The New Normal

Much more than a disruption, the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing a new reality. Beyond the heavy toll on lives, families and businesses, this pandemic will leave a lasting mark on what we value, and how we interact with one another in our communities. The long-term impact on business will also be profound. To succeed in the next normal, enterprises have the opportunity to:

Achieve resiliency in operations to meet the immediate needs of customers, associates and other stakeholders.

Adjust 2020 and 2021 strategic plans, operations, and financials for successful near-term recovery.

Reimagine services and uncover innovation by understanding the post-COVID business dynamics within their sector.

ANALYTICS

The need for integrated, trusted, easily understood data across business silos has been underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic as organizations seek visibility into key performance, operating and business health metrics. Transparency of data now will enable critical, informed decisioning and position businesses for success in both the short and long term.

Questions to Consider

How is your customer engagement mix shifting during the pandemic:
By channel (online, phone, physical, partners)?
By product type?
Are your customers now asking for new options to engage? Will these trends continue post-pandemic?
How are competitors serving customers during the pandemic?
What is your profitability (cost to acquire, cost to serve) for each channel and product?
Are your customer types changing due to the pandemic?
How will these pandemic-driven shifts impact your business if they last into the future?
Should you adjust pricing, eCommerce strategies, customer marketing etc. to ensure your business stays resilient?

Potential Solution Methods

Customer profiling, preferences and segmentation
Customer valuation and profitability
Customer attrition and retention
Market research and look-a-like modeling
Modern data architecture and 360 view of the customer

Questions to Consider

Is your team unable to provide forecasts for the current COVID-19 demand for supplies like personal protective equipment (PPE)?
Are they just too busy keeping up with the daily need for general metrics leaving useful predictive scenarios on the sidelines?
How is your leadership making decisions on supply distribution during the pandemic? Are they able to take advantage of proven analytical models and methods?
How will your business respond as the effects of the pandemic subside?

Potential Solution Methods

Data Collection from External Sources for Internal Use such as:
State Health Department, Johns Hopkins and NVSS Weekly Mortality Estimates
Catalog Unification
Ensure products from new vendors are properly integrated into your existing catalog
Link product similar SKUs from vendors via clustering and probabilistic edit distance
Low friction collaboration with procurement teams to validate match rates
Predictive Modeling – focus on the effect and staying power of COVID-19 black swan event through interpretable methods
Spatiotemporal modeling
Timeseries Changepoint Detection
Vendor Risk Modeling
Bayesian Forecasting
Data visualization and executive reporting

AGILITY

Businesses can improve their resiliency and accelerate the path to recovery by embracing agility. Enterprises will need to reimagine their strategy across customer, people and technology to adapt and activate their business post-COVID.

Questions to Consider

How will your workforce environment change post COVID 19?
How will you operate differently based on changes in your workforce environment?
How well do you understand the roles of your organization related to your business functions and capabilities?
How will your business functions and capabilities change relative to customer preferences?
How will the roles of your employees be affected by the changes to your business functions and capabilities?
Have you thought about how to address the implications (i.e. risk, productivity, management, employee success, etc.) of these changes to roles and workforce environment?
Have you thought about how to optimize your employee engagement?
Have you thought about how to optimize your operations?

Potential Solution Methods

Impact Analysis and Prioritization Assessments for:
Operational functions
Customers Experience
Partners / Suppliers
Workforce Strategy Planning
Role Effectiveness Evaluations
Employee engagement
Business Functions and Capabilities
Implement strategic roadmap with specific intention on:
Focused Skills
Industry Expertise
Measurement of progress

Questions to Consider

Has demand for your products and services spiked due to the pandemic?
Are you triaging customer requests?
Do you lack visibility into inventories, and future demand?
Do you understand your team’s capacity to meet the COVID surge in customer needs?
Is decision-making centralized during the pandemic?

Potential Solution Methods

Agile-driven autonomy – push decision-making down to the team as much as possible
Proactive analysis of current / past issues for patterns and future mitigation & resolution
Forward looking advanced data modeling to predict demand
Kanban to visualize backlog and optimize flow / throughput
Quantify team capacity, autonomy and velocity
Size the backlog items and measure the team’s capacity to forecast throughput, and forecasted cycle time impact if more resources are added
Backlog weighting (WSJF, customer value, topline value)

RISK

COVID accelerated the already rapidly evolving security and risk environment, requiring firms to respond to rapidly changing needs. This presents businesses with new risks and security threats. Organizations must develop and implement measures not only to safeguard themselves from immediate harm, but also to protect from additional disruption.

Questions to Consider

How are you managing risk with the workforce operating outside the traditional office setting?
How are you training and educating both new and existing workers on the changing threat landscape?
How are you maintaining and monitoring equipment in this UYOD (Use Your Own Device) environment?
Have you reviewed, updated, and tested your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans for this new work setting?
Have you identified which systems are business critical? Have you identified which employees are business critical?
What risks have emerged that need to be addressed?
Do you have plans around long-term disruptions and alternative working?

