Over the last couple of months, the Coronavirus situation has taken centerstage across the world. Not only it is flooding all media and communication channels, but it is also impacting everybody’s life in ways we probably did not think possible in 2020. We are surrounded by uncertainty on its short term economic and social impacts and fear for the broader personal and financial implications for us and our loved ones.
This whitepaper covers the key considerations organisations should make at this time of crisis.
Many organisations are deprioritising their CX agenda – and that is a mistake!
Over the last few weeks, many organisations have decided to deprioritise their CX agenda to focus all their efforts on launching pre-established business continuity plans and thinking about what they have to do to survive the crisis. Health and safety, remote working, resourcing, downscaling, employee wellbeing, supply chain management, cashflow planning… and so on. Many are also considering the impact of these actions on their customers and on their ability to continue to provide ‘normal’ products and services, and some are putting into place mitigating measures or gestures of goodwill.
Are you one of them?
While all those actions are absolutely necessary, deprioritising the focus on the customer experience is a mistake. In fact, have you considered that those business continuity plans may not be fully relevant now, as customers’ needs have materially changed due to these very different circumstances? Have you understood how those needs have shifted and therefore how you should adapt your actions to best meet them, because what you were doing and offering before may no longer be fully relevant? Do you know how to ensure that your immediate survival management doesn’t preempt your ability to bounce back and recover after the crisis has passed?
Now more than ever, it is important to put your customer needs first and boost their experience
At this time of crisis, it is extremely important to think about what your customers need within this new context, both functionally and emotionally, and flex your CX strategy to make it a key decision-making lens for all your crisis management actions. Deprioritising the CX agenda and putting the CX team in the ‘non-business critical staff’ category are the worst things you could do.
They can help the business by reassessing customer needs, analysing customer feedback, spot new issues and opportunities, realigning the customer journeys to the new reality, spanning organisational departments to facilitate integrated actions across channels and product areas – and overall, they will ensure the customer experience remains at the forefront of all decisions and actions. After all, without customers, your business will not survive.
By handling this situation in a truly customer-centric manner, you have the opportunity to strengthen your relationship with your customers at this time of heightened need and uncertainty and increase their loyalty and advocacy afterwards – instead of potentially jeopardizing the brand equity and relationships you have built over many years and losing them forever!
Therefore, how do you adapt your CX strategy to be effective and relevant to this situation?
Top 10 considerations on how to flex your CX strategy to help you through the Coronavirus crisis
Like for all other business plans, your CX strategy also now needs to be flexed to respond to the different reality. While your overall brand strategy is likely to be valid also in times of crisis, and may therefore remain unchanged, you need to review whether you need to flex or evolve the way you deliver those promises to your customers within these different parameters, i.e. review your CX strategy.
I recommend you progress this exercise in three incremental stages: customer strategy, customer journey and experience measurement.
Stage 1: Review your customer strategy
Your customer strategy defines how you translate your brand promises into what you need to do for your customers and why, in order to achieve your overall business goals and objectives.
1. Have your customers’ needs, behaviours and expectations shifted or materially changed?
We live within a state of unprecedented social and economic turmoil which has already shifted the hierarchy of importance across the full spectrum of needs. Think about Maslow. Things that before were considered basic hygiene factors which were taken for granted, like health and safety, product availability and online access, are now placed under stress and therefore have become elevated to primary requirements. We are regressing to a situation where functional customer outcomes such as ease and safety of access to products and services have become of the utmost importance. But also, these functional needs are taking a different meaning: while before ‘ease of access’ might have translated into the ability to order online and get the products delivered, now most people seem to prefer to walk to the local store and be more in control of what they can purchase and the alternative product choices they can make there and then based on availability. Therefore, preferences and behaviours on how to meet those basic needs are shifting.
On the other hand, emotional drivers are also heightened and will translate into different expectations on end outcomes. Overall, not only what customers need is changing, but also are the main why drivers and the expectations on the how they should be fulfilled.
Therefore, are you aware of how your customers’ functional and emotional needs and expectations are changing or shifting in relative importance? And if so, what is the impact on your target customer outcomes or their relative balance? Which are those that matter the most to customers now? If the shift is material enough, do you need to dial some up or down and make changes to your propositions and service delivery model accordingly?
In addition, do you understand how the situation is impacting customer behaviours? For example, since most customers and businesses are trying to minimise direct contact with people and surfaces, contactless transactions are increasingly becoming the preferred method of payment and, in some cases, are being imposed as the only choice available.
These new behaviours are likely to become habits which will continue also after the end of the crisis and require you to make ongoing strategic changes to your normal customer proposition and business and operating models.
