The Heightened Value of the Customer Experience During Times of Crisis

Annie Abber started as an Advisory Analyst at LogicManager over seven years ago. Her commitment to enhancing the customer experience has earned her several promotions, and Annie is now the Associate Director of Advisory here at LM. Annie truly understands the importance of the customer experience, so our content writer Ali MacDonald sat down with her to talk about how she’s witnessed that value magnify over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ali: Talk a little bit about your key responsibilities here at LogicManager.

Annie: I oversee the Advisory department, which works to partner with our customers for the lifetime of their relationship with us. We see ourselves as having a unique vendor-customer relationship, where we’re really looking to foster a true partnership and serve as an adjunct team member for our clients. We’re focused on enhancing our partnerships, so I’m responsible for making sure that our team is always carrying out that mission.

Being a steward of CX probably makes you hyper-aware as a consumer. Have you had any recent customer experiences that have stuck with you (in either a good or bad way)?

I haven’t been impressed with the Amazons of the world lately. With large corporations juggling multiple vendors and product lines, I understand it must be challenging to stay on top of things, especially with their increase in demand right now. But recently I had an experience with Amazon that was frustrating; I didn’t feel their shipping timeline was transparent at all. Since I work for a company that’s always striving to provide transparency, it certainly stood out to me in a negative way.

How have our customers’ expectations evolved over the course of the past few months as a result of the pandemic?

I would say over the past few months, expectations have changed in that people are looking to us for guidance on how they are managing the pandemic at their organizations. We need to be a partner that’s there to help our customers plan and prepare to ensure their operations continue. That said, we’re aiming higher than ever to provide outstanding service, since it’s that much more important to our clients’ businesses for our software and our advisory team to support them as much as possible.

What are some of the biggest challenges you’re seeing some of our customers face today, amidst the pandemic?

One of the biggest challenges seems to be getting a seat at the table regarding some of the organizational decisions being made related to COVID. It’s important for risk managers to be a part of the conversation with regards to return to work plans, PPE, loan applications, and so much more.

Once they are able to get involved in the areas where their risk expertise is needed, however, it can be overwhelming; suddenly they’re on various cross-functional committees and standing organizations, making them busier than usual, so leveraging our software and expertise has become incredibly critical. Also, most people are working remotely now, making it more difficult to communicate their initiatives with their colleagues, so that brings its own set of challenges.

How has the Advisory team been able to help customers through these challenging situations? Any common themes that you’ve noticed?

We’ve been able to help by educating our customers on working through communication challenges; our software has the capability to keep everyone on the same page by making it clear what needs to be prioritized. Also, something we’ve been able to offer that has helped many of our customers is open licensing through the end of September. This was part of our COVID relief package that we rolled out in the beginning of March. During this difficult time, we want to ensure customers have access to leverage LogicManager and any of our solutions in any way that they need. It’s more important than ever to be able to see what areas of the business can be formalized or automated to drive efficiencies and inform better business decisions. We also have multiple initiatives in place to quickly and effectively help our customers in any way that we can, both proactively and reactively. Maximizing our efforts to help as much as possible has certainly been the overarching theme over the past few months.

Can you talk more on those recent initiatives that are geared towards enhancing the customer experience?

Yes! We’ve ramped up our advisory workshop program, and have hosted more than 7 workshops in the last 2 months. We really want to bring best practices and teach through the successes of other customers and feel these workshops are a great platform to do so. To go along with each workshop we have been offering content packages, which are truly end-to-end in terms of both providing the necessary content and workflows to get our customers up and running in a very short amount of time.

We also now offer a chat solution, which gives customers another avenue for getting questions answered quickly. Real-time support is more important than ever right now. On top of that, we’ve been advising our clients during their quarterly business reviews. These meetings give us the opportunity to have more strategic conversations with our customers around their upcoming goals and how we can best partner with them to reach those goals.

Do you feel your team’s responsibilities have shifted to meet the demands of the new normal?

We’ve certainly felt a bigger responsibility to proactively reach out and advise. As we all know, these are unprecedented times so there is a lot of uncertainty, making it more important than ever to adapt to new use cases and requests that come up. Our CEO, Steve, is great at seeing patterns and keeps a pulse on trends that relate to risk management within the pandemic. We want to ensure that our customers are kept just as much in the loop as we are on these trends so that they can plan ahead whenever and wherever possible.

How, if at all, has transitioning to remote working changed your interactions with clients?

Our team’s transition from working in an office every day to remote working hasn’t really changed our business model at all, because we’ve always advised our customers remotely. So we’re in the fortunate position of not needing to reinvent the wheel; this is the way we’ve always done it, so we’ve felt properly equipped to help our customers since the first day we left the office.

I will say that we are especially cognizant towards our customers that have needed to overhaul their operations to some extent in order to sustain a remote working environment. It’s motivated us to try extra hard to take any burden possible off their hands. Our overall goal from day one has been to help our clients know their challenges before they happen. The worst thing that can happen is they’re overprepared, which is unlikely to be the outcome given the predictions for a second wave of the virus this fall. Our team, if anything, is just working harder than ever before to prevent our clients from being caught off guard.

Want to learn how Annie and her team can help you prepare for tomorrow’s surprises today?

Request a demo from a LogicManager expert today.