Top COVID-19 Challenges: How Customer Experience Leaders Responded
Customer experience leaders have faced multiple challenges in the areas of digital, safety and well-being of customers and data and analytics throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report from McKinsey. “The challenge for companies is to understand which customer trends and patterns will endure over the longer term,” researchers found.
Grappling With Digital Transformation
Things weren’t figured out in a minute. Most CX practitioners as of late summer were still in reactionary mode, according to Ann Cosfol, principal and founder of Design Mind Consulting, who interviewed several CX leaders throughout the pandemic. Around August, many were still struggling with digital transformation and how to pivot from the reactionary mode of the early pandemic days. “Some of them were just starting to wonder how do they re-energize around customer experience,” Cosfol said.
What have been the greatest challenges for those who care about digital customer experience throughout the pandemic and how have they addressed them? We caught up with some of those leaders.
It Starts With Content and Tone
Kevin Malone, director of digital experience for the Produce Marketing Association (PMA), said his team’s biggest challenge in 2020 was finding its voice for its membership in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The teams shifted its content away from marketing and services and toward helping membership move forward and face the pandemic’s challenge.
“We focused on transparency, authenticity and providing actionable content to help our members run their business in the critics,” Malone said. “By doing so, we saw our traffic numbers rise consistently. As we shifted back toward more marketing content, we focused on keeping the tone of voice we established in our crisis response.”
Most of the PMA’s content is locked down to membership. However, content teams decided to make the COVID-19 response content available to the industry. On that resources page is a video from the CEO discussing how the industry is moving forward together.
“This reflects the transparency and authenticity I was referencing,” Malone said. “As you move down the page you see the actionable resources and content that helped our membership as they coped with the early days of the pandemic.”
More Content, More Work
But it wasn’t easy. Creating new content means creating new work.
The biggest challenge throughout the content pivot? Rising to the task of the influx of content flowing into the site, Malone said. “We had to adapt and work fast, with a focus on our users, to make sure that the content was organized and presented to them the way they needed,” Malone said. “We made updates multiple times a day, and provided our users with regular email communications including the top resources their peers were engaging with.”
Keeping up With Customer Demand
The single greatest challenge in CX faced this year has been keeping up with customer demand, said Thiago Garcia, VP of customer success at VTEX. “As clients closed their physical stores and moved all operations online, our CX team has worked tirelessly to implement, launch, optimize and support thousands of customers in record time,” Garcia said. “Meeting our customers’ high expectations has been the hardest but most rewarding work we’ve ever done.”
What went into that super-quick pivot? VTEX CX teams had to prioritize, develop and scale at breakneck speed. “We had to focus on the right projects, be very clear about the scope and improve our processes in real-time,” Garcia said. “We hired more people to support the growing demand as we onboarded net new clients, and leveraged our incredible ecosystem of agencies to supply our customers with what they needed to get the job done.”
