The latest events caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak have changed the usual course of things and brought a lot of uncertainties for business owners. Many companies, especially small ones, are now forced to show all the ingenuity they have to adapt to the new circumstances. It’ll be fair to say that many companies and even entire business industries don’t even dare to think of growth and thriving in the foreseeable future. For many, avoiding bankruptcy and saving enough resources to overcome the upcoming crisis is the number one priority.

It has become apparent that the coronavirus outbreak won’t pass without leaving long-term business consequences. Therefore, it’s crucial to start planning the future of your business with everything that may come next kept in mind. In this article, we’ll share some tips that will help you to prepare your business for a foggy future that lies ahead. Besides, we’ll tell you about Webix, a JavaScript UI library that can save you some time and money on web and mobile development and thus help you to stay afloat.

How to Protect Your Business During the Coronavirus Outbreak

The crisis that we witness isn’t the first one, and unfortunately, it won’t be the last one that we have to deal with. The reasons that cause such unpleasant events may vary, but the rules for overcoming them remain pretty much the same. Those companies that will be able to cut costs and save resources accumulated during the years of prosperity and growth may stay afloat. It depends on the entrepreneurial abilities of a particular business owner, whether a post-crisis era will provide new growth opportunities. To the greatest extent, it depends on the ability to develop new ideas, set the right goals, and efficiently spend saved resources to achieve them. In this chapter, we collected some useful tips that will help you to save what will become the basis for the new rising of your business.

First of all, it’s crucial to analyze the changed circumstances on the market and adapt your services to the current situation as soon as possible. The main advice given to people all around the world is to reduce the number of contacts with other people and stay at home if it’s possible. For companies that follow the B2C model, depending on the angle of view, such a state of affairs can a severe threat or a cause for implementing a more innovative approach.

If you rely on face-to-face interactions, you have to develop a new, more creative way of delivering your services and products to the customers. The first thing that comes in mind is the adoption of an online chatting app for consulting your clients on how they can stay in touch with you without any physical contact. Another example is the use of mobile applications. If you own a restaurant or a cafe, such an approach will help your clients to make orders online and choose a suitable delivery time. Push notifications will help to inform a client about the upcoming discounts and special offers.

It’s essential to adjust your marketing strategy to the changes in the market with coronavirus in kept mind. Analyze your products and services and ask yourself if they could be of additional use or relevance in current circumstances and change your marketing strategy accordingly. Such an approach is especially important if you can provide an altered service during the outbreak. Many people will wonder whether a specific business is still operational or not. You can leverage social networks to make sure that your target audience knows you’re still up and running.

It may be a pretty hard task to analyze the current state of the market, taking into account how volatile the market at the moment. Finding a new niche for your business may be a harsh task if you have to collect and analyze all the data manually. Business intelligence software can be an excellent answer to this issue. Interactive dashboards that represent dozens of indicators in real-time could become your ace up your sleeve. The use of predictive analytics powered by AI algorithms will allow you to predict market trends in advance and change your strategy accordingly.

There’s a high probability that most of your staff will work from home for some time. Therefore, you should plan ahead how you will coordinate your efforts and ensure efficient communication channels. Phone calls won’t be so useful, especially if we keep in mind the necessity of regular brainstorming and contingency meeting caused by unpredicted events. Consider the use of online platforms that provide easy-to-use ways of communicating and sharing ideas. For small companies, custom-made Kanban boards, for example, is an easy way of ensuring that everybody is on the same page. Also, this tool that will allow to share ideas and distribute responsibility between employees. For big companies, a web-based Gantt chart will be an excellent solution for monitoring the current state of projects consisting of a large number of tasks and find bottlenecks without the need to organize the actual meeting.

The successful strategy of dealing with coronavirus effects requires the use of both management adjustments and technological means. If you hesitate to adopt new software solutions due to possible time and money losses, have no fear. There’s a technology that you can use for creating comprehensive web and mobile apps without significant efforts.

