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What COVID-19 Has Taught Us About Business Continuity

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world by storm. Previous to March 2020, many businesses could not have envisioned how a pandemic would affect them. In the wake of the ongoing pandemic, many businesses have had to shut their doors.

Many businesses have lost revenue and declared bankruptcy, and some are still struggling to make ends meet. On the flip side, others are still standing and thriving. Needless to say, this ongoing pandemic has taught a lot of businesses that there needs to be a system in place to ensure business continuity in a crisis.

Prepare for the Unexpected

The best way to be prepared is to think ahead. Due to the pandemic, many businesses have adapted business procedures that allow their employees to work from home. 

Working at home brings its challenges, especially when you still have to work as a team. In order to be effective from home, you will need to have a comprehensive work management system. If you want to succeed, you must put a system in place that lets you share and edit files as a team.

Once you have set up remote solutions for your business, you’ll have a seamless out-of-office transition. When the solutions are already there, the only thing you need to do is implement them.

Be Flexible

You should prepare as much as possible, but there are times when your plans need to be flexible. In those times, you will need to make adjustments depending on multiple factors such as safety, sales, security, and potential threats. 

There may be a need for system upgrades or added solutions. When you work with an experienced IT team, these changes can be implemented and managed with little stress. Additionally, emergencies will be addressed quickly so you can go back to growing your business.

Customer Service is Essential

The businesses that are doing well throughout the pandemic are the ones that have good customer service. The ones that lack good service have their reputation pummeled online by disgruntled customers.

Customers are the heart and soul of your business, and if you can’t keep them satisfied, you will lose them to your competition. In the past, you only had to worry about getting a bad reputation by word of mouth.

Now when customers are disgruntled, they can take to social media or review sites to tell others how they feel about your business. In the wake of COVID-19, those businesses that can remotely continue offering great customer service are faring far better than those who can’t.

Good Communication 

Appropriate and comprehensive communication is a necessity between your business and customers. It is also important within the organization itself.

When you are communicating with your customers, you will need to use email, live chat, chatbots, and phone calls to stay in touch. However, it’s also necessary to apply these same methods of communication with your team. Good communication between staff members leads to stellar customer service. 

Looking Ahead

When the pandemic is over, it may be more cost-effective for your business to allow some team members to continue working from home. To facilitate this long-term shift, it is best to put a strong system in place now. Technological solutions need to be easily integratable and future-proof. If you are finding gaps in your current system, now is the time to fix them.

There is no better time than the present to cement your tech management systems so that your staff will be familiar with all the aspects of it. You can also tell your employees what you expect from them so that the remote rules of conduct are clearly defined.

Once you do this you can move to a more permanent remote working solution, as you will have a system that provides a good opportunity for remote workers to liaison with those who are in the office.

The Future is Bright

COVID-19 has challenged the world to rethink how business is done, but this is not all bad. It has given a lot of businesses the chance to dive into the world of technology and broaden their scopes.

If you have the right tech solutions you can create an office that is just as high functioning as one that is in a physical space.

This means that it is possible to eliminate or create a smaller office space and save money while still being a fully functional business. This is the wave of the future, and all you have to do is ensure that you have the technology to keep up.

Envision Consulting

Envision Consulting

We started Envision Consulting for businesses that share our passion for building long- term and healthy relationships. While we might be technology experts, we’ve always known that trust, reliability and looking after a client’s best interest are paramount to succeeding in business. But in 2001 and to this day, there were few managed IT providers available that embodied our customer-centric values. There were countless support companies more interested in reacting to issues than paving the road forward for clients, making it far too difficult to build long-term relationships. We felt a strong pull to make something different, and we did.