As we approach the end of a tumultuous year, your business likely has made numerous changes to comply with health guidelines, adapt to new ways your customers want to do business, or modify your portfolio of product and service offerings. For some businesses, impacts from the pandemic might work to their advantage. For others, the pandemic effects have been detrimental.
News of the pending vaccines have created hope. How would your business landscape unfold in the next year? It is time to pause and strategize.
Envision customer needs
Over the past months, business customers have modified their operating models and consumer customers have made significant changes to their daily lives. The way they utilize products and services likely have changed also.
Do you have any intelligence that informs a long-term change that you need to incorporate? If not, it is time to reach out and learn more about customer needs. Gather customer input on their challenges, needs, and potential trends they see in their respective markets. How would you support them?
The reaching out serves two purposes: you send a message that you want to collaborate for future success and, gather insights on building products and services that add value.
Understand capability gaps
When strategy changes, demand for new capabilities might arise. The exercise of reviewing needs and identifying gaps is critical for successful implementation of your renewed strategy.
Remote working during the pandemic has placed more emphasis on empathy and effective communication. The needs for timely alerts and responsive communication across teams place the paper-based processes in disarray. Online support utilizing chatbots becomes a necessity to minimize the contact centre queue time.
How prepared are your teams in closing the capability gaps? Can they be addressed by technical training? Or is there a need to invest in new technologies?
Invest resources to align with priorities
Processes, technology, and people remain the foundational building blocks for a business operation. Where you plan to steer the business needs to be supported with the right resources in those three areas.
Recognizing that budget constraints resulted from the current business environment is a hurdle, holding off investments until the market turns around is not going to work. It is important to identify the investments that are critical for strategy implementation. Prioritize options by conducting sound evaluation of risks and returns. Build what you need and get ready. Holding off investments until the market turns around is not going to work. Share on X
As Warren Buffet said, “be greedy when others are fearful.” When you invest in the right priorities, you would be ready to act and capture market share as the market condition improves.
Pause and strategize now. Develop a plan, with options, for taking the business to where you want it to be. Those who are prepared would be rewarded.
Leave a Reply