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The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has had a significant impact on business all over the world. The effects of corona are likely to affect many businesses negatively. While you may face different challenges, it is imperative to respond rapidly in order to remain standing assuming this pandemic progresses for 12 more months.
The importance of data today cannot be over-emphasized. The truth about leveraging your historical data to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic unfortunately needs some wisdom:
- While you may have silos of historical structured and unstructured data, that history might not tell you anything about how COVID-19 will affect your business in the near future.
- Doing analysis using your existing data repositories may not satisfactorily handle the fast-moving and unknown variables of an outbreak like COVID-19.
- Seasonality patterns of your forecasts may not come into play this year and hence, all your pre-computed statistical forecasts may not tell you the truth about the next 10 months.
As time passes by, you are likely to run out of options, and sooner or later it may be necessary to PAUSE. PAUSE is a Problem-Solving Framework and an acronym for a cycle of five steps: Perceive, Ask, Understand, Strategize, and Evaluate. The secret to PAUSE lies in the data you have collected since the first discovery of COVID 19 pandemic in your country. The use of recent data will bring everyone to the table and on a daily basis help your business to:
- Perceive: The PAUSE process begins with learning more about the situation by observing, listening, and asking questions. As business tends to slow down seek to learn more. It is important to observe and listen to your customers and not to apply industry wide strategic restrictions.
- Ask: Ask questions to learn more about what is happening to your lowest affected segments in addition to careful listening and observation. Seek to answer questions from the pandemic data collected. Do not hesitate to sample and find out what’s happening to your high value customers.
- Understand: Understand your customer experience or viewpoint. Relationships are the core underpinning factors to monitor in order to manage your business effectively. In order for your business relationship to function smoothly, consider each party's point of view and act accordingly. Do not generalize. Generalized models kick out high valued prospects because they fall into risky categories.
- Strategize: After analyzing all information gathered (also referred to as the pandemic data) select and take decisive actions treating each of your customers uniquely.
- Evaluate the outcomes on a daily basis using reflective processes.
As you are implementing PAUSE, the following data strategies may help you and your business take decisive.
Credit Team: Seek to reduce exposure by increasing your customer profile scoring threshold and treating customer complaints on an individual basis. Consistently make use of data to deliver credit scores, models, and tools to ease the business exposure during this time.
Customer Service Team: Reach out to your clients; Let them know you care, accommodate their needs according to their risk profiles and increase the customer contact ratio. Consistently gather and analyze your customer data, in order to get daily actionable insights that allow you to evaluate your strategy on a daily basis.
HR Team: Communicate, Educate & Encourage. Consistently track capability by using capability analytics metrics. The success of your business depends on the level of expertise and skill. Seek to identify core competencies you need in your business and ensure these are available all the time. As an analytics team, we shall be compiling and sharing strategic data insights to help you navigate the COVID 19 pandemic. If you would like short term remote help to manage your analytics operations, please reach out.