3 Steps Survival Guide to Recession for Customer Service Leaders
Recession is a period of general economic decline that is typically characterized by three early signs:
1. Increased unemployment rate
2. Declining housing market
3. Drop in the stock market
When these three things are happening at the same time, that can be a good indicator for an upcoming recession what may affect all types and sizes of businesses regardless from their market segments and positions.
Unfortunately, today we can check all those boxes that listed above, so as a business leader you wouldbetter to be prepared for the recession with an action plan that can serve as a rescue belt in case of need.
#1 – Make sure you have a plan
It sounds easy, because you always have a plan, but the question is if you have a plan that is specifically designed for economic downturns.
This plan should be built upside-down and with outside-in approach (not the other way around) because in this situation you need to navigate through randomly appearing obstacles and need to leave your well-known path to avoid collisions.
To make this plan you may ask and try to answer the following questions:
1. What we’ll do if more than 30% of our baseline revenue is delayed or disappearing from our cashflow?
2. How can we decrease our cost of operation (significantly) without sacrificing quality / customer experience?
3. How can we attract more cost-cautious customers without additional development or processing cost?
4. How can we retain existing customers from churn?
Unfortunately, most of the right answers to these inconvenient questions need preparation and execution ahead of time, so when the cashflow starts decreasing it may be late already to start thinking about the corrective actions. The best course of action would be to start your preparation for the recession BEFORE it hits your cashflow.
#2 – Flex your agility and be prepared to execute your plan(s)
Whatever will come at least one thing is certain: The course of actions you need to execute will not be fully predictable. Better to have a plan of plans rather than a Plan. You may partition your master plan into smaller individually executable actions that can be done in a sequence (or in parallel) fully or partially, depending on the actual circumstances.
To execute your planned micro-plans consistently you may cluster your actions into three main domains:
What can you do before the recession starts?
List the course of actions you can do to avoid economic challenges – such us reserve a part of the cashflow for corrective actions, list the possible activities / products / services / you may suspend or downgrade during the recession and be prepared to stop all unnecessary spending immediately when it is needed.
What will you do during the recession?
Think about how you will execute the cost saving initiatives in each function without risking the core operation. List your key contributors (inside and outside of the company) and involve them into your planning. Let them understand why you will do what you do in which circumstances. Keep your customers, employees and partners informed, as they need to remain confident that your company can overcome all challenges. Let them know what you are planning to do and why, then inform them about the positive results of the corrective actions. Allow them to contribute to your plan in their own ways and appreciate their support.
What should you do in the recovery period (after the recession)?
Think about how you will restore the normal mode of operation. Review your learnings during the recession. Use the recession for optimize your operation. You may find some suspended activities that unnecessary to be restored, or you may apply a new way of doing things that proven to be more cost effective. Make a note about what went well and what you may need to do differently next time.
#3 – Ride the Wave of Recovery
Once the recession ends the economy starts growing with an accelerated speed and the “sleepers” may awake too late to ride the wave.
Monitor the economic signs and be the first who leverage the increasing demand. Be ready with a new product / service that specifically designed for the acceleration period (e.g. offer a quick and easy service restoration for all suspended accounts).
Leverage part of the saved operation cost to invest in products / service development that fits for the new (may be changed) needs. Keep in mind that your customers’ demands may be changed forever – like we seen a significant and permanent shift in customer needs after Covid.
Consider using composable and agile IT platforms to satisfy your customers’ needs as these kinds of events may happen in the future. The micro-solutions you developed at this time can be fully or partially reusable next time and can be shared with another part of the organization without additional development or platform cost.
Keep in mind that it is easy to gain efficiency if you willing to sacrifice customer experience or accept to loose agility. To save operational costs without harming your other important business KPIs is much harder. To achieve improvement on all KPIs at the same time you need an agile and easy to use business automation platform that can enable you to quickly develop meaningful business automation solutions with low effort that can support you to adopt even significant changes. The good news is that agile business automation platforms (which are capable to satisfy all your seemingly conflicting KPIs) exist and they need no IT knowledge to operate. They only need your business process knowledge and creativity.
If you want to learn more how to overcome the challenges that may come with the recession and howe to leverage the unique capabilities of an agile business automation platform that need no significant IT support, contact our experts or schedule a free demo with our solution consultants.
Tibor Vass
CMO of Eccentex
https://www.eccentex.com/products/hyperautomation-cloud/gain-efficiency/
