How the Digital Shift Is Driving SME’s Roadmap to Recovery

Ensuring Survival

In a Vimcar study of over 1,000 SMEs which operate company car vehicles, over 4/5 of businesses said they have had to significantly adapt their operations since March 2020. Whilst 30% of those surveyed adapted to stay afloat and 38% adapted to protect profitability, 37% of businesses were focused on protecting their employees’ mental and physical wellbeing. The latter priority reflecting the unique predicament that business owners found themselves in – not only did they need to ensure the survival of their business, but they also had a huge responsibility and duty of care to their employees whose personal lives were no doubt also thrown into disarray.

In order to protect both profit and the workforce, it is apparent that a large proportion of SMEs turned to technology. Streamlining processes and becoming more efficient as a business operation enabled businesses to save costs and ease the pressure on staff members, with 41% of businesses taking this hybrid approach. A deeper dive into a few of the ways businesses across the UK applied technology illustrates this point further. Office-based teams reverted to fully remote working and adopted new internal comms platforms and HR software overnight to keep staff engaged. Independent brick-and-mortar retailers launched ecommerce offerings to avoid a complete loss in revenue. SMEs with company vehicles used fleet management technology to cut costs, help their workforce become more efficient, and keep customers up to date with deliveries.

A Long-Awaited Digital Shift

Digitisation has long been heralded as a key component of business growth and success but unlike larger corporations with the resources and funds to undertake digital transformation projects with minimal disruption to day-to-day processes, SMEs have historically lagged when it comes to making the digital shift.

What the pandemic has proved, however, is how crucial it is to digitise and how vulnerable and fragile SMEs are without technology to support their business operations. A report on small businesses’ digital transformation by Cisco found that SMEs who are more technologically advanced, enjoy 8x more benefits (revenue) than those who are ‘digitally indifferent’. The data gathered in our own survey of UK SMEs also observed that an overwhelming majority of those who adapted using technology said the impact of that technology has been positive.

Adopting more technology was a vital move for SMEs throughout the pandemic but far from being a temporary measure, it is a decision that businesses will reap the benefits from in the long-term. Consider the fact that, post-pandemic, SMEs’ customers have become more digitally reliant and savvy themselves, and small businesses must keep pace with this digital shift or risk falling out of favour. Take the acceleration of ecommerce for example: online sales rose by almost 50% during the pandemic and consumers who were once indifferent to a business’ website will now demand an exceptional online customer experience – regardless of whether it is a small local business or high street brand. SMEs’ customers are going to have less and less patience for digitally outdated businesses and so technology adoption is as much about protecting profit and people during the pandemic as it is about gaining a long-term competitive edge.

Future Roadmap

Many SMEs have proven themselves to be agile and resilient over the course of the pandemic. Adopting a hybrid approach by investing into their people as well as technology has enabled businesses to focus on their survival. However, despite much talk about the economic outlook looking promising, less than a third of small businesses are optimistic about business growth over the next 12 months – indicating that many believe they will continue to operate in survival mode for the foreseeable future.

Brexit regulations (23%), financial challenges (25%) and high standards of customer expectation (24%) were the main reasons for concern by those SMEs surveyed – concerns which cannot be quelled overnight. So what is the way forward? How can SMEs move beyond simply surviving and into a state of growth and optimism?

There is no simple answer but what we do know is that the roadmap to recovery for UK SMEs is being driven by the digital shift that occurred during lockdown. Of the SMEs surveyed by Vimcar, 2 in 5 respondents confirmed they will be committing to technology in the next 12 months to overcome any challenges that come their way and support future growth.

The pace of digital change and innovation shows no signs of slowing down and so SMEs who explore and implement new technologies – whether that be to save costs, create efficiencies, support staff, or all of the above – will be the ones to thrive in a post-pandemic world.