4 Ways to Keep Businesses Running During a Crisis

4 Ways to Keep Businesses Running During a Crisis

As the worst crisis in a hundred years, COVID-19 is changing lives across the globe in a way not seen in our lifetime. And while we have already made incredible breakthroughs, this situation reminds us that humanity remains vulnerable.

As business leaders, we need to adjust to the circumstances of this rapidly changing world and move from growth mode to survival mode. For some businesses in the short term, that means hiring freezes, delaying product launches, and putting expansion initiatives on hold. For other businesses in the worst-hit industries, this means drastic measures such as furloughs and layoffs. While we are all worried about the next 3-6 months as the uncertainty looms, there is an even greater need: to keep everyone motivated.

Although the current environment is not an ideal time for bold changes to your business model, or undertake a digital transformation effort, it is worth looking at a data-driven approach that combines accelerated innovation, creative problem solving, and teamwork. Perhaps more than ever, it will benefit your organization to be more agile and to be able to improve your employee productivity, increase efficiency, and reduce costs.

What’s your key to realizing this opportunity? By making sure you can target maximum resources at the drivers of profitable growth (good costs) while you also free up and minimize expenses (bad costs). Here are a few things to consider:

Improve Supply Chain Visibility

AI and machine learning with precise analytics can detect supply chain disruptions or sudden changes in demand. This approach is necessary during these uncertain times when the need for specific products (such as face masks and exam gloves) rises exponentially. Better visibility throughout your supply chain is vital to optimizing your supplier spend, negotiate better payment terms, and explore which suppliers to do business with, and which factories need to stay open. Understanding of tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 suppliers, and their location data can reduce forecasting errors, reduce costs related to transport and warehousing, and combat interruptions to your supply chain.

Drive Hyper-Personalization

I loved it when GSTAR-RAW sent me an email promoting their latest collection of home-office looks. Retail experience is about being relevant, timely, and maintaining open and ongoing communication with your customers. You can use machine learning and advanced analytics to evaluate customers’ needs, and target products and services they need in real-time. AI can help you understand the intrinsic needs your customers have. Build a customer-centric business, take personalization to the next level, and deliver highly relevant offers to your customers.

Enable Omnichannel Commerce

Since they can’t currently shop at a physical store, consumers are using mobile and other digital channels to drive an increase in online shopping activity. Not only does this create a unique opportunity for companies to attract customers’ attention, but it has also become a great time to grow your market share for digital-savvy customers. Enable your customers to browse, search, and research what they need, help them transact seamlessly across channels and deliver click-and-collect options. Combine this with automated replenishment, along with a “no-touch” experience to ensure customer loyalty and retention.

Focus on Sales Efficiency

Sales teams spend 50-60% of their time on administrative tasks. This time includes time spent manually entering information into CRM, quote management, pricing, and many other systems. All too often, this repetitive work results in errors and inconsistent information across systems, creating delays in the process. By automating these mundane tasks, your sales colleagues can instead focus on, well, selling. Also, AI can help you improve sales forecasting, better predict customer needs, and enhance communication. Automating administrative tasks can help sales professionals better manage their time and proactively identify who they need to follow up with and when.

My Recommendation During Crisis

Throughout civilization, there have been other pandemics. And like other health crises and pandemics that have come before, we’ll eventually have a way to manage coronavirus. What we don’t know, of course, is what recovery will look like: As fast as things have changed, could the economy bounce back equally quickly? I hope these strategies help you find new efficiencies, bring productivity, streamline operations, and be better prepared to be back in business immediately.

One thing this crisis has shown us is that we need to put purpose before profit. I see many examples of organizations stepping up to help their employees, customers, and the broader communities in which they operate. While it makes sense to keep our focus on execution, it is equally critical to be a bit more empathetic during these times. Always keep your customers, suppliers, and employees engaged, and show that you care. There are good things ahead. Let’s keep up our hope.

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The Importance of Data Sharing in Organizations - MDMgeek

26 Oct 2020

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[…] data sharing is real, and organizations seem to be agreeing to this fact. For example, Ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic, ten large pharmaceutical companies undertook collaborative efforts to train their machine learning […]

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