COVID-19, How Will You Respond?
Darryl Grauman
Technologist, Strategist, Board Member, Speaker, Author, Restauranteur, Advisor, Investor, Coach, Biohacker, Fitness fiend and Thought Leader. Taking Kiwi ingenuity global.
Sitting here and watching the global implications of COVID-19, the next few months are going to be tough for our customers and their customers.
Because of the COVID-19 restrictions, relevant or not, the fallout will be significant.
Just the pause in business for 4-6 weeks could have a catastrophic effect on businesses without reserves to keep paying operating costs while incoming revenue is reduced. Many government’s reactions and policies to “flatten the curve” of the outbreak invariably means that the time to conclusion is drawn out but many lives of at-risk people are saved. This is the right short term decision, but now we need to look to the future and what recovery looks like. Right now we need to see what we can do immediately to keep the economy moving, and then what can we do to recover rapidly.
In the short term we should all be asking our business partners, vendors and our customers, what we can do to help them keep the doors open and customers transacting, what transactions can move online, what can be done via voice, video and virtual? Hey Uber Eats, how about reducing the delivery fees making it easier for people to order so eateries can keep their doors open? Credit departments of larger organisations, how about making a call to add 3-4 weeks of time to payment due dates?
On a personal level, the best advice is to keep doing what you usually do. If you go out for Coffee on a weekend, keep dong it, ask for a table outside with enough social distance, or get takeaways and FaceTime/Whatsapp your friends for a virtual outing. If you were going to go shopping, just do it online, keep the economy moving. Right now I’m looking for holiday deals for the school vacation!
Over the longer term what is there that we can do to help right the ship, help bring customers back?
Each industry will need a different strategy. But the best case is everyone will carry on as they were before this virus hit. Re-book travel, confirm orders, confirm advertising and marketing, reschedule events and keep selling tickets… Yes, there are some seasonal events that will be missed, but other than those, what’s the next available date? Hopefully the economic world can be enticed into a mere speed bump- but this is 100% dependant on behaviours. If the general behaviour is to ease back into it, the time to recovery will be longer. If the general behaviour is to pick up exactly where we left, time to recovery will be significantly faster.
So all I can say in conclusion is…stand tall, get inventive about how to keep going short term, pick a date in the future and commit to returning to normal operations!
Kia Kaha New Zealand
Channel Account Lead, SMB.
4 年Good article Darryl.
Azure / AWS Cloud Business Solutions -
4 年Flatten the curve
Oracle, Customer Success Services Director, Wellington & South Island, New Zealand
4 年I can’t believe how Auckland hotels are capturing data for guests checking in, (I’ve just been thru the process in AKL) which is passed onto NZ Govt. introduced as such. Whilst this is good to see in place, why has someone not stood up a simple native mobile / web app for data capture.....versus hotels scanning, emailing paper form based declarations x2 back to whoever is then re-keying data into something useful for tracking / managing social containment + + It is 2020 after all. Even if we leveraged what Singapore has in place, and adapt it for our NZ market?
Consultant - Connect and help build a Vision of the resilient, multi-resource, Infrastructure of the Future.
4 年The total number of people who contract the disease is the area under the curve. Aren't there more in the flattened curve? Not questioning the rational just the conclusion as portrayed by the curves.