Let’s face it, COVID-19 forced most business leaders and entrepreneurs to alter their operations, service delivery, and customer experience overnight.
If, before COVID -19, you sold flowers in a traditional retail store, suddenly; you had to find a way to take your entire business online. Service providers leveraged technologies to maintain relationships with their clients and minimize revenue losses.
COVID-19 was a gut punch that forced radical business transitions, reduced service interactions to digital exchanges, and produced functional yet largely undifferentiated service experiences.
During those urgent transitions, most leaders functioned on adrenaline and survival instincts.
But then there was a pause, and many of us had a moment to feel our repressed anger and a profound sense of loss. On a personal level, I ache for the hugs of my children and grandchildren, and my anger fixates on how numbed I’ve become to a horrific global death toll.
But as my momma would say, “We better dust ourselves off and do something good with the hurt.”
How about claiming this moment as the time for design? Why not examine every change COVID-19 forced you to make and look for ways to optimize those changes for your core customers? What if you moved from forced operational shifts to well-designed, technology-aided, human-powered experiences?
Let me tell you a secret. Many of my clients have taken this approach, and not only do they see their desired business benefits, but they are also healing and punching back at COVID-19. This virus took a lot from us, but it can’t kill human resilience or lockdown our capacity to design a better experience for our teams and customers.
If you’d like to hear some of the ways my clients are designing personalized and differentiated experiences, let’s talk! Reach out to me here.
Related: Listening and Leading Customer Experience in Uncertain Times