Facing this new context, companies must care for their teams without neglecting customers and users.
Airlines canceled flights, restaurants closed their kitchens for a few days, and companies rebuilt their plants. The scenario is not easy in some countries due to the high contagion capacity of the new strain and the vacations move.
Caring for teams and your brand
The last months of the year are usually dedicated to planning how the team dynamics will be during the first months of next year—mostly managing people’s vacations or leaves of absence, projecting brands’ summer actions, and launching marketing activities.
However, Omicron burst in such a way that organizations had to rethink several schemes to maintain a healthy workforce, preserve agility and solve unplanned absences.
This context requires flexibility and anticipation while always taking care of the customer experience.
Anticipating scenarios
The Spanish newspaper “El País” headlined on December 27 that “the omicron variant complicates the operation of essential services and the activity of key economic sectors” among the US, UK, France, Italy, and the Netherlands.
The pandemic taught us that a good plan often becomes meaningless in the face of the unexpected. Therefore, besides good planning, we need to establish various scenarios within those unpredictable situations.
Internal communication becomes the hero in this context: the people area should implement clear communication on planning within diverse scenarios, taking into account absences and replacements among the teams.
A question that can open up this anticipation is:
- What is the minimum headcount with which your company can continue to operate, and how does the area break this number down?
Sharing this information with the area managers will help the company make smart decisions about absence and vacation management. And it will prevent the organization from running out of staff, even adjusting crews among areas if possible.
CX (Customer Experience) at the core
The staff contraction, not only within the hierarchical positions but also in production and customer service, can cause problems to the brand’s reputation for not delivering the product or service on time.
According to a Zendesk study on post-pandemic consumer behavior, 50% of customers look for a competitor after a bad experience, but 75% will buy more when offered good customer service.
Having a contingency plan is essential and having the digital channels to respond promptly to queries and complaints.
At Oxean, we can build together this anticipation and create a communication plan tailored to your company to manage internal and external strategy within this challenging new context.