2. Has this situation created new customer groups or segments, which require different propositions or service models?
For most businesses, the answer to this question is yes. It is enough to think about people self-isolating or the new categories of vulnerable customers emerging, like the elderly who now struggle to access normal products and services more than before. These customer groups require new or adjusted propositions and delivery models.
Many stores and financial institutions are already offering dedicated early opening hours for exclusive use by the most vulnerable. Some supermarkets have introduced new click and collect points in outdoor areas like car parks to reduce the strain on delivery services and allow also people in self-isolation to pick up their orders safely. Take-away venues are developing ‘contact free’ ways to deliver food orders to people’s homes while maintaining social distancing standards.
Do you know if this situation has altered people’s needs to the extent of creating new customer groups or segments for your business? What are their specific requirements and how can you best meet them? Do you need to flex your existing propositions or develop new ones for them, and will these endure past the crisis to become an integral part of your delivery model?
But also, more strategically, how can you anticipate these needs and behavioural changes now and leverage them as an opportunity to differentiate yourself by offering targeted and optimised propositions and therefore create sustainable competitive advantage to last past the crisis?
Stage 2: Adapt your customer journeys
Once you have reviewed your customer strategy, you need to adapt the delivery of your products and services to the changes required. This is about the how you deliver those flexed or new propositions and implies the end-to-end review of your customer journeys, especially to meet those newly identified customer needs, outcomes, behaviours and segments.
3. Are you still able to meet your brand promises?
This is not the time to abandon your customers. In most cases, your customers still rely on you and still expect to receive some essential products and services. Indeed, this is the time when retailers and service providers play a critical role in safeguarding social and economic wellbeing and stability.
The moment that they stop providing for their customers, people will be forced into higher panic mode and will fall prey to opportunistic ploys – hyper-inflated prices, black market, fraud, selfish and anti-social behaviours… Just think about the current frenzy to stockpile toilet paper and household essentials and how that could easily escalate into social unrest.
For most organisations this will imply making changes to normal business and operating models or re-aligning products and services to the different circumstances – and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution on the how. However, the common message is: abandon your customers now, and you’ll lose them forever, also beyond the end of the crisis. Your reputation may be so impacted that you could struggle to survive. On the other hand, if you look after your customers now in whichever ways are possible, you have the opportunity to strengthen those relationships and create loyalty and advocacy that will boost you through the current financial dip into a position of stability and new growth.
This is the time for creativity and innovative thinking. Think about what your brand promises are and the assets you have, and how you can flex or redeploy them to continue to meet your customers’ needs or tap into those that have changed.
Some traditional restaurants are already offering new take-away meals or ‘ingredients and recipe’ boxes supported by online tutorials on how to home-cook the same meals customers were enjoying in their premises before. Some manufacturers switched their production line to fill product gaps like hand sanitisers or medical equipment.
Not only will this continue to provide you with a revenue stream, but also it will create unprecedented closeness with your customers.
4. Have you adapted the way you communicate with your customers?
At a time of increasing social distancing and isolation, maintaining that closeness with your customers is of paramount importance. However, your previous communication strategy may no longer be totally suitable.
We still receive daily emails from travel operators selling discounted tropical holidays, from restaurants with special dine-in offers or retailers with great in-store promotions for products or services. These messages are not only inappropriate, but also extremely irritating, as they throw petrol on the fire and highlight the depressing side of the situation where all those wonderful things we were able to access every day are now out of reach for the foreseeable future. To make things worse, often these messages come from the same organisations people are currently talking to via separate channels in an attempt to get refunds on already booked holidays or chase pre-paid orders which haven’t been delivered yet. Insensitive and disjointed.
Have you reviewed your pre-planned communications and automated marketing machine and made them relevant to the current situation? Have you adapted your content and communication style? Do you know what your customers need to know from you now and how frequently?
We are currently being bombarded with long ‘letters from the CEO’ from each company we have ever dealt with, outlining all the measures they are taking to handle the situation and emphasising commitment and safety. In most cases those messages are irrelevant or of no interest to people, especially if the interaction with that company was a one-off occurrence a long time ago. Even if fueled by good intentions, many of these feel like pure marketing wrapped with fake empathy.
Most customers will want to be kept informed of developments which are relevant to them now, and won’t be interested in long-winded general updates. Messages should be personalised and relatively short, to ensure people read what actually matters to them. Frequency of communication should also reflect the nature of that customer relationship, but also aim to maintain an ongoing conversation to keep customers informed and engaged with your organisation in a relevant and value-adding way.
