The pandemic of 2020 severely affected almost every country’s economy and forced businesses to change their way of operating to survive significantly. HKTDC Research (2019) states that “the clothing industry is a major manufacturing sector of Hong Kong, and one of the country’s largest manufacturing employers” (para. 2). Companies who work in the clothing sector had to adapt their old strategies, management technics, and the used tools to these new pandemic conditions. This paper aims to discuss the novel use of internal and external Internet Technology (IT) services for Hong Kong’s clothing business companies.
The pandemic permitted buying clothes in stores in person, and businesses had to put the whole process on an online basis. In Hong Kong, with a vast number of clothing companies, it was vital to retain customers by providing them with high-quality support and ordering online as handy as possible. The employees of clothing business companies had to work from home during the lockdown, and the executives needed to update their management methods for working online. The clothes manufacturing was also interrupted by the pandemic, and the inability for managers to travel severely affected clothing businesses with abroad-located factories. Modern technologies and IT services are capable of assisting companies in online operations.
The primary way of using WhatsApp was for internal communication between the employees and executives. When the lockdown began, it became clear that to make or cancel orders via this service is more convenient than by the phone or email as people prefer the messenger. Moreover, WhatsApp is the most popular messenger in Hong Kong (SimilarWeb, 2020), and utilizing it in both internal and external communications is reasonable. The chatbot for faster customer support was created, as well as the group with the notifications about new arrivals, sales, and news. The novel way of using WhatsApp turned the messenger into the main channel to contact and inform consumers. It mitigated the challenge of providing high-quality support in pandemic circumstances.
Before the pandemic, all management operated via Slack, an IT service to set tasks and commit them among the employees. When online communication with customers became the crucial factor for stores, managers created an external open Slack base for clients and shared it in the WhatsApp group. In this base, customers could leave feedback or ask questions, and employees could take the requests as tasks to complete. Clients became involved in the management process, so the whole company was able to see their inquiries and give them a higher priority than before.
Some of the clothing manufacturers are in Sri Lanka or Vietnam, and employees like designers used to visit the factories to discuss the new models personally. Then, the cloud services were utilized to send the approved drafts, most of which were available to watch for everyone who had a link to Dropbox. The pandemic cut the ability to travel and made the executives improve online communication with factories. The non-approved drafts had to stay secret, so the exchange between a factory and headquarters had to be secure. Thus, Dropbox, which had a high-secure subscription for companies, became the solution to keep the clothes designing at the same secrecy level.
Although the pandemic severely impacted the clothing business of Hong Kong, it forced the companies to rethink and optimize their operational processes. IT services used for internal management turned into convenient ways of communication with customers, and cloud features guaranteed the security of documents that could only be shared in person before the lockdown.
References
Clothing industry in Hong Kong. (2019). HKTDC. Web.
Mobile app ranking: Top Google Play apps in Hong Kong. (2020). SimilarWeb. Web.