Business continuity and the customer

Keeping the customer at the heart of business continuity planning

All too often, business continuity (BC) is viewed in isolation. But a good business continuity plan should help maintain trust with customers during times of crisis, ensuring that the organisation meeting their requirements despite being hit with a disruptive event.

The analytics behind business continuity, the business impact analysis, are typically focussed on the products and services that are delivered to the customer. A best practice BC plan breaks down the barriers between various functions to understand how different scenarios will affect the business and impact customers.

Leaders should design and implement the business continuity plan starting with a customer perspective to drive the business impact analysis. Understanding the customer’s needs is key to identifying where to create value for them, allowing decision makers to prioritise and discern how much downtime is manageable in different areas before impacting the business and how quickly the business should be up and running again.

This requires cross-functional collaboration, communication and a common data-set from which to make decisions and test ideas.

• Become agile in order to improve responsiveness and reaction time
• Build systems and processes that are resilient to disruptive change
• Use data and user-cantered principles to stay focused on immediate customer behaviour
• Innovate and move quickly to adapt to marketplace volatility

Organisations should consider creating listening channels to get customer feedback during a crisis, such as face to face or phone conversations, a message hotline, emails or even social media.

Don’t forget ESG during times of crisis

The importance of sustainability and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) continues to rise. In keeping with the goals of the Paris Agreement, many organisations and economies have committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions as an organising principle.

Companies are expected to approach their initiatives in a rigorous, strategy-driven, and socially attuned way. But, during difficult times, investing in these areas comes under pressure.

One option for businesses to consider is “skinny design ”. By using a skinny design approach to reassess products and packaging, companies can simultaneously lower product and transport costs and reduce their carbon footprint. It can often be implemented quickly and with little investment while motivating a design team to fulfill the company’s mission.

When a company determines, within ESG, where it would like to be good versus excellent, it is making important decisions, with consequences. It’s critical to then underpin any ESG decisions by seeking to gain a deep, evidence-based understanding of their own business and its broader potential effects.

Assessing progress is most effective when it is done regularly and, with robust data analytics, information can be updated rapidly. Companies that have a considered process in place to measure their ESG performance are better positioned to respond even in times of rapid change.

Regular scenario planning to anticipate potential disruptions

Scenario planning helps organisations better understand the present, consider what might change in the future, and explore what those changes could mean for the business. During times of disruption, traditional scenario planning can be too analytical and runs the risk of falling prey to a “failure of imagination”.

For scenario planning to be useful , it needs to integrate user-centric insights from a cross-disciplinary team that considers a broad range of possibilities. be as complete and detailed as possible, continuously updated with the latest data, and most importantly, refreshed throughout with the impact of the strategies being considered.

Additionally, data analytics such as predictive modelling allows organisations to understand the root causes behind problems and predict future outcomes. Organisations should fully embrace analytics and machine learning to detect both abnormalities and opportunities.

Business leaders can experiment with the impact of external events, such as a supply chain interruption, and of internal changes, such as a new product launch to drive revenue or efficiency to lower costs. When a variable in the scenario is changed, the areas impacted by that change are updated instantly so all plans and forecasts are continuously up to date.

The team will need to test multiple futures, brainstorming multiple “what-if” outcomes for what may occur during a defined timeframe. By having interlinked scenarios that are calculated off the base of multiple factors, leaders can see the financial impact of two or more events happening at the same time, as well as understand the impact on revenue and/or costs.

For further information, including best practice tips, download our business continuity whitepaper here