These are not times for blanket self-promotional messages. How can you shift your communication and content strategy to focus on what your customers need or would like to know now? Can you create content and videos which still reinforce your brand position and personality, while also helping them through the situation? Think about your customers’ communication needs, not yours.
5. Are you providing the right type of support to your customers?
In addition to information, customers now also expect full support. They need to feel that you are looking after them and proactively helping them through the current situation. How can you anticipate your customers’ needs through timely service communications? Not only will this keep your customers aware of their situation and therefore comfortable and in control, but also it will save you from floods of inbound calls and lengthy case management processes.
For example, I was due to go on a holiday abroad next week and still had received no update from the travel agency, despite having been sent several standard emails asking people not to contact them, as they were prioritising customers due to travel within the next three weeks. With one week to go and still no news on my trip, I had to chase them for an update and ask for a refund, which wasn’t the simplest process and only resulted in an offer for ‘credit on account’ with a validity of 6 months. Only 6 months! After a long-winded process I managed to get that extended to 12 months, which left me with a general feeling of annoyance towards that company and the frustration that I will still have to deal with them at some point within the next year to get some value from my credit.
Most of your customers now need empathy and understanding. They expect you to go above and beyond your standard processes and procedures and your normal terms and conditions, to demonstrate that you not only value their custom, but you also care about them and their wellbeing.
Most of your customers now need empathy and understanding. They expect you to go above and beyond your standard processes and procedures and your normal terms and conditions, to demonstrate that you not only value their custom, but you also care about them and their wellbeing. This is not the time to impose strict rules and put your near-term revenue protection first. Don’t project on your customers your frustrations and try to make them compensate for the inevitable near-term business impact you are suffering. Show them empathy and care and they will continue to rely on you now throughout the crisis. Proactively look after them now, without waiting to be asked, and they will look after you later by remaining loyal and engaged.
For example, many airlines are waiving cancellation and rebooking fees and some banks are offering mortgage payment breaks and extended credit facilities.
6. Have you adapted your operating model to the channel shift currently taking place?
Some service organisations have been cancelling face to face meetings and events because of safety concerns. While this course of action is understandable, it is important to think about the alternatives available to still deliver the required services. Most organisations could easily leverage technology which enables access to online meetings, video links, screen sharing or remote support, rather than just pulling the plug.
Needless to say, self-isolation and social distancing are changing channel usage, with increasing emphasis on remote services. Are you able to redeploy your employees and resources to the best channels in a timely manner? Are your channels suitably integrated to support seamless cross-channel transitions and can you guide your customers through the optimised routes you have created?
For example, over the last week some supermarket delivery services have crashed under the pressure of the heightened demand and there were no delivery slots available for weeks, or current deliveries were not able to fulfil the orders due to stock issues. This is having the effect of pushing even more people into the stores and encouraging stock-piling, as well as increasing the volume and frequency of social contact between people, potentially facilitating the faster spread of the virus. From my window, I see lines of people going into daily pilgrimages to the local supermarkets in an attempt to intercept the stock delivery lorry with the latest supply of toilet paper, soaps and dry goods. In most cases people return home with semi-empty shopping bags, resigned to try again the next day.
Was the unavailability of online deliveries a business decision or the result of high demand? Either way, wouldn’t it be better to redeploy some store staff to support the delivery service, in order to maintain better control of stock and its safe and fair distribution? How can you rebalance your channel usage and encourage a shift to the safest and most effective solutions for your customers and your business? And how can you foresee now how things will change further, as the situation will progressively escalate into full lockdown?
For example, some supermarkets are closing fresh food counters to redeploy staff to restock the shelves. Aldi are recruiting new temporary and short-term contract staff to help them meet the higher demand, acknowledging that many people are currently out of work and will appreciate this employment opportunity.
7. Are you suitably looking after your employees to enable them to continue to look after your customers?
Whenever feasible, employees are asked to work from home, but for many companies that is not an option. For example, retailers rely on their staff to remain healthy and willing to continue to serve customers in the stores or via the delivery service, in a way putting themselves at risk of contracting the virus and taking it home to their families. While I am truly impressed with the degree of solidarity and social sense displayed by most people, organisations cannot take this for granted and need to ensure they continue to look after their employees in the same way they should do with customers.
Are you keeping your employees regularly informed about your plans and any changes introduced? Are you putting into place suitable measures to protect them at work, independently of the cost? Are you trying to meet individual needs and preferences as much as possible, also considering that their family situation may have changed because of school closures or other repercussions on their household? Are you financially and emotionally supporting those who, unfortunately, may have contracted the virus and need to self-isolate?
