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A top-notch business continuity program is no longer just important for IT leaders. CX leaders across companies of all sizes and industries have prioritized establishing and managing a well-designed business continuity plan to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on their activities and ensure that they are better prepared for future unexpected events. If you don’t yet have a business continuity plan and are struggling to get started building an effective one, we highly suggest incorporating the six building blocks listed below to maximize your success.
- Don’t fly blind; establish a formal VoC program capturing customer feedback and sentiment data across all channels to determine changing customer expectations.
- Analyze VoC data to reveal how changes in customer expectations affect your business activities. Determine how your activities align with meeting the expectations of your current and potential clientele, and address any misalignment by making necessary adjustments.
- Empower employees across the entire business with relevant VoC insights. It’s not just the marketing, customer service, or sales departments that benefit from VoC data. Employees in product development, finance, operations, and other departments also benefit by understanding how they need to adjust their activities to align with changing market conditions
- Become more proactive in capturing and using VoC insights. Don’t wait for customers to share their feedback — continuously remind clients that you seek their input. This will make it easier to gauge how changing customer expectations impact business continuity amid any change observed by your organization.
- Don’t wait until customers complain; use VoC data to build and execute proactive customer communications. Leverage analytics to observe sudden changes in VoC data to identify emerging issues customers need help with. Additionally, monitor your operational activities by identifying any potential disruptions in your ability to deliver products / services to clients, and alert your customers by delivering proactive notifications, alerts, and reminders through channels such as text messages, recorded phone calls, and messages on the company website.
-  Minimize the negative effects of customer churn on your business by regularly tracking your ‘at-risk’ customers. It’s not a secret that acquiring a net-new client is far more costly than keeping an existing one. Therefore, you should be segmenting your at-risk clients by using VoC data and analytics to help minimize the cost of losing clientele during times of changes. Firms that retain their clients are far more likely to survive and thrive in the face of any disrupting event.
The COVID-19 pandemic placed business continuity — organizations’ ability to continue their operations to address the needs of their current and potential customers — high on the priority list of many CX leaders. Much like other disrupting events, COVID-19 impacted different industries in different ways — while some firms observed an increase in customer demand, others observed the opposite. Similarly, while some firms thrived based on changing business conditions, others struggled to adapt. Firms with a top-notch business continuity plan are far more likely to adapt to change to survive and thrive. If you don’t currently have the following capabilities, we suggest prioritizing building a business continuity plan to ensure that your business is well-positioned to adapt to future events (e.g., regulations, hurricanes, pandemics) that may impact your business activities.
Compared to their counterparts without an effective business continuity plan, savvy CX leaders that thrive at times of change are more likely to have the following capabilities:
CX leaders that thrive at times of change are more likely to have the following capabilities
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Aberdeen Strategy & ResearchOpens a new window , a division of Spiceworks Ziff DavisOpens a new window , with over three decades of experience in independent, credible market research, helps illuminate market realities and inform business strategies. Our fact-based, unbiased, and outcome-centric research approach provides insights on technology, customer management, and business operations, to inspire critical thinking and ignite data-driven business actions.