When a crisis like this contagion hits a company, its executives need to evaluate the impact on their business model, both instantaneously and over the long run. Of course, this is no routine economic downturn. Central modifications in consumer behavior, supply chains, and avenues to market are unveiling vulnerabilities of companies. As a result, it is unthinkable to estimate and scrutinize trends. Conventional yardsticks and acumen applied to administer the firm have become archaic. Although ambiguity has taken precedence, it is still conceivable to reclaim some degree of governance by shielding the business and looking out more than ever for the stakeholders. The new normal would be all about outwitting uncertainty in dynamic cycles while leading companies. In regards to this context, leaders endure the significance and intricacy of cultivating the proficiencies they wish they had invested in before; a more digital, data-driven, and cloud-led organization; to have higher agile operations and digitization and to generate more robust aptitudes. This pandemic certainly is providing the opportunity to navigate the financial and operational challenges of the economic crunch while promptly confronting the needs of their employees, consumers, and suppliers.
CREATING TRANSPARENCY IN A DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENT
Leaders must disseminate information as much as possible, even though the leaders themselves might practically surmise that there is ample information and interpretation accessible externally. So, they do not need to do anything further. Nonetheless, research has shown that forming and extensively sharing a recurrently updated rundown of facts and connotations is indispensable. Consequently, there is no debate on finding the facts and dealing with misconceptions. This is the time to communicate policies promptly, visibly, and steadily. Additionally, leaders need to communicate relative information and the rationale behind strategies so that employees can strengthen their understanding and also take initiative in unforeseen circumstances, such as how to handle contractors. Companies need to proactively seek assessments from employees and provide them with a voice. Erecting a forthright atmosphere also suggests that leaders need to induce purpose in their employees, as a purpose-driven workforce would be able to endure this challenging journey of change. In any case, the reinvention of the business model means putting people first. During and even beyond this pandemic, leaders need to offer not only mental health support but also wellbeing programs to assist grief-stricken employees or those tackling stress.
Moreover, it is vital to construct a model where honoring losses is enabled. Restraints on travel and congregation will generate employee needs for access to education, health care, regular supplies, and so forth. Leaders should foresee and produce solutions to those issues and construct an information hub where workers can locate all the information they need. Several of these needs will be locally-specific, demanding a multi-tiered technique to policy-making. Besides, leaders need to ensure a safe space where they could share their own coronavirus-related experiences. The focus has to be on the most susceptible groups, namely temporary workers, single parents, employees with disabilities, and those who lack sufficient health benefits. Employers can also seek health and safety advice from professional consulting services to ensure that your business complies with health and safety legislation at the right time.The responsibility is to facilitate a safe, comfortable, and stress-managed environment.
REDESIGNING SERVICES TO MEET GROWING CUSTOMER NEEDS
The coronavirus outbreak has compelled businesses to re-assess how contact centers are weighed, where they work, and how digital channels can be applied to support business viability through the predicament and beyond. The pandemic is essentially metamorphosing consumerism and is fast-tracking massive structural modifications in the consumer goods industry. As soon as the actual threat of the virus will exterminate, companies will need to contemplate the effect of these transformations on the strategic, communicative, constructive, and operational approach. Anyhow, firms need to enhance contact center management. Management needs to tame data and analytics to enlighten an agile, receptive, and pertinent procedure for addressing customer needs and support. Reprioritizing and sequencing customer support so that the most integral needs are confronted at the outset, with non-integral contacts ricocheted to digital. More than anything, leaders have to boost virtual agent competencies to support COVID-19-specific requests and beyond. Companies must be prepared to tackle failures in the scattered network ecosystem that may lead to performance concerns and/or outages. Away from technology, firms must also address numerous people- and process-related hurdles.
Making people swiftly up to speed will entail virtual training and adjustment management programs to instruct workers on the practice of new technologies, procedures, guidelines, and collaboration gizmos. With the use of a virtual training room, businesses can offer trainees real-time interaction, integration with learning management systems, post-training assessment, etc. Accordingly, leaders will have to outline new approaches and directions for cooperation to conserve productivity and efficacy in the fresh, dispersed environment. Customary call volume projections should be heightened with patterns observed in other challenging times and relative data. Ancillary sources of data that should also be included are customer demographic and geographic data, influence on customers from corporal actions, the timing of communications, contact behavioral trends from COVID-19 in other destinations; crowd-sourced data explicitly from agents and public information, i.e. variations to supply of goods, local service convenience and local and national issued regulation. Companies must incorporate predictive analytics with this data that will equip the operations teams to equalize volumes with the available workforce. For the majority of businesses, constructing predictive outlooks of demand will necessitate new degrees of an organizational alliance.
BUILDING A RESILIENT OPERATING MODEL
Developing into an intelligent enterprise means converting from top-down decision-making, entrusting teams channeled by purpose, driven by data and built by technology, facilitated by cloud for more nimble speed to market. It demands annihilating inelastic systems that accentuate territory and supervision and crafting a permeable company with components that plug and play. The resolutions oughts to be significant in every business tire. For instance, field service engagement technology is a progressive adaption that is increasingly seen in on-site businesses. Such adaptation can ensure that the business is running at its full efficiency. Certainly, an intelligent enterprise is adept at fast-changing self-management and incessant revision. It is constructed for suppleness, resiliency, and progress. This is the opportune time to implement an agile supply chain strategy that escalates demand-grasping intelligence, localization, and product flow optimization as the profile of the chain commences to manifest contemporary fluid offerings and fulfillment experiences for the present climate and the future. It will incorporate business stability planning by branching out across supply chain and distribution channels, manners of transportation, and environment and coalition partners.
With anything, companies have to survey productivity by administering process mining and other business procedure management gears as employees perform day-to-day work tasks. Companies are obliged to provide digital tools and training to enhance employee experiences, stimulate teamwork, and facilitate prompt reskilling. Companies can make use of virtual reality in training and development that can improve the impact of learning when it is skill-based work. Innovative solutions like these can offer trainees real-time interaction, integration with learning management systems, a high level of functionality, post-training assessment, etc. With the use of virtual training room, businesses can change the definition of a job. Also, redistributing workloads across the network based on improved corresponding work volumes with the aptitudes and capacity across the global network is decisive. The aim of companies must be to support malleable working to evolve into a more humane, liquid enterprise. Furthermore, leaders must enable the construction of dynamic sensing competencies, the amalgamation of projecting, verdict support, and analytics. They need to erect new partnerships to drive innovation. Leveraging analytics to administer cohesive demand and supply and inclusive productivity. Leaders have to attempt to alleviate supply chains by applying safety stocks, substitute sources, and working with suppliers to decipher bottlenecks. Wherever swift solutions are not conceivable, leaders must co-develop plans, establish provisional solutions, and communicate plans to all germane stakeholders.
TO CONCLUDE
It is vital to bear in mind that a crisis does not denote immunity from performance management, and ultimately markets will review which companies managed the challenge most effectively. Most probably, this pandemic will critically change companies. Nevertheless, when the acute segment of this crisis has been traversed, companies should ruminate on what this crisis transforms and what they have cultivated so they can reflect them in their strategies.
A key lesson from previous economic downturns is that companies that are positive and divulge in a growth-mindset, even as their susceptibilities surface, they will still have an edge surviving the crisis. Sooner or later, it the attitude in a given set of circumstances that is fundamental in helping companies and individuals move forward in uncertain times.
Written by
Hussain Imam
