What if this COVID-19 pandemic is just a trial run?
By now, most organizations are working on more stable plans and readiness for remote work and some are shifting to remote work as a new normal. When JPMorgan Chase states publicly they are asking most of their employees to work from home, then this may be the trend for lots of more businesses.
You have recovered from the knee-jerk reaction to having your employees work remote. You are making an objective assessment of the band-aid you put into place and looking at your tools and systems. You are preparing your future policies and procedures and reviewing your security and application requirements for this to be the norm. You may even be developing a cloud strategy.
But what about your customers? On your path to a digital organization have you thought about extending your digital footprint to include handling your customers through online systems? If not, here are some considerations.
Is your business e-commerce enabled? I know, you don’t think you are the type of business that fits online customer use. Based on the work I’ve done in the past few years, I bet there is more that can be done online than you are considering.
Just a few months ago, I worked with a distributor of industrial parts who swore they were not a candidate for online business. We proved them wrong. It was a micro-step process, but we started by exposing their entire SAP catalog of parts online for customer use. We were able to restrict access to the catalog by requiring customers to log in, and you have to be an existing customer to have access. Sound familiar? The logical next step is to get customers to place their orders online. They already have the catalog, and they only get to see their pricing. Why have them phone in orders anymore?
And what about customer service? Think that chatbots and AI are not for your organization? This could also be the case where you can start with a chatbot or an online chatbot to begin the customer service process, especially if you find that most calls involve similar issues. Go ahead, ask your customer service team about the bulk of the issues they solve on the phone. I bet there are opportunities for automation that could free up customer service time for the really important issues that require a live person.
These are just a couple examples. Do you know anyone right now that does not have a mobile phone in their pocket? This is the technology generation whose phone, tablet or laptop is their first go-to when they have an issue or think of researching a product or placing an order. So, are you going to follow along or are you ready to lead your organization and reengineer your organization for the digital future? That future is here, right now.