New Needs, New Challenges – Is your business ready for post-pandemic revival?

The primary challenge will be to develop an adaptability mindset to welcome the new change. Secondly, the entire organization has to become more resilient than ever to remain stubborn. Lastly, every upcoming challenge would meet its solution through collective innovation to outperform competitors.BusinessFeatured - Insights

We all are familiar with the face that Covid-19 is going to bring long term business disruptions to almost every organization in the world. As the dust settles, there will be new & unprecedented challenges in bringing back a new normal scenario for all aspects of the business. Amidst all this, we just want you to ask yourself, `` Is your company ready for this post-pandemic revival?

We are sure you are in the middle of redefining the norms, strategies and operations of your business. In this article, we suggest that to come back stronger and better, companies should reimagine their business model as they return to full speed. In every situation, the team has to find a fine balance between Resilience, Adaptability, & Innovation. 

To recover fast with an upward revenue trend, businesses have to adopt adaptability to the core, must be resilient enough to repel back unforeseen challenges and should embrace innovation to outperform competitors. These three factors have to be infused at the fundamental level of business structure to strengthen its three pillars – team, operations & customers. Now, let’s understand how we can forge such a base through the lens of adaptability, resilience and innovation.

Adaptability

Strive to remain highly immune to recent pandemic aftermath by adopting distinct changes in the area of team supervision, business processes and client management.

Get the team ready to fight back

Go for a startup mindset to give the team members confidence and motivation to work earnestly for the bigger vision. Businesses will have to rethink such an operating model that is driven by the objective of people’s productivity and commitment. Employees need to be encouraged to work as a team and forget the spoon-feeding or step-by-step work delegation for the time being. Businesses need to establish brisk cadence to encourage agility and accountability by increasing the communication frequency and by setting clear attainable goals.

Prioritize revenue opportunities & sources

While the growth and profitability of insurers are under question, the immediate need is to identify and prioritize revenue streams to ensure employee safety, business continuity, and enterprise-wide risk management. Companies should reshape their existing offerings according to prevalent situations and stances to position them well in the market.

Launch targeted campaigns to win back loyal customers, come up with attractive offers to sell the available stock, and design customer experiences focused on health and wellness. Once identified, these measures need to be rigorously prioritized to reflect their impact on earnings and revenue graphs.

Endorse customer-irst mindset

Position customers at the core of strategies to accomplish milestones and yield results for the business. Harness the power of customer insights and embrace it to understand and map the current sentiment of the target audience. Businesses should let their customers know that they stand by them in this adverse situation and will provide the best solutions to fight back the same.

It is high time for the companies to develop proactive outbound engagement plans that provide clear and consistent messages to substitute downsized call center capacities for the high volume of customer queries.

Resilience

COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the shift to digital and if the leaders have resilience, the business will stand the test of time with flying colors.

Embrace the core capabilities

Workforce transformation & enhancement will be a key strategic priority. The focus should be on creating a highly adaptive disruptor culture capable of adapting to constant change.

Embrace the core capabilities of the team and play by their strengths to incorporate resilience into the entire system. Foster strategies, models, and outcomes on the cores of business and outsource the tasks that suck the time and capabilities of the team. Opportune this time in reskilling and up-skilling the teams and fueling up the company’s pace to recover, reform, and rise.

Adopt agile methods to streamline process

Driven by urgency to survive and thrive in the market, companies are willing to take on agile methods with a primary objective of placing a new operating model with the customer as its axis, supported by the right processes and governance.

For instance, Agile marketing and sales teams have made it possible to quickly solve customer queries through video conferences and giving more authority to the teams to take faster actions. The agility is yielding fruits only in those businesses that have clear growth roadmaps and stable marketing-sales-operations-management processes in place.

Map consumer behaviors to craft experiences

It is imperative to map the mutations in customers’ behaviors. The surpassing situation had a severe mental impact on the people and their lifestyle and buying habits were completely flipped for a while. They have learned the difference between necessities and extravagance. So, the buying behaviors of people are surely going to be unpredictable for the time being. To conquer this uncertainty, engage in social listening and use that knowledge to develop new use cases keeping personalized sales service in mind. To realize that plan, create a team of cross-functional skills and design a recovery dashboard to track progress. Craft solutions that are experience-driven and not extravagance-focused. 

Innovation

Organizations having an agile business model will be able to survive and capitalize with ease. But the scalability of any entity will be directly proportional to the level of innovation that is going to embed in working methodologies, operational and customer front.

Equip the team with modern tools

Sustain and enhance workforce productivity by every means. After gaining momentum, the team has to work hard to maintain the pace and upgrade the levels gradually. To ensure this, companies should plan well in advance about the tools they are going to have for their employees to upscale the graph.

In the near future, the primary focus will be to equip the workforce with new tools and technologies to create a conducive and technology-friendly environment. Increase the speed and productivity of digital solutions.

Switch from traditional to digital

In the same line, to eliminate the erring friction and to ensure the smooth running of any business, adopt digital transformation for every aspect of the business. Companies will also need to greatly improve their IT productivity to lower their cost base and fund rapid, flexible digital-solution development. 

Though it may take some time for the transformation to complete, getting this right will enable companies to successfully navigate demand forecasting, asset management, and coping with massive new volumes. Technologies like AI, Blockchain, and ML will not only enable businesses to touch the horizon of automation but will also empower businesses to set new benchmarks with data-driven solutions. 

Refocus digital efforts to bind the customers

Customer needs are evolving, and they are increasingly looking for simple and value-driven experiences rather than brand-boosting and product showcases. Accelerate the move towards the digital world to ensure favorable client conditions for clients to make a purchase. Like even simple online transactions which require seamless integration and guided assistance through chatbots can delight your customer to a great extent.

Acknowledge and harness the power of digital transformation and take significant actions to get your business back on track in a small time.

Conclusion

You are in an era full of challenges and instability, where agility, curiosity, risk mitigation, learning by exploring, and learning by doing, but with focus, would be the norm for both survival and competitiveness. Reimagine how to recover, operate, organize and use technology to set the foundations for enduring success even as you return.