Expert Opinion – What Lessons Did Your Firm Learn During COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred huge changes in technology, transforming the way businesses function all over the world. Many businesses didn’t even have any future plans, and those who planned for the future didn’t expect such a humanitarian crisis to hit the industry.

This pandemic has impacted the mindset, thinking, and attitude of many organizations. To know more about it, we, at Ace Cloud Hosting, reached out to a few industry experts to understand what did their firm learn from the pandemic.

Let’s find out what they said:

1. Christine Crandell

Christine is a career B2B board member, advisor, customer marketing, and digital transformation consultant. Her superpower is driving growth, based on user experience and customer success for late-stage SaaS platforms, manufacturing, and technology companies.

She partners with the boards and CEOs of her clients to examine their business challenges through a lens of shared curiosity and truth-seeking. As a domain expert in digital transformation, customer experience, and turnarounds, she’s a student of emerging trends and product-market fit.

She brings 30 years of leadership and pattern recognition that dramatically accelerates the velocity and quality of sales pipelines, marketing programs, customer expectations, and ROI that my clients achieve.

To know more about Christine, read her full story in this interview.

Let’s see what she has to say:

COVID-19 is considered a Black Swan event, highly disruptive and seemingly unpredictable. Yet, after analysis, the signposts and their associated disruptions were there all along.

Our firm has been engaged in future-casting as part of its strategic marketing and customer experience services for over 20 years. It’s our secret sauce. While we could not forecast COVID-19, specifically, we had been tracking several trends that reached a tipping point because of the pandemic.

Specifically, that time is a new competition, authentic human connections redefining commerce, new organization structures, the rise of vigilant companies driven by purpose, and disruption of global supply chains.

In 2019, we expanded to new markets and realigned our services into packaged solutions. What surprised us was the emotional toll the pandemic had. People were frozen, hunkering down to ‘wait it out’ to return to ‘normal’.

While leaders intellectually understood that now is the time to double-down on innovation, committing to the new direction(s) was fraught with fear. Leaders lacked scenario planning experience to plot a path forward that effectively balances risk across emerging opportunities in the face of multiple unknowns.

Progressive leaders overcame that by involving everyone, including customers, in the planning process, which helped counter the feelings of frustration, fear, and helplessness.

2. Mosun Shasore

Over the past 25+ years, Mosun has accumulated a wealth of experience in strategy development in the industry as well as consulting, with multinational and local organisations, such as Accenture, ARM Investment Managers, and Procter & Gamble. Mosun is a certified customer experience professional (CCXP) and a judge for the UK mycustomer.com CX Leader of The Year Award.

He also actively influences impactful change in the local business community by speaking about how CX (customer experience) can be a powerful differentiator on radio shows and at conferences.

Mosun is the Author of Serve Them Right, published in September 2018 (now available on Amazon).

Follow her on social media: LinkedIn and Twitter.

Let’s see what she has to say:

The reality is that working remotely in Africa is not as easy as it is in other parts of the world. A significant proportion of the population still faces electricity poverty.

Just when you thought you had it all figured out and ensured that members of staff have a laptop and internet modem assigned to them. Not only that, but staff also have power banks for laptops to support power needs for short periods of time, but power banks also have to be recharged.

We, however, faced situations where people had not enjoyed grid power supply in their neighborhoods in months, and this put a strain on our operations.

Clients should choose their technology by not only considering current business requirements but also medium to long-term needs for scope and scale. The strategy going forward should be based on the immediate steps you had to take to flexibly adapt during the pandemic.

It is important to identify clearly which of these changes are here to stay. Then considering all risks, start constructing ways to securely operationalise these changes. Lastly, work on improving contingency and crisis plans.

To Conclude

The coronavirus has taught us how vital it is for organizations to be agile to adapt to changing events. Also, we’ve realized the importance of cloud technologies such as the Desktop as a Service, which have made it possible for us to work remotely and collaborate efficiently with our workforce.

Without a doubt, it has been a challenging year for all of us. But, we should look at it as a challenge and come out of it stronger.