Potential Solution Methods

Risk and Vulnerability Assessments
Virtual Workforce Training
Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery and Pandemic Planning
Business Impact Assessments
Table Top Exercises

FINANCIAL SERVICES

COVID’s impact to financial entities reaches well beyond the balance sheet. Firms are navigating providing hardship flexibility to customers, volatile markets, evaluating a new environment for lending, and skyrocketing customer-service volumes.

Questions to Consider

Are government regulators requiring additional, more frequent reporting?
Are your teams bogged down with response, leaving them manually wrangling data to get the reports needed?
Is the source-to-report process understood and traceable? Is it rapidly repeatable?
Are you dealing with manual quality checks on the data due to inaccuracy?
Are there automation solutions in-house to reduce time to produce reporting?
Do you trust the data?

Potential Solution Methods

Automate data quality checks
Provide surge BI capacity to meet reporting demand
Explore source-data architecture and modern data platform solutions for speed to insights
Explore business intelligence automation
Establish metadata

Questions to Consider

Are you an SBA lender struggling to meet demand of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)?
Do you have a surge in new customers seeking PPP loans?
Is your PPP loan application ingestion manual?
Are you working overtime to processing the PPP demands?
Have you determined the capacity needed to process applications?
Are you ready for the next stimulus package?

Solution Methods for the Next Wave of Fiscal Policy

Impact analysis and assessment of key banking processes
New account
Loan activation
Loan management
Intelligent Process Automation Integration
Identify procedures that can be automated
Design new workflows with automation
Prototype the integration of manual and automated procedures
Implement a strategic roadmap to:
Streamline existing new account and loan processes
Automate to improve speed, accuracy and overall customer experience
Introduce robust Cycle Time metrics to accurately track progress

HEALTHCARE

COVID is at its core a healthcare crisis and our brave front line healthcare workers are leading the charge in the battle against the virus. Health insurance companies are also working quickly to ease the constraints facing our health system. The need for fast action and collaboration has never been greater.

Questions to Consider

Are you facing high call volumes from members regarding coverages, availability of care?
Are your members and providers experiencing longer than acceptable wait times?
Have you experienced catastrophic servicing channel technology failures or technology capacity issues?
Do your members seek confirmation that their elective procedures will be rescheduled and covered?
Are your members and providers increasingly anxious about the status of prior authorizations for COVID and non-COVID related care?
Are your customer-facing teams struggling to meet service expectations as a result of working remotely?
With the increase in call volumes, are you aggressively seeking ways to enable self-service to improve member and provider satisfaction?
Are your call center agents frustrated as a result of dealing with exasperated customers?
Are your service representatives meeting productivity expectations?
Is growing dis-engagement from your workforce affecting servicing, performance and productivity?

Potential Solutions

Telephony Service Evaluation & Recommendation
Improve flow, call segmentation, and / or increase self service
Telephony Service Integrations
HIPAA-ready natural language processing, sentiment analysis, text analytics
Alternatives within your current self-service platforms and / or augmentation with advanced alternative technologies
New Servicing Channels
Portals and / or mobile, self-help chat
Analytics Environments & Data Analysis
Targeted intelligence research to segment and customize servicing treatment, and to prioritize efforts to increase member and provider satisfaction
Call Outsourcing Solutions
Increase access and capacity

Questions to Consider

Are you facing high call volumes from patients about COVID-19 test results?
Is your staff calling you because they are concerned about their own health and have questions on testing, benefits, and procedures if they are sick?
Have you experienced catastrophic servicing channel technology failures or technology capacity issues?
Is your scheduling department overwhelmed by elective procedure scheduling challenges, including not knowing when procedures will be allowed again, and how that will happen?
Are your customer-facing teams struggling to meet service expectations as a result of working remotely?
With the increase in call volumes, are you aggressively seeking ways to enable self-service to improve member and provider satisfaction?
Are your call center agents frustrated as a result of dealing with exasperated customers?
Are your service representatives meeting productivity expectations?
Is growing dis-engagement from your workforce affecting servicing, performance and productivity?

Potential Solutions

Telephony Service Evaluation & Recommendation
Improve flow, call segmentation, and / or increase self service
Telephony Service Integrations
HIPAA-ready natural language processing, sentiment analysis, text analytics
Alternatives within your current self-service platforms and / or augmentation with advanced alternative technologies
New Servicing Channels
Portals and / or mobile, self-help chat
Analytics Environments & Data Analysis
Targeted intelligence research to segment and customize servicing treatment, and to prioritize efforts to increase member and provider satisfaction
Call Outsourcing Solutions
Increase access and capacity

Questions to Consider

How are you managing privacy and security in relation to changing HIPAA regulations in response to COVID?
Have you provided resources to employees to effectively secure their home networks and prevent a PHI breach?
Are their workstations locked down so PHI cannot be downloaded locally?
Are employees encouraged or required to access PHI in a secure area in their home (if possible)?
Are you remotely managing, patching, and securing your assets to adhere to HIPAA and HITRUST compliance?
Have you reviewed your I&AM controls to ensure employees have access to what is needed to perform their daily job responsibilities?
Do you have a process to continually update employees regarding the latest security requirements and best practices?
Have you properly tested, secured, and developed a contingency plan for your virtual care and telemedicine capabilities?

