Digital presence in elevators

This interview was first published in the Q1 issue of Elevator World India Magazine

By Mr. Subramania Bharathiyar, elevator product manager at Monarch – Inovance’s dedicated elevator business platform

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 so long now – going on two years – that many of the changes we’ve made are likely to become permanent.

To put it broadly, I’d say that COVID-19 created relatively few totally new changes, instead what it did was cause a massive acceleration of many business changes that were going to happen anyway.

Nowhere more so than when it comes to our digital presence.

The importance of digital platforms

Digital platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook and LinkedIn were, clearly, already a massive part of how we all connected with our customers well before COVID-19. 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 & marketing team started promoting our products using various digital platforms which has got us good leads as well as social media presence.

In the Indian market, we now find that Facebook and Whatsapp are our #1 tools for managing relationships with our customers, and LinkedIn is also becoming increasingly crucial. We’ve got a renewed focus on our communications via these mediums – which we now see as essentially our most important customer facing outlets.

We also totally revamped our website during COVID – again something we’d planned anyway – but COVID bought these plans right forward. We now have a dedicated page for our Indian business. You can check it out at www.inovance.eu/india.

The vast majority of our product documentation is now sent out in digital format – often by email or even via Whatsapp. For sure, we’ll do print documents again in future, but there’s a new focus on digital as a result of COVID-19 and it’s here to stay.

A virtual presence

Virtual events have really taken off as a result of COVID-19. And I don’t think that the focus on webinars, virtual trade shows, and other virtual events would be anywhere close to what it is now without the experience of the pandemic. I’ve been particularly impressed by webinars, such as the one I attended last year that was run by this very publication to discuss how the VHT 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 to invite special guests from almost any corner of the world. At least for me, COVID-19 has given me 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 totally agree that nothing beats face to face: real events will come back. But the future is hybrid – it’s a trade-off between the close connections you build in F2F vs the huge reach and flexibility of virtual.

We have been using the digital platforms for our business since the pandemic started and we also conducted several technical product trainings during this period which has helped us in transfer of knowledge across our team.

IoT

Finally, even 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 COVID – 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 that 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 releasing our own elevator IoT solution, which was developed right here in India and designed specifically for the Indian market by our locally based R&D team. When it’s available, in the near future, it will bring a wealth of possibilities to our customers such as remote elevator status monitoring and control, as well as predictive maintenance.