost any corner of the world. For me, at least, the situation has given a new awareness of the limitations of live events.

I also suspect many other corporate events, such as media launches, will now be “virtual first,” rather than waiting for the next live trade show, in a way that never would have been the case previously. I agree that nothing beats face-to-face (F2F). Real events will come back, but the future is hybrid — it’s a tradeoff between the close connections you build in F2F versus the huge reach and flexibility of virtual.
We have been using the digital platforms for our business since the pandemic started. We also conducted several technical product training sessions during this period, which has helped us transfer knowledge across our teams.

IIoT

Finally, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has surely received a pandemic boost. IIoT has long been the growth trend of the future, and would have been so without the pandemic. But certain IIoT-enabled capabilities, such as remote service and maintenance, have now been thoroughly “road-tested” by the pandemic-inspired home-working revolution. My view is that, as elevator OEMs start to offer these remote services in the near future, they will find customers will be far more willing to embrace them than they might have been if the pandemic had never happened.

At Monarch, we are currently planning the release of our own elevator IoT solution, which was developed right here in India and designed specifically for the Indian market by our local R&D team. When it’s available in the near future, it will offer our customers a wealth of possibilities, such as remote elevator status monitoring and control, as well as predictive maintenance.