Can your company withstand the next crisis?

In chal­leng­ing times, resilient organ­i­sa­tions suc­ceed by doing more than just splash­ing out on new tech­nol­o­gy or send­ing an action plan from the board­room and hop­ing for the best. Proac­tive busi­ness­es should be look­ing to trans­form by com­bin­ing these five key ele­ments – after all, one-off events hap­pen more often than you think.

Know your cus­tomers’ ecosys­tem

If it is not a pan­dem­ic, it’s infla­tion caus­ing chaos. Crises hap­pen but resilient com­pa­nies under­stand their cus­tomers and the robust­ness of their sup­ply chain, says Emile Naus, part­ner at Bear­ing­Point, a multi­na­tion­al con­sul­tan­cy.

Ful­ly respond­ing to cus­tomers is key. In BearingPoint’s ‘Tune Your Deliv­ery’ sur­vey of 3,000 Euro­pean cus­tomers, deliv­ery price was respon­si­ble for 70% of cus­tomers’ deci­sions, but some cus­tomers were pre­pared to pay a pre­mi­um for speedy deliv­ery on cer­tain items. “Ful­ly under­stand­ing the bal­ance can save 20% on costs and 15% on your car­bon foot­print,” says Naus.

“One auto­mo­tive man­u­fac­tur­er had looked at their sup­ply chain but not in enough detail. When the Fukushi­ma nuclear dis­as­ter hap­pened, they dis­cov­ered all of their gear­box sup­pli­ers used the same tiny com­po­nent that came from the one place in Fukushi­ma. Hav­ing gone to all the trou­ble of split­ting risk by sourc­ing across mul­ti­ple sup­pli­ers, they were still 100% exposed when that sub-com­po­nent sup­pli­er went down.”

Turn data cen­tric­i­ty into a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage

Have use­ful, easy-to-access, uni­form data that assists the whole com­pa­ny and ensures its rules are rig­or­ous­ly adhered to, says Tony Farn­field, part­ner at Bear­ing­Point.

“Often, organ­i­sa­tions have mul­ti­ple cus­tomer data points across many lega­cy sys­tems, result­ing in frag­ment­ed and incon­sis­tent views of a cus­tomer, mak­ing it very dif­fi­cult to have one clean, con­sis­tent and use­able record. Suc­cess­ful organ­i­sa­tions will have a sin­gle, well-gov­erned data of a cus­tomer, allow­ing the organ­i­sa­tion to per­son­alise cus­tomer engage­ment”

Empow­er your peo­ple

By the time a com­plaint reach­es senior man­age­ment, you have often already lost that cus­tomer. Ensure peo­ple on the front line are ful­ly empow­ered to respond, says Naus.

“There is so much data you car­ry on cus­tomers – why can’t your front­line cus­tomer ser­vices see it too? What if a com­plainant is a long-term val­ued cus­tomer and you fail to swap a prob­lem prod­uct instant­ly and lose their busi­ness? Or, if a ser­i­al return­er is able to sim­ply return used goods all the time?”

Suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies always aim to repair rela­tion­ships, not just prod­ucts, and good data can help you gain more cus­tom and loy­al­ty after a com­plaint.

Use tech­nol­o­gy to improve agili­ty

Tech­nol­o­gy should be inte­grat­ed into your over­ar­ch­ing strat­e­gy, but under­stand that inno­va­tion isn’t just about IT – it’s a chance for col­lab­o­ra­tion. Cre­ate joined-up respons­es by invest­ing in new tech­nolo­gies that can gath­er sen­ti­ment analy­sis and pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics from online behav­iours to cre­ate a rich­er data set, says Farn­field.

“For exam­ple, for an insur­ance com­pa­ny, under­stand­ing cus­tomers’ demo­graph­ics and char­ac­ter­is­tics pos­es questions:-do they have chil­dren about to start dri­ving and need a group dis­count? Are the fam­i­ly about to go on hol­i­day or do they need pet insur­ance? Mar­ry up offers to give a bet­ter prod­uct and even offer bonus con­tent – i.e. send­ing ‘secur­ing your home’ arti­cles to those buy­ing home insur­ance – to add extra val­ue, per­son­alise and dri­ve loy­al­ty.”

Sim­pli­fy gov­er­nance

Com­pa­nies expect their staff to use ini­tia­tive in a cri­sis – so why not let them make deci­sions that way reg­u­lar­ly? As the pan­dem­ic hit Europe, one lux­u­ry goods com­pa­ny had already seen the impact of the virus on their busi­ness in Chi­na and was able to rede­ploy resources at speed by hav­ing flex­i­ble gov­er­nance.

“Euro­pean local lead­ers saw the impact in Chi­na, moved quick­ly and utilised dig­i­tal tools to a pro­vide cus­tomers with a bespoke ser­vice via online remote inter­ac­tion to great effect,’’ says Naus.

To find out more, vis­it bearingpoint.com

Pro­mot­ed by Bear­ing­Point