By: Ryan Falkenberg
There is no escaping the fact that South Africa’s economic situation is desperate. Already faced with sluggish growth and massive unemployment at the beginning of 2020, the events of the past year have pushed it to the edge. Within this context, people are desperately seeking solutions that will fuel growth and job creation.
Those pinning their hopes on the large corporates which have traditionally been job creators are looking in the wrong place. These companies are much more likely to “right-size” and shed jobs. The focus should, instead, be on small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and empowering them with the technologies, including digital workforces, needed to scale and grow into new markets.
Adaptability and the new economy
That SMEs are the companies best suited to fuel economic growth in the new economic reality isn’t all that surprising. By dint of their size, they’re more adaptable and capable of pivoting more quickly than their corporate counterparts.
Additionally, many SMEs are run by a single founder or small group of people who are product experts in a specific field. This expertise allows them to compete against large players who can beat them on price, especially in specific suburbs and towns where their physical presence is reassuring to residents.
Unfortunately, many SMEs are unable to replicate this level of expertise and service when they try to scale up. Founders can either be too cautious when it comes to letting new hires interact with their customers, or are unable to successfully transfer their product expertise. The former gives competitors a chance to claim the market opportunity for themselves, while the latter increases the risk of dissatisfied customers who will eventually spend their money elsewhere.
The power of digital workforces
Fortunately, there is a way for SME founders and managing teams to ensure customers retain access to powerful levels of expertise even as they expand beyond their local market. In fact, it’s something that could allow them to take advantage of the great digital leap created by the pandemic and scale globally.
Using digital expert platforms, business owners with little to no coding experience can build, maintain and deploy a digital version of themselves – an expert that can ask the right situational questions to fully understand the customer’s context before then guiding the customer to the right solution choices.
This not only reduces the amount of training new employees need (the expertise exists within the platform, they just need to know how to use it), it also allows them to complement the company’s expertise with an exceptional customer experience. Combined, these two things can be an incredibly powerful differentiator.
Additionally, this approach allows SMEs to overcome the skills gap that exacerbates South Africa’s unemployment problem. Rather than hiring for a specific skill, SMEs can find people with great attitudes and EQ (emotional intelligence) and the ability to deal with multiple languages and cultures. South Africa has an abundance of such people and they could prove a powerful weapon in helping local SMEs scale globally.
Embracing change
South African entrepreneurs are renowned for their tenacity and grit, but if they are to truly help the economy grow and create large numbers of jobs, they need to move beyond resilience. Instead, they need to embrace technologies like digital workforces, build on the strengths found locally, and chase digital-ready markets around the globe.
In the face of a status quo that simply isn’t working, we shouldn’t fear change but grab the opportunities it presents.
Ryan Falkenberg is the co-chief executive of CLEVVA.
*The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL or title sites.
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