The coronavirus pandemic has taken a toll on Small to Medium Sized businesses just like yours. It has dealt a savage blow to your operations and your income. You may well have had to make lots of sacrifices, taking on more debt, placing your employees on furlough or even being forced to let some go completely. But, like all crises, there are lessons to be learned from COVID-19. As businesses start to make further adjustments to their operations and plotting a long, winding road back to normalcy, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the lessons you’ve learned about your business, your market and your customers. 

Image by Enrique Lopez Garre via Pixabay

 

Just make sure you’ve learned all the right lessons. For instance…

 

Never underestimate the value of your customers

 

It’s okay to admit it. Before the coronavirus came along, you may have been taking your customers for granted. They were checking in with you regularly, making orders consistently and engaging with your brand online. So, why shouldn’t you assume that all is well with your customer relationships. 

 

Then the lockdown came and reminded us just how fickle your customers can be. Even those who can still access your services and products online seemed to be ordering and engaging less. This should serve as a reminder to all that you can’t take your customers for granted. 

 

In the wake of the lockdown, all businesses need to invest more in relationship marketing, engaging more meaningfully with their customers and providing them with more reasons to check in with them online. These might include the use of content marketing to add more value for customers or  investing in the software to create unique, single-use promotional codes to coax back customers whose loyalty has lapsed. 

 

You can’t afford to let your operations stagnate

 

When businesses were obliged to close their doors in light of the lockdown, many businesses were forced to realize just how unprepared they were. They had achieved a way of operating that worked for them and developed a “Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. However, the lockdown proved a stern lesson in the importance of agility. 

 

Businesses needed to adapt to survive. In some cases, this meant radical overhauls of their digital infrastructure to facilitate secure remote working. Many businesses will do well to box clever in the wake of the lockdown. They will invest more in IT support services to stay agile while keeping costs manageable. They may start migrating more of their infrastructure to the cloud and thinking of ways in which they can trim down core operations, making them faster, more efficient and more adaptable to change.

 

The world is watching. Do right by your employees

 

As well as providing a sobering reminder of the importance of customers, the COVID-19 pandemic has also reminded businesses of the importance of the workforce. Not only have they risen to the challenges of remote working with aplomb, in some cases they’ve proven a valuable lesson in PR. Some less scrupulous businesses have chosen to let huge swathes of their workforces go to protect their interest and drawn the ire of the media as a result. Experience has shown us that consumers favor scrupulous businesses with a string sense of Corporate Social Responsibility. 

 

And when businesses prove themselves otherwise, they can expect their customers to pay attention!