Undoubtedly, Corona Virus has become the hottest talk of the now. You will have to gear up and disallow this from cripple your brand. Desperate to flatten the COVID-19, customer success teams are working hard from their homes and straining remote work operations. As a Customer Success Leader, you must respond to these alerts and be prepared with both short-term and long-term goals. Remember, your main target is to improve resilience and deck up your company for the future profits, bereft hampering the current plans.
Fortunately, by the stroke of luck, this threat has proven to galvanize the IT teams as they see remarkable progress on their ‘work from home’ efforts, as compared to the earlier situation. They are pepping up by boosting bandwidth, training employees to grab the best of remote technologies, and provisioning the servers. Read on the following article, and know 7 such essential tips for Customer Success Leaders.
Communication First, Always!
A statistical note from the Forrester Research claims that as high as 59% of the workforce face higher anxiety due to the spread of the pandemic virus. What stands critical in such chronic situations is hands down, communication.
When it comes to handling these kinds of situations, the best foot to put forward is by reassuring your employees with some gratitude and empathy. Be as understanding as possible. In fact, it is time to alleviate their anxiety by actively communicating with them. Share as much as details related to keeping the working area sanitized. Educate them on the steps taken by the company for their health protection. Let them know that you are there for them and be flexible enough to give them some time off and sick leaves.
Hail the Crisis Management unit
Put your crisis management team to action. Connect its member to the sub-sectional or even divisional continuity teams. Coordinate activities that are designed to ensure the connectivity of the business functions. Identify the sites that you feel are going remote and equip them with the technology that they need to be productive with. The team should always be well-equipped and alert. They should create scenarios associated with the outbreak.
Milind Wagle, CIO, Equinix aptly quotes it in one of his excerpts, “My department has been actively involved in crisis management and discussing the ‘art of the possible’ since the onset of the coronavirus in the U.S. No one expected a crisis as big as this, but I’m seeing natural leaders emerge in my entire organization”
Full support to accelerate Digital options
Start spending on the technologies that help to support digital options like remote work. Give them access with VPNs, or multi-factor authentication to ensure that it has a secured connection. Offer them some of the best practices to keep the employees engaged.
Render special focuses on virtual access, remote onboarding, cloud, and collaborative technologies. Furthermore, you can deploy artificial intelligence assisted chat boxes that can help out the queries of the employees who are working from home. You will soon see a significant rate in product adoption and productivity tools.
Chalk out Future Plans
In Covid-19, customer success teams must have all the preparation strategies on the tip of their fingers. Although it’s not like, if I drown in a river tomorrow’, you will still have to discuss it with your team about the future. You will have to come up with comprehensive business continuity plans and test those more frequently.
Despite the dark clouds hovering on the top of your head, you should be all set to rev up the speed with which you are working. Use it to augment the transformation efforts. You can easily schedule meetings online, say on Zoom or Teams, and have weekly discussions on how to combat the situation. Take up your employees’ suggestions and review succession plans.
Find Savings without sacrificing Customer Experience
Although cutting costs is inevitable, that should not come at the expense of great customer experience. During tough times like Covid-19, customer success teams have to pull up their socks and find ways to minimize the cost factor as well. Better yet, you can look up to improvise digital self-service and make smarter operational trade-offs.
It is often seen that migrating the clients to digital platforms is often a successful way of boosting the levels of customer satisfaction and savings as well. Aside from this, some of the other ideas you can implement is simplifying a product portfolio or even maybe optimizing the service level agreements.
Adapt to agile innovations
Building agility across the functions to handle this changing customer demands and circumstances is thought to be a necessary tool. And this will definitely engender longer benefits. Not only that, companies’ should rapidly test their innovation pipeline and set priorities.
You can do so for the new experiences that line up with the remote home delivery trends. These are more likely to rev up and differentiate the customer experience providers in the post corona world to come.
Solicit Feedback and Suggestions
Soliciting helpful suggestions from the employees will prove to be of much use for you and your company. This will help to gauge out how your clients are actually feeling and will examine how daily interactions are changing.
Note: Statistics claim that as much as 60 percent of the employees say that most of their ideas and suggestions for improving the customer experience go unheard.
There are many tools and technology to rapidly garner and aggregate real-time ideas and feedback from the frontline employees. Once, you religiously follow these steps, you can bring out a critical difference in the rapidly changing environment.
Final Take
In difficult times such as Covid-19, customer success teams are on their way to gearing up for the best. Needless to say, customer experience has taken over a newer definition altogether. As a customer success leader, you must strive to innovate during these times and build up healthier relationships that will endure the test of time.
Kaustubh Sangam is a Customer Success Analyst with 2 years of experience. Committed to delivering exceptional customer experiences and driving business growth. Proficient in leveraging data analysis to optimize customer success strategies.
Published July 10, 2020, Updated June 07, 2023