Potential Solution Methods

HIPAA Privacy and Security Policies, Standards, & Procedures
Security Awareness & Training
HIPAA Assessments
Information Security Audits
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Vulnerability Management

PUBLIC SECTOR

Federal, state, and local agencies are at the forefront in leading and coordinating COVID response. From serving as a reliable source of accurate information, to providing and coordinating resources to mitigate the social, medical, and economic effects of COVID, to continuing to provide business-as-usual service to meet urgent citizen needs, public sector agencies are on point to deliver.

Questions to Consider

What new or different needs for information and analysis do citizens and other stakeholders have during this pandemic and what role does my agency have in meeting these needs?
What role and responsibility do we have for communications and how will we meet them?
How can we analyze and process the information we hold to provide insights that can be useful in COVID response?
What needs for information that we hold will other agencies have and how can we meet these needs?

Potential Solution Methods

Dashboarding and Visualization
Command center dashboard development
Emergency communication templates
Effective data communication design
Data and Information Analysis
COVID information analysis and reporting
Critical resource supply and demand analysis
Trend and demand forecasting
Interagency Data Sharing
COVID data sharing automation
Data preparation and cleansing

Questions to Consider

How scalable and sustainable are the remote workforce solutions now in place?
Are employees able to access all systems and data required to be productive?
How effectively are teams collaborating during this crisis?
Is working remotely introducing new and potentially unknown risks?
Is our remote workforce remaining compliant with Federal and state mandates?
Have you provided resources to employees to effectively secure their home networks and prevent a compromise of sensitive data?

Potential Solution Methods

Remote Workforce Alternatives and Scaling Assessment
VPN architecture and sizing
Desktop as a Service (DaaS) strategy, architecture, and implementation
Remote resource access enablement
Information Security
Data loss prevention needs assessment
Remote workforce security policy documentation
COVID Security Awareness and Training update
Remote Collaboration
Remote Agile team support and coaching
Remote collaboration assessment, training, and remediation

Questions to Consider

How are you managing privacy and security in relation to changing HIPAA regulations in response to COVID?
Have you provided resources to employees to effectively secure their home networks and prevent a PHI breach?
Are their workstations locked down so PHI cannot be downloaded locally?
Are employees encouraged or required to access PHI in a secure area in their home (if possible)?
Are you remotely managing, patching, and securing your assets to adhere to HIPAA and HITRUST compliance?
Have you reviewed your I&AM controls to ensure employees have access to what is needed to perform their daily job responsibilities?
Do you have a process to continually update employees regarding the latest security requirements and best practices?
Have you properly tested, secured, and developed a contingency plan for your virtual care and telemedicine capabilities?

Potential Solution Methods

HIPAA Privacy and Security Policies, Standards, & Procedures
Security Awareness & Training
HIPAA Assessments
Questions to Consider
What new or different needs will citizen customers have as a result of COVID and what contact center changes are needed to meet these needs?
Are these changes changing contact center volume and creating unacceptable wait times?
Are current agent skills, IVR/VRU trees, and floodgate messages optimized for these changes?
Are your customer-facing teams struggling to meet service expectations as a result of working remotely?
With the increase in call volumes, are you aggressively seeking ways to enable self-service to improve citizen customer satisfaction?
Are your contact center agents frustrated as a result of dealing with exasperated customers?
Are there additional options for contact center optimization
Customer self-service
Chatbots
Robotic process automation (RPA)
Are your service representatives meeting productivity expectations?
Is growing dis-engagement from your workforce affecting servicing, performance and productivity?

Potential Solution Methods

Contact Center Evaluation and Recommendation
Improve flow,  call segmentation, or increase self-service  options
Add new service option including chatbots and RPA
Alternatives  within your current self-service platforms or augmentation  with advanced alternative technologies
Analytics Environments and Data Analysis
Targeted intelligence research to segment and customize servicing treatment, and to prioritize efforts to increase member and provider satisfaction
Contact Outsourcing Solutions
Increase access and capacity
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Vulnerability Management

As a B Corp, the belief that we have a responsibility to our communities is at the core of everything we do and serves as our North Star. Our technical depth and strong business acumen uniquely position us to provide risk management support during COVID-19. Our consultants are here to help reduce the friction of adopting new tools and technologies, to ensure your people are positioned for productivity, and to guide your organization in implementing a risk management plan with minimal disruption.

ANALYTICS

AGILITY

RISK

FINANCIAL SERVICES

HEALTHCARE

PUBLIC SECTOR

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