The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted everyone's attention and accelerated certain trends. Standard customer relationships have changed and better ways must be found to transform customer relationship processes using digital technology. Here are three things you must do during and after a pandemic to accelerate digital transformation efforts and deliver customer value faster. 1. Analyze data to retain customers and focus budgets We tend to think in a formulaic way of thinking about data analytics. For example, a customer bought Product X, and analytics can show where and when the purchase was made, where the customer came from, and how popular the product is. All the information you need, but it's too reactionary. Moving to an analytics platform will give you a proactive edge. Think about how Amazon analyzes customer information and then creates targeted ads. While more online shopping happening during a pandemic, it is much easier to predict shopper behavior, which, if analyzed correctly, can give a competitive advantage and focus efforts and budget on the most popular products and services. With pattern analysis, behavior analysis, and machine learning (ML), you can anticipate your customers' needs and take steps to meet them. 2. Get rid of staff availability issues. Many companies rely on human efforts to keep the business running. For example, an employee talks face-to-face with a colleague about a purchase order. It is the epitome of inefficiency. In addition, during a pandemic, the luxury of shared office space is no longer available, which means that a once ineffective process can be successfully automated. Automating traditional human roles through digital processes can help eliminate many of the workflows that lead to wasted time or delays, as well as any labor force issues due to the pandemic. Take, for example, the purchasing process: a customer buys a product. The order first goes to the sales system, which then needs to be reviewed by a human before it goes to the purchasing department and finally to the shipping department. All this makes the buying process longer. Instead, if you build system integration into your web store, you can streamline the entire process by removing many of the interactions between people that slow down the overall process. This allows your employees to focus more on interactions, the customer, and how to improve those processes, making customer service faster and more efficient. 3. Build a team dedicated to process improvement. Digital transformation projects won't work if you don't think about the end results for your customers. Customer experience is critical to business success, especially during COVID-19, when many customers were forced to resort to online meetings, transactions and services for the first time. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the possibility of creating a dedicated team focused exclusively on improvements and efficiency gains in this area. The team must consider which outcomes are most important to customers and decide how digitalization can better deliver those outcomes, given the complexities of the pandemic. Based on this information, they can design the best digital transformation strategy.