Be a Partner Your Customers Need During the Pandemic

Brian McCann

No successful business operates in a vacuum. To meet the digital demands of today, organizations rely on vendors for everything. That means from simple storage solutions to complex digital ecosystems. In hindsight, the process of managing these customer relationships before the COVID-19 pandemic was relatively straightforward. Network security providers could focus on balancing cost and usability, the need for speed and the delivery of uninterrupted digital services. As long as you had the tools and analytics required to fulfill performance and security requirements, customers were satisfied.

However, like everything else, the pandemic has dramatically changed the relationship between service providers and their customers. As organizations have shifted their workforce and business channels to digital, our role in supporting those customers’ needs must shift, too.

Though being a great partner in a time of crisis does demand more, it is what clients need, and this extra effort turns short-term customers into long-term advocates. Here are some tips for how to best approach partnerships right now.

Be Quicker

Companies were already quickening the cadence of digital implementation before the pandemic. Now, digital strategies that might have mapped out over months or years have been replaced by initiatives that go live in a matter of days or weeks. Many initiatives that were until recently seen as a smart long-term play or a means to streamline efficiency and lower costs have suddenly become mission critical.

Executive teams are under extreme market pressure to digitalize business lines, and after witnessing successful examples from every industry over the last several months of scrambled rollouts executed quickly out of necessity, there’s an increasing willingness to move fast. Executives used to meticulously planned, phased and tested deployments suddenly face a dynamic where being overly careful may now be a recipe for failure, and getting it done quickly is the most prudent strategy. For many larger organizations, this represents a significant polarity shift to the standard IT orthodoxy.

Despite the will, many organizations don’t have the internal resources to execute right away. The only way to establish digital platforms quickly is through the support of third-party ecosystems. Leadership teams recognize this. Instead of focusing on what can be done internally, organizations are now looking to get the most they can out of partners.

Vendor partners need to be ready to implement solutions faster than ever. The perfect solution months down the road isn’t going to satisfy customers. Instead, drive lean and iterative development toward a minimum viable product.

Be Bolder

Digital transformation for many businesses was inevitable, but there was still a lack of urgency from management teams pre-crisis. The pandemic has changed that. Once-hesitant organizations leapt into action as uncertainty and volatility became the new normal.

As COVID-19 forces companies to embrace digital channels, now is the time to push for the bold digital efforts that will transform businesses for the better – especially if …