Customer experience is all about understanding and responding to customer and employee expectations in ways that drive business results. But in today’s — and likely tomorrow’s — world, your customers’ and employees’ needs and expectations are likely evolving in new, rapid and sometimes surprising ways. As a result, businesses need to respond rapidly as well, in many cases with greater risk and access to fewer resources.
I’ve been hearing the phrase “in these uncertain times” far too often. After all, the future has always been a bit uncertain. The reality is that regardless of your business or sector, you need to understand how you, your customers and your people are being affected — and use this knowledge to plan and act accordingly.
With that, here are five things you can do today to help you act proactively, intelligently and decisively right now, as well as five actions to help you anticipate the future, because tomorrow will be here sooner than we imagine.
Today: Be proactive.
Tomorrow: Anticipate the future.
For the near future at least, businesses have smaller margins for failure and more opportunities to fail, with identifiable ROI remaining a required outcome of any investments. Today, more than ever, it’s important to plan a path forward through an uncertain future. The challenge is that it can’t be addressed with a single plan. You’ll need multiple scenarios to continuously review, prioritize, detail and activate as things become clearer. From a focus on quick fixes that you can activate and collect benefits from immediately to the adoption of systemic change like more agile business models, now is the time to act. By moving quickly and in an informed, customer- and employee-centric manner, you can identify and mitigate risk and embrace opportunity — both of which are at hand — as you develop and deliver on your plans for the future.
First appeared on Forbes, July 2020