Disruption Response Planning and the Customer Perspective

• Companies typically do disruption planning by looking inward (e.g., restoring services, data and infrastructure). Understanding how disruptions impact our relationships with customers and partners is less often considered in planning.

• Marketing organizations should identify the impact to customers and partners under representative disruption scenarios and identify what initiatives the company can take to support and protect business relationships.

• Marketing organizations should then assess their readiness to execute against those initiatives, reviewing digital capabilities, resourcing, governance and in-house expertise. This will yield clear priorities as to what needs to be developed, built or acquired.

Q: You’re recommending the marketing organization do scenario planning. What kinds
of scenarios?

Su: Anything that may significantly disrupt customers is something marketing needs to plan for. Marketing is customer-facing and should bring that customer perspective to the company’s wider business strategy and operations. Business continuity thinks about impacts on infrastructure, products and services, leadership and personnel, financial, IT and let’s call it legal and regulatory. What’s missing from that list? Customers. That what marketing brings to the table: the customer’s perspective.

Anything that may significantly disrupt customers is something marketing needs to plan for.

Eric: Let’s take the scenario of the moment: a prolonged global pandemic. The pandemic was about disease and working remotely of course, but it was also a scenario of massive market disruption and uncertainty. In housing finance, where we do a lot of work, some homeowners had trouble making their payments, but at the same time lots of other homeowners decided to refinance. So, the companies in the industry who work directly with borrowers got hit from two directions at the same time. Marketing and comms organizations reacted to this as best they could, but clearly those that anticipated this scenario were better prepared.

Q: So that’s a cataclysmic event. You said more mundane events could also be disruptive. Can you give an example?

Su: Right. Not every scenario is “a meteor destroys the home office.” A disruption could be as simple as: your competitor comes out with a game-changing product, a huge leap forward that upends your category. That scenario is not covered in the business continuity plan. However, it certainly is a situation that demands resilience. How do you bounce back? And how do you go forward?

Q: Do you speak from experience?

Su: I do. I was working with a large retirement plan provider when DOL [Department of Labor] put the fiduciary rule into effect. The new regulations were sweeping … and ambiguous. So, first we had to understand the requirements ourselves, then determine the impact on our clients, and then figure out the most effective way to communicate all the information, including actions required of the clients, while collecting compliance-mandated data. All of which required us to stand up a sizeable communications effort very quickly to reduce disruption, keep customers calm, minimize the impact – all while the regular business kept running as usual.

Marketing is inherently client-focused, so having market-facing leadership define responses helps drive resilience.

Eric: What we’re advocating for marketing is complementary to what the CIO is doing with business continuity scenario planning or what the CRO is doing with risk assessment modeling. Marketing is inherently client-focused, so having market-facing leadership define responses to disruptions helps drive resilience.

Q: Let’s talk about the customer – or client – impact analysis. How is that done?

Eric: The first step is to come up with a list of representative scenarios. Within those, look at the client’s business cycle, all the processes and people and entities and technology, and imagine what could happen under each given scenario. Will your client lose sales and income? Can they process transactions? Are your client’s costs going to rise? Could your client incur fines or penalties or be hit with a lawsuit? Then, identify what you can do to support them, and look at your capability to provide that support. What information does your client need, and how and when do they need it? Can your technology do something their systems can’t do?

Q: Should marketing budgets include a line item for disruption scenario building and contingency planning?

Su: Marketing should have a budget enabling them to assess resilience and acquire and build what’s needed to become resilient. An important thing about this investment is that the skills and capabilities and processes we’re talking about that create a resilient business – they’re also 100% useful outside of a crisis. Being able to rapidly stand up a program, roll out a microsite, integrate third-party capabilities, tailor messages to various audience segments … all these capabilities make for a better marketing organization, crisis or no.

All these capabilities make for a better marketing organization, crisis or no.

Q: Marketing’s scenario planning – it’s not happening in a vacuum. How does it relate
to what the wider company is up to?

Eric: Very good point; obviously plans such as these can’t be siloed. Most companies have a business continuity committee, and traditionally marketing has had a relatively quiet voice at that table. But now, because of the sort of work we do with CMOs – digital marketing innovation, gaming out scenarios and developing contingency plans – now the CMO comes to the table with a very well thought out set of if/then scenarios. As a result, marketing has a much more prominent voice in the organization’s overall resilience planning process.

Step One: Identify representative disruption scenarios. As a starting point, consider around five scenarios, including some global in nature and some specific to your business. Here is some inspiration from Ready.gov to help you get started.

Step Two: For each scenario, consider your customer’s needs, including likely pain points, impact on operations and impact on capacity. How are category competitors likely to respond?  

Step Three: Identify how you can support your customer. What assets or services can you offer to help them address their most critical needs?

Step Four: Assess your marketing organization’s ability to deliver that support. Evaluation criteria should include:

• Speed: How fast can you roll out vital communications and applications – e.g., a new microsite experience? In a day? A week? A matter of hours?

• Technology: Is your marketing tech stack built on a component architecture, enabling you to deploy new solutions essentially by snapping together existing objects?

• Team: Is there a defined team and process in place that can be activated rapidly and that has relevant training for the most likely disruption scenarios?

• Operations: Do you have multiple channels available for reaching customers, and no single points of failure?

• Governance: Is it clear whose authorization is needed under various circumstances and scenarios?

• Budget: Does marketing have discretionary budgets pre-approved and set aside for emergency use?

• Target: Has your organization identified a recipient list and messaging considerations for each scenario?

In case you missed it … Check out the first article in this series: Business Resilience and the CMO.