Our small businesses must be set up for success in the ‘new normal’ future apart from adjusting and recovering in the market. These particular actions can help businesses to bridge the crisis response to a successful future, by laying the foundation to thrive in the aftermath of the crisis.
The outbreak of COVID-19 is fundamentally changing the way you do business and is continuing to cause disruptions for many small businesses, now and in the future. Extraordinary flexibility, coordination and resilience are required for such change during what may be a protracted period of recovery.
Every Small Business must have a sense of optimism about what lies ahead!
Succeed twice as likely with ‘7’ agility & accelerated innovation capabilities!
Doing nothing is not an option. In an increasingly active space, those who simply retain their old ways of working are likely to suffer an increasingly diminished book, as small business owners’ switch to more bespoke protections that are more dynamically moulded to their real business needs.
To deliver on these strategic themes, align the operating model to focus on delivering value to the customer and the business. These apply across the operating model and are cross-functional.
A personalized, seamless experience helps to encourage your customers to return and build trust.7 aspects needed to keep track for delivering tools, methods and frameworks to achieve a new & better small business are
- Understanding your customer needs
Today’s customer demands optionality on their terms, both physically and digitally. Whether your adverts pop up on their social media feed, they use your web chat or walk into one of their offices, a small business must be able to respond with a seamless, integrated and consistently high level of engagement.
Small businesses need to step up their efforts in digital product innovation with new thinking and innovative ways to simplify, add value and enrich people’s lives.
- Getting your cash flow in order
The business trends we discuss have been significantly intensified by COVID-19 and are not new.
Small businesses tend to have relatively low levels of business insurance, viewing it as a cash outflow that may not provide them with the benefits they need.
Develop innovative new business model opportunities, supporting you from ideation, through to launch to market.
This creates significant opportunities for insurers in the market to provide the right range of cover, at the right price, through the right channels.
These were built into a multi-year customer strategy and transformation roadmap, setting the small business on the path to becoming a customer-centric mobility services provider instead of a product-centric vehicle provider.
- Re-organizing your supply chain
Customers expect immediate fulfilment when completing onboarding checks, changing their details or making a payment — they are no longer willing to wait for lengthy internal processing.
The community nature of the plan limits the need for credit scoring, which happens before every small organization in the network.
With new startups offering faster experiences and more innovative business models, companies must adapt to the changing industry.
- Rethinking your workforce
To be able to adapt to relentless change, small businesses must be built on an agile organizational structure, empowering talent to be able to innovate quickly and collaborate freely in fluid teams.
This process allows businesses at their facilities to identify opportunities for improvement and implementation. They then apply these lessons in the field supported by lean and digital experts, for a few weeks, and exchange observations during the follow-up forum.
This must be shaped by the culture, and should include; strong leadership, insight-driven rewards and feedback, capability development centred on skills for the future, and access to technology to support modern ways of working.
- Digitally enabling your business
Digital disruption is everywhere — 44 per cent of organizations expect to fundamentally change their product/service offering or business model over the next 3 years, and this has largely been driven by the need to become more customer-centric.
Similar to productivity programs, digital- and AI-adoption programs also rely on centres of excellence and model factories for demonstrations.
However, the small businesses that are making the most success from digital have been much more proactive, putting the customer at the heart of their strategy, and driving technological transformation which improves the customer offering.
- Regularly check changes in your workplace
At a time when customers are increasingly empowered, connected and demanding, small businesses can be better equipped to understand their customers’ needs and wants as well as the health of their business.
To ensure your business is ready to thrive now is the time to turn your attention toward recovery.
It is vital to stay ahead of global shifts in social, technological and geopolitical trends now, more than ever, by harnessing data from multiple sources and transactions to create a real-time understanding of your customers, such as social media, online surveys.
- Integrated partner and alliance ecosystem
Third parties and customer touchpoints, coordinating and aligning technologies and services across internal functions can be incredibly challenging.
To combat these challenges effectively, small businesses demand a more agile, flexible business model, which can improve the operational efficiency of its support functions to move away from the limitations of operating in functional silos.
We see three phases that are all resilient business owners must face recovering from the COVID-19 crisis:
By integrating and managing the right third parties, businesses can deliver their customer promise, increase speed to market, reduce costs and mitigate risks.
It can be overwhelming for small business owners to keep up with the new laws, rules and regulations, let alone work out an action plan for their business and then desire to take charge of it!
