In Wake of Covid-19: Death Industry Resists Digitization as “Death Tech” Proliferates

Death Industry Conservatism

Back in yesteryear, during pre-pandemic times, death care professionals were content to adopt a frosty, chilled stance to time-saving, innovative technologies. Observers pegged them as stuffy, stodgy, and old-school traditional, uneager to try out several new emerging digital products and services that sought to remake the industry anew.

Indeed, seasoned death care professionals were all-too comfortable looking in the other direction: continuing to push paper, use fax machines, and accept and process only checks when other gargantuan-peer industries were embracing revolutionary tech solutions.

The notoriously slow consumption and digestion of "death tech" by the global death industry -- in the years before and after Covid’s arrival – is credited to a significant conservatism, said Richard Feret of the CPFM French funeral industry to the BBC.

He stated that, for years, he had seen start-ups go belly up for being too avant-garde for the industry, when both clients and providers in France exhibited a decided taste for old methods and tradition.

Feret remarked: "We'll eventually get to digitization [here in France], but it's slower than most industries. Funeral businesses and customers are still conservative. Start-ups bring new ideas that are sometimes too early for their time and their market."

In the U.S., David Nixon, of the Illinois company Nixon Consulting, a respected funeral industry consultant, agrees that conservatism is at the heart of the slow-digitalization issue still death-gripping funeral home businesses in America.?

“The funeral profession [here] is extremely slow to change… Many funeral home owners are neither tech-savvy nor interested in learning new things,” he commented to Funeral Director Daily this year. “There have been a number of… startups over the last 15 years, in some cases 30 years. Few have caught on.”

Pandemic’s Impact

Then struck the seismic industry wave shocks of Covid-19 starting in early 2020, with the disease leading to veritable logjams in death care spaces as Covid-victim bodies piled up faster than they could be properly treated and served by professionals.

According to The New York Times, the pandemic first forced funeral homes and crematoriums in regions whipped by the disease to erect makeshift morgues -- typically rented refrigeration trucks -- in order to get a grip on the surge of deaths.

Today, as Covid-19 continues to roil the globe, many funeral businesses are still at maximum capacity: customer service lines continually ring off the hook, and sure-thing funeral service bookings remain unlikely. City governments have had to step in to address the issue of the oversupply of bodies to funeral homes and crematoriums.

A significant decline in the quality of death care services ensued everywhere, as death care professionals within the radius of hotspots, or not, had to alarmingly break with vaunted in-person traditions, switch to virtual technology solutions, and often work overtime, sometimes to the point of exhaustion.

The nature and customs of the funeral service changed during pandemic, transforming it to something emptier and bleaker. Universal client dissatisfaction with funeral services in the age of the stubborn-to-die viral disease is at an all-time high.???

"Funerals in the Covid-19 era [are] low-key affair[s] and are sparsely attended which [are] unprecedented in most communities where until now funerals have been a social event," noted US market research group Global Industry Analysts, Inc. (GIA) in a June company press release.

To comply with safety restrictions, the funeral services industry, like most other sectors, has made some of its staffers work remotely and partially moved its operations online, which required it to make use of new digital technologies. Today, for example, funeral businesses live stream the service and/or upload a recording of the funeral service to the online obituary on their website in the form of a hyperlink.

However, the recurrent waves of the disease combined with the fact that some undertakers refuse to treat Covid-contaminated bodies, are pressuring providers to give a variety of death technologies a “try,” in a bid to cut slavish working hours, meet higher demand, and gratify both upset-with-pandemic clients and overworked staffers who embalm Covid-victim bodies.

?French funeral director Michael Basdim said, “We used to print sheets of papers and write a lot. [Now] we clearly see the difference and the time we gain to organize the funeral, bill the families, fill in administrative forms,” he said to the BBC.

At the same time, people from all walks of life are also thinking about death more, due to Covid-19, and are hungrily seeking out death tech for themselves.

"Death Tech" Consumption Spikes

End-of-life start-ups – businesses addressing funeral planning, remains disposal and grief and bereavement – were experiencing “steady to moderate growth” in the days before the pandemic struck, an article published last year in The New York Times noted. ??

Yet in the Covid-19 era, the same publication noted that young adults, who had been living pre-pandemic lives unburdened by death anxiety or worries, are “newly anxious about their mortality, increasingly comfortable talking about it and more likely to be grieving or know someone who is.”

These young people surged as a sudden, new market for end-of-life start-ups, and triggered sizeable growth for B2C and B2B death tech companies, alike. ?

Indeed, condolence-related traffic skyrocketed for American start-up Cake, a free service that helps users organize end-of-life documents, instructions and wishes, with sign-ups to the service quintupling between February and June of last year.

Lantern, another new B2C start-up, which bills itself as “the single source of guidance for navigating life before and after a death,” had seen a 123 percent boost in sign-ups, most of them of people aged under 45, during the same period.

Market platform start-up Near, a company that introduces users to end-of-life and bereavement service providers, like death doulas and therapists – who span as specialists in massage, music, sound and art – launched earlier than slated and expanded its niche provider offerings to include, for instance, end-of-life photographers.??

There are other much-talked-about B2C start-ups: namely, Trust & Will, a business that sells easy-to-understand estate planning -- it charges only a fraction of what lawyers charge; and Austin-based company Eterneva, which manufactures diamonds out of hair or cremated ash, and recently secured another round of financing.

On the B2B side, start-up PlotBox integrates cloud technology into the plot management process. The software manages finances, records bookings, arranges plot inspections and even provides a funeral director portal. The software reduces time spent on day-to-day tasks by up to 78%, which explains why it is quickly becoming a must-have tool for cemetery and crematoria directors everywhere, noted industry blog Connected Directors in May.

Spain-based Vivo Recuerdo is another B2B start-up that experienced a real spike in interest. That is, a 300% increase in site traffic in early 2020, according to Sifted. The company sells its digital memorial service – consisting of showing a digital memorial of the deceased during the funeral, made up of pictures and messages submitted by loved ones, on 49-inch screens installed by the company.?

These and all end-of-life start-ups are doing their part to reduce the emotional and financial costs of dying. Costs which stress out the bereaved, particularly in the long, depressing days of Covid-19. Several exasperated death care professionals are giving “death tech” a break, if anything to provide their clients with a meaningful send-off while keeping up with higher demand in the age of lock-down restrictions.

Chris Cruger, Partner and Chief Operation Officer at the industry-observing survey firm The Foresight Companies stated in a press release: “[T]he pandemic has forever changed how consumers plan for, buy, and participate in funerals. And th[e] businesses that adapt quickly will win the day."

Embracing innovative technology is key to this adaption process, and may prove to be business-saving for the shell-shocked industry of death’s “final responders.”

Likewise, “death tech” may enduringly resonate with families and friends of the newly deceased as they seek a compensation of meaning in the ultra-minimalist funeral service times of Covid-19.

“Death tech” is spoon-feeding succor to those in grief, and that is welcome. Technologies are providing emotional relief when before, the pat of the funeral director’s hand on a grieving widow/er’s back was all what was traditionally expected of death care providers.

Time has yet to tell if industry-wide digitization will settle to sit well in America’s heart. ??