Stage 3: Flex your experience measurement
The third area of the CX strategy that you should review is the Voice of the Customer programme.
8. Are your CX surveys still relevant and appropriate?
I recently received a feedback survey from a retailer after I struggled to order some products and eventually gave up. The only questions in the survey were ‘would you recommend us’ and ‘were you satisfied’. At this time of crisis, when stocks are depleted and services are cancelled, the typical NPS and CSAT questions are just pointless. Organisations probably want to keep these surveys going in order to maintain a full performance trend over time for their KPIs. However, the risk is that these inappropriate and insensitive requests for feedback will just annoy your customers even more.
Beyond the KPIs, the performance driver questions in your surveys may still be relevant, especially if they focus on the experience elements which matter most to customers or on the overall outcomes, like responsiveness, support, empathy, expertise or problem resolution. These provide a better performance assessment and more actionable insight than NPS and CSAT – and in a more sensitive way to customers.
Now ‘less is more’ and organisations should review the overall structure of the Voice of the Customer programme and scale it down to limit requests for feedback only to those key touchpoints and journey stages which are an indication of the way the organisation is responding to the situation, therefore providing truly actionable insight. You do not need to ask whether the customer was satisfied after they could not place an order, as you can reach that conclusion yourself.
Have you reviewed your touchpoint and journey surveys’ frequency and content? Can you adjust the questions and the triggers to be more relevant? Do you still need your relationship level programme? People are now worried about bigger things than their relationship with your brand and what matters to them is definitely not the survey response that matters to you and to your tracking report.
This doesn’t mean that you are ignoring the impact you are having on the customer. On the contrary, it shows that you are driven by an emotionally intelligent understanding of the customer’s situation and are willing to flex your frameworks and processes in order not to worsen their experience even more.
Once this is all over and people will be back into normal frames of mind, you will certainly be able to understand how your customers perceived you and your responses to the situation.
9. Can you leverage other business indicators?
In the meantime, instead of keeping your full Voice of the Customer programme going, you could leverage a number of other operational metrics and business indicators to provide you with a quantified performance assessment of the situation, without annoying your customers with pointless feedback requests.
That could be a combination of Voice of the Business metrics (like stock availability, sales, customer calls or complaints, renewals or cancellations, business incidents etc.) and Voice of the Employee indicators (both quantitative and qualitative). Now more than ever, your people are aware of how your customers are being impacted, so they will be your best source of actionable insight.
And now back to stage 1 and your strategy
To close the review circle and go back to broader strategic considerations, remember that this time of crisis truly presents an opportunity to strengthen your customer relationships and increase loyalty and advocacy.
10. Are you doing whatever you can to go above and beyond for your customers and all your local community?
Most of the above considerations so far have been about flexing and adapting your response to continue to meet the changing needs of your customers. Another essential element to consider now, which is extremely important in these times of crisis and in this era of purpose-driven societal focus, are the different needs of the broader communities within which you operate. The strength of your brand and your customers’ perception of it will also depend on that.
A number of organisations are already taking big important steps in this direction. Pret a Manger announced they are offering free drinks and discounted food for NHS workers. Some bookstores are delivering books for free to those in self-isolation. The National Trust opened its parks and gardens for free. Some organisations are volunteering to help people in self-isolation or the most vulnerable however possible, even if simply by taking their dogs for daily walks.
What is your organisation doing to leverage its people and assets to help everybody get through this crisis? Every little gesture may go a long way.
However, you should refrain from masking profit-driven decisions as if they were made in the name of the public interest. An example was the recent postponement of the launch of a major blockbuster movie which was advertised in the name of societal good, because it would have put people at risk by attracting them into the confined space of cinemas, when it was clear that the true primary motivator was the loss of Box Office income.
One final message
Considering these 10 key areas will enable you to support your organisation’s contingency planning and put into place measure that not only will optimise your response now, but will also boost you into a new phase of recovery and growth afterwards.
A quote by Maya Angelou is the perfect conclusion to this whitepaper: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Independently of those 10 considerations and the actions you are currently taking to navigate through the crisis, don’t forget that your customers are creatures of emotion – and that emotions are particularly heightened now by the situation. How you make your customers feel now, when they interact with your organisation, will determine how successful you will be when things go back to normality.
The final and most important recommendation for you now is to understand those emotions within all the constraints of the current situation and design your response to reach clear emotional outcomes for your customers.
If you can make your customers feel that you are doing all you can to help and support them and their loved ones through these difficult times, you will be able to come through the crisis stronger than before.
Written by Manuela Pifani
CXellence Consulting
+44 7917 773731
www.cxellence.com
