Three Priorities for Measuring the Pulse of Your Organization in Today’s “New Normal”

How your own data can comfort your people, secure your customers and risk-proof your business now and for the future

In 2020, the state of the world is causing us to live and work in a physically dispersed paradigm unlike any we have ever experienced. This “new normal” — isolated, remote, distributed, and detached — is being redefined daily. Our lives and business practices are changing, possibly forever. In times of business uncertainty, business continuity has never before been pressure-tested in this way.

Most people are in isolation by necessity. Direct social interaction is minimal. Many are totally on their own. Frustrations rise when digital communication does not properly substitute in-person engagement. Deficient technology or inadequate solutions fray nerves further.

As CEO of a fast-growing company, current events are reordering the priority of various KPIs in my mind. Revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction are obviously major indicators for any operator. However, the KPI trending up the stack these days concerns my employees — not just their productivity, but their morale — and how their mindset impacts their ability to support customers in a safe, risk-managed environment.

This is where I see glaring gaps. New tools and technology solutions are needed in the distributed environment we find ourselves in today. To provide proper bearings, it is important to first acknowledge three key priorities for ensuring business continuity during uncertain times. How businesses manage these priorities will dictate how well they survive today’s pandemic and economic slowdown, as well as the future of their business thereafter.

• A business is only as strong as its people. Every company must take care of its employees — keeping a finger on the pulse of their security, morale and mental health are paramount. 
• Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Customers are experiencing the same anxiety and concern as employees. Understanding and addressing their needs with empathy is crucial to ensure continuity in their eyes. 
• Protect the business from internal and external threats. Extreme macro conditions and fragmented infrastructure provide a rich breeding ground for internal errors and heightened risk, compounded by a rise in attacks from bad actors taking advantage of distributed and distracted teams. 

These three priorities must be managed in concert. Managing them requires a capable solution. At Behavox, we’re taking matters into our own hands. It’s why I started the company years ago. 

Collaboration And Motivation

As we venture into this indefinite state of forced distributed working models, businesses of all sizes, in all industries, and in all geographies, need modern tools that effectively assess morale, enable collaboration, and monitor stress and anxiety across an employee base. To me, the well-being, resolve, and evolving psyche of employees is a top concern. I would argue this should be the case for any business, any leader, any manager, any operator.

After all, employees are the atomic unit for catalyzing revenue growth, profitability, and customer satisfaction. As a result, managing employee morale should be an enterprise KPI with metrics for every business. Each business should measure how well its employees are coping with their new normal, and if there is a need to foster better collaboration and empathy.

Customer Insights

As you monitor and manage your employee sentiment, applying this same approach to your customers is equally important. With quarantine mandates in effect across countries, provinces, states, and cities, businesses must reinvent how they capture and evaluate customer data, their needs and pain, especially now that the infrastructure is shifting from on premise — which is off limits now due to the pandemic — to a distributed, cloud computing model.

To clearly understand their customers’ needs and sentiments, businesses need tools that provide the context of their connection points with their employees. This requires an ability to automatically mine and nurture contacts from communications, measure the strength of relationships based on past interactions, and summarize the context within customer interactions. This information enables businesses to visualize collaboration frequency and how lines of communication within companies are progressing or regressing.

For sales, support, and other customer-facing functions this insight spotlights exactly what customers want so a business can collaborate and deliver service with speed and empathy.

Controlling Greater Risk

In this uncertain climate, volatile markets, historic volumes, a “work from home” back office tied to on-premise infrastructure, and bad actors, all create heightened risks for businesses. These exceptional conditions are a rich breeding ground for mistakes, misunderstandings, and misconduct. For example, the risk of insider and rogue trading within the financial sector increases while security exploits typically escalate within enterprises during periods of duress.

Extra vigilance is required to protect business continuity and operational integrity. Proper tools are required to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent external contact. Distracted or negligent insiders are especially vulnerable at this time and are unaware of the extra security risk they pose to their enterprises.

For example, in the financial sector, the combination of clearing trade errors, monitoring “fat finger” mistakes, wading through the exponential rise in false positives (some customers tell me that their legacy systems are currently producing 1,000 times increases), and protecting employees from cyber risk are overwhelming compliance and operations teams. 

These tasks would be challenging enough if the employees were not forced into a distributed, remote work setting and had access to each other in a centralized work environment. Today’s reality exacerbates this challenge considerably.

The Importance of SaaS & Data Analytics in Supporting Business Continuity

No one can accurately predict how long employees and businesses are going to be confined to this current working model. A protracted lockdown will continue to stress legacy on-premise infrastructure and in-person collaborative working models between employees and customers.

Management must look to agile Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to ensure business continuity that is secure, compliant, and affordable. At Behavox, we are uniquely positioned as the only vendor that can deliver an end-to-end, AI-driven SaaS solution that aggregates, analyzes and visualizes internal data all in one place. Our data operating platform can provide data analytics that support compliance officers, IT, HR, Legal, and other key enterprise functions to understand and manage business continuity — triangulating employees, customers, and operations as a concerted strategy. 

At Behavox, we care deeply about our employees, customers and protecting the future of businesses around the world. If you want to measure the morale of your employees, really connect with your customers, and identify risk in your operations at a time when it is paramount, we are here for you.

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