CX in the Post-COVID-19 World
While restrictions are being lifted at a different pace throughout the world, it’s important for businesses to be constantly thinking of new ways to adapt to the changing environment.
Adapting your customer experience throughout the coronavirus pandemic is an ever-present challenge for businesses in the coming months or even years. An altered customer experience is one of the many ways businesses can ease customer pain points throughout the pandemic.
There is no doubt that businesses will need to make many changes to adapt to the idea of a “new normal” we’ve been constantly hearing about over the past number of weeks.
Even if we are sometime away from this “new normal”, corporations’ current actions will ultimately have a large impact on the customer experience in the future.
Trust
Trust continues to play a major role in providing good CX, even throughout times of crisis. Consumer confidence in Ireland is currently low, economic outlook is poor and trust in businesses is slowly declining. To combat this, brands need to proactively try to gain consumer trust over the coming weeks and months. Consumer trust needs to be at the forefront of any campaigns in the near future.
Research by Edelman indicates that 71% of customers say that if they perceive that a brand is prioritising profit over people during the COVID-19 pandemic, they will lose trust in that brand forever.
Businesses needs to understand the mindset of the post-COVID-19 customer. This means research focused on the changing customer mindset will need to be conducted on a regular basis, to be able to appropriately alter the current customer experience.
Consumers will remember the actions of corporations during the pandemic. In times of crisis, customers’ interactions brands can have a big impact on his or her sense of trust and loyalty.
Maintaining the trust of all stakeholders now (during the crisis) will be key to instilling trust when we begin to see a return to some form of normality at a later stage.
Stakeholder Communications
As discussed previously, keeping customers engaged is key to keeping your brand in their mind. While it’s important to not go overboard with marketing messaging during a stressful time for many, keeping your brand in customers’ minds will pay off when normality returns.
However, just keeping communications with customers active isn’t enough to deliver a great customer experience. The employee experience is just as important.
Frontline employees are what keeps a company operating throughout a crisis. Constantly keeping employees in the loop regarding changes to policies and procedures will be reflected in the customer experience.
Any insights gathered from employees can be used to fine tune the customer experience that best adapts the rapidly changing current environment.
New Technologies
Even though some business continuity trials took place prior to the restrictions coming into effect, many organisations were forced into becoming solely digital overnight in mid-March.
Adding new technology to the customer experience isn’t a simple task. This is especially true in industries relying on traditional methods or physical brick-and-mortar outlets.
While industries such as banking have been slowly becoming digitally transformed in recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the need for robust and functional digital tools. Closures during restrictions has seen more services move from physical branches to digital channels such as apps and websites.
Similar adoption of new technology can be seen in seen the retail and restaurant sector, where the availability of delivery apps and tools has become crucial to keeping the business operational.
It’s unlikely that we’re going to see brands revert any of these new digital transformation changes any time soon, and we’ll probably be seeing these changes still in place even after the crisis has ended.
Are you preparing your customer experience for the post-COVID-19 world? If so, contact us today on +353 1 8041298, or click on the link below to be brought to our contact form.
