COVID and the doubling-down on flexibility and speed in B2B partnerships

The biggest transformation we’ve seen since mid-March is the need for flexibility and speed in customer interactions.

We need partners and customer experience processes that can adapt quickly, creatively, and with elasticity.

Easier said than done, though.

How do you translate that to your partner selection criteria and process?

Some key things to look for:

• Strength and speed in the ability to upscale and downscale your outsourced operations.
• Ability to quickly navigate between WfH (Work from Home) and WfO (Work from Office), or as we like to call it: WfOH (Work from Home and Office). Some call that a hybrid model.
• Ability to offer solutions for enhanced security in a WfH setting, including PCI Certified WfH.
• A culture of caring for employees. Remember, these times are not only challenging for businesses — they’re challenging for the people who drive those businesses.
• Digital First strength, or an ability to truly understand your business processes and to replace repetitive tasks with intelligent Robotic Process Automation, or to achieve contact avoidance by injecting carefully-tuned AI chatbots into your Customer Experience.
• Track record of demonstrating all the above. Make sure your partner has years of experience with WfH, adapting to seasonality, digital, or changing market dynamics with their clients.
• Willingness to translate this and commit to it in contract form. That’s always better than just lip service.

Should we double down on the CX basics right now? (Yes.)

Some suggestions:

Stick to the basics. It’s still about your customers. Be they consumers or businesses, teenagers or startups, governments, or large organizations. They’re all changing, adapting, morphing – evolution at an accelerated pace.

So let’s not forget to ask ourselves: aside from what we’re already doing inside our own businesses to weather this storm, what do our customers need and crave, now and in the years ahead?

It’s about (to) change. Difficult to predict, right? We know the landscape is changing. We see it happening before our eyes. We can guess what the future will bring. They’re educated guesses, but there are too many variables to say with certainty. So what do we know with absolute certainty? Fast and forceful change is here to stay.

So how does one prepare? Become good at change. But remember: people generally resist change. So the biggest challenge will be to make change part of your culture. At Conectys we’ve done that since day one: “We love change” is one of our company values.

Focus on your fundamentals:

• Specifically, your people, your processes, and your technology.
• Make sure you have the means to rapidly scale your human assets, up or down.
• Make sure you reinvent your business processes for efficiency and speed.
• Make sure you inject digital in everything you do, internal and external.

How Conectys can help

We pride ourselves on co-creating with clients, which means that our front-line agents will work with customers directly, then pass the information from customers to your sales team, marketing team, and product team. This drives sales strategies, campaigns, and product launches/feature adjustments. Call centers aren’t thought of as a strategic space, but they need to be in the CX realm — they are the first line of contact with customers, and that’s where the conversations that drive CX, product, and sales all commence.

If you’d like to talk about some strategies we’ve seen and endorsed around CX during (and after) COVID, let us know.