How Webix Can Help You to Achieve More With Fewer Efforts

XB Software has significant expertise in JavaScript development, and one of our greatest achievements is the creation of the Webix library. It was used to develop more than 150 projects during the last eight years. More than 10,000 developers from all over the world are actively using Webix in their projects. We continuously improve our library and add new features keeping in mind feedback from our users. Now, let’s take a look at Webix in more detail.

Webix is a JavaScript UI library that helps significantly reduce development time without sacrificing the quality of product or user-friendliness. At the moment, the library provides access to more than 100 ready-to-use widgets of various complexity. Among them, you can find:

  • Complex widgets that help accomplish a variety of tasks: make complex calculations, create interactive reports, manage workflow, and perform advanced data filtering;
  • Data widgets that offer a wide range of features for convenient data management, e.g., all-in-one-piece data loading, CRUD operations, fast data sorting, on-the-fly filtering, grouping, and styling. All the components suit for cross-platform app development;
  • Visualization widgets, including graphs and charts for designing analytical web applications and mobile applications. These widgets allow implementing dynamic data visualization with smooth animation and several interactive features;
  • Navigation widgets including Menu, ContextMenu, Sidebar, SideMenu, SubMenu, Toolbar, Hint;
  • Windows and popups that allow you to emphasize important information to end-users;
  • Layout widgets allow creating complex layouts for your apps with ease. These tools are suitable for the development of business applications and corporate solutions of all kinds;
  • Control widgets will help to improve user experience by facilitating interaction with an app.

Let’s focus on some tools that can help you to implement the functionality described in the previous chapter. Data widgets, for example, can help you to organize and present large amounts of data in a clear and structured way. Data can be put in scrollable and sortable tables or listed. With their help, you can build a BI dashboard that will display multiple charts and reports on a single page. Such an app can help to review and analyze the most important metrics in-a-click. Webix-based business intelligence app can provide both summary and in-depth views of performance. Thanks to the visualization widgets, there will be no need to pay for any third-party data visualization library.  If you have Webix, a wide variety of graphs and charts that you can use for representing vast amounts of data in an easy-to-read way is at your service.

If you don’t plan to build an app from scratch, but only intended to upgrade your current software solution, Webix can be pretty helpful as well. Say, due to the current state of affairs, the majority of your target audience has gone online. In such a situation, you have to act fast and timely implement new features that will allow you to stay in touch with clients. The best part of Webix is that you can cut costs of development thanks to the ease of use and the ability to add a new widget to your app and configure it with the minimal amount of code.

The UI of any complexity can be created without involving an extensive staff of designers and UI/UX specialists. You can see it for yourself by reviewing demos and analyzing the source code required to create them. To make the development process even more effective, we provide access to the catalog of JavaScript templates.

Learning new tricks may be a time-wasting process. Time spent exploring the features of a new JavaScript library can turn into missed opportunities. We understand that, and therefore provide you with resources that will help you to beat the learning curve. Our documentation page contains tons of useful information related to Webix widgets. Interactive tutorials provide access to a detailed guide, code editor, and preview. These courses will help you make your first steps in building web apps with Webix. If there are any questions, you can always find an answer on our forum.

Conclusions

The successful strategy of overcoming the coronavirus outbreak for business should include both management improvements and technological means. Changing the business approach that you’ve been using successfully for many years may be a hard task for any company. Whether you like it or not, planning solutions with several unpredicted scenarios in mind is the reality that we’ll have to deal with for some time. In these circumstances, any investments should be carefully weighed, and resources should be spent with care.

Webix is a library that can help you build a web or mobile app fast and effortlessly. An extensive library of UI components that your developers can add to the application with a couple of lines of code can become a good way of reducing labor costs. We’ve been working on UX/UI for years. As a result, it won’t disappoint the users, while the ease of use will amaze your developers with a modest amount of time necessary to acquire new skills. All these features combined will allow you to use the resources that you have with the highest efficiency and create full-functioned web and mobile apps as fast as possible.

If you don’t have the resources to develop the application yourself, you can always rely on us. Our developers have significant experience in Webix development and can build an app of any complexity for you. If you still hesitate, our specialist can estimate the cost of the final product to help you understand how much you can save in comparison with other offers on the market. We believe that it can be an excellent first step in our relationships.

To learn more about Webix development, feel free to contact us.