Our customer’s immediate ‘business as usual’ workstreams have, like almost all organisations, been impacted by the pandemic and they have needed to focus on business continuity and starting to adopt new organisational norms.
In response Invotra has ensured we’re in sync with our customers and their challenges during this time. This process had the added benefit of enabling us to review and streamline our business processes giving us more understanding about what’s critical for us and our customers.
Community
Early on in our response preparation to COVID-19 we made a decision to open our customer portal (GOV.invotra) to all civil servants across UK Government. The response has been excellent, we now have over 30 organisations actively participating on the platform.
There is a growing sense of community in GOV.invotra. Our customers are having regular discussions on their COVID-19 challenges and successes. It’s fantastic to see them sharing their approaches, best practices and real life application of our product.
If your organisation doesn’t have a customer platform, create one, give your customers a voice. The feedback you will get from these interactions is indispensable.
Product value optimisation
Focus on emerging needs and understand how your product team can meet them. This is a great opportunity to align your customer success and product teams to organically create solutions for customers.
Invotra built a customer coronavirus hub to showcase the best features available in our product, from iframes to broadcasts for critical communications promotion.
We’ve also taken customer feedback from immediate customer needs and translated them directly into backlog items for the next quarter.
Rapid response
Account for rapid response for the foreseeable future across your business. Your customers need you – you need a pragmatic approach to process in order to serve them.
Review the customer delivery life cycle and empower your customer success and live service teams to expedite requests across your business. Invotra have been especially focused on streamlining our change acceptance processes to account for expediting requests, with some changes being reduced from days to hours for implementation.
Communicate
Anyway you can, at any time, make sure you’re communicating with your customers as regularly as your schedules allow. Customer relationships are not just about account management, they are built by listening and problem solving with product and process applications. Our customers are under immense pressure and understanding and solving their challenges is a mutually beneficial activity.
Focus on stability
Keep the lights on. During this time as a communications application we are seeing more traffic, more utilisation of product features and a growing number of new users being onboarded.
At some point in your service lifecycle there will be an adverse event, it is inevitable. However there are 2 key activities I urge all organisations to undertake to mitigate against events:
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Review your end to end service
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Focus on metrics
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Test your processes
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Run event fire drills to test your team’s response to incidents and review and troubleshoot any identified issues
Conclusion
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We’ve seen first hand that doing what you can, big or small, to show your support and mitigate the pressure your customers are experiencing will go a long way.
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Going through testing times albeit challenging and stressful, can help you to re-evaluate and streamline your business processes.
