Like many of you, I have been watching the news with a certain level of anxiety. The situation definitely calls for concern, and we cannot sit idle — we must be proactive in our efforts to help stabilize our customers’ businesses, our own business and, of course, our employees.

To put it simply, we want to help. And an unplanned benefit of our augmented workforce is that our Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) can provide relief to businesses seeking to be more recession-resistant – whether you maintain your workforce or, unfortunately, have to adjust in response to the economic downturn.

Over the next week, I will be talking to CFOs, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success leaders to hear their thoughts and concerns about the current situation with Covid-19. I started with a number of my peer CEOs over the last few days and, from my conversations, it is clear that Conversica is in a unique position to help its clients more than most.

What Is Conversica Doing to Help Its Current Customers?

Conversica has a set of cultural values that guide everything we do, from big decisions to day-to-day operations. Topping that list is our dedication to being “Customer Obsessed.” We seek to deeply understand our customers’ businesses and problems so that we can help solve them. We strive to think and act from our customer’s perspective.

In that effort, we have developed a few initiatives to provide relief to our current customers including:

1. New COVID-19 Conversations: Conversica is working on new conversations available to customers in response to the coronavirus. For example, a store can use our Intelligent Virtual Assistants to autonomously engage and reply to customers regarding what the business is doing to keep customers safe.
2. Free Services:
   • New IVAs: We are proactively offering all transport customers who use either our Automotive Sales AI Assistant or our Automotive Service AI Assistant to add the other for free, for a period of time to help them get through this crisis.
   • New Skills and More: We are proactively offering all of our non-transport customers the ability to use all of our IVA skills, have unlimited leads/contacts, and have the opportunity to add a Customer Success AI Assistant for free, for a period of time to help them get through this crisis.

Those are only a couple of many examples that we’re offering to help our customers. 

Listening to Business Leaders

As I mentioned in the introduction, I will be speaking with business leaders across Marketing, Sales, Customer Success and Finance to hear their thoughts, concerns and strategies during this difficult time. These conversations will be shared on the Conversica blog over the coming weeks.

From my initial discussions, these are common responses I am hearing from people like you:

• As a business leader, you are freezing hiring and keeping expenditures low, but you still need coverage. The “haystack” of digital traffic may have not changed (our network still seems to be engaged at the same volume due to many being at home and more digital than ever), BUT the number of opportunities are shrinking. What do you do?
  • Answer: While bringing on new hires might not be possible at this moment, you can still augment your teams by bringing on an Intelligent Virtual Assistant. Our IVAs are quick to deploy, highly scalable and autonomous in their lead and customer coverage. This digital-first solution can fill in the gaps left by pausing hiring. 
  • Also, you need your people to focus on what they do best, such as creative work, problem-solving, building relationships and, most importantly, closing business. Allow our IVAs to feed your team with the right opportunities to keep your team occupied and operational, and help you soften the blow to your original revenue plans.
• Unfortunately, you need to right-size or down-size, but the business still needs to push on without getting into a “spiral.” What do you do?
  • Answer: This is one of the hardest decisions for business leaders to make. But if you need to maintain business momentum while right-sizing staff, our IVAs can bolster operations in an autonomous, scalable and affordable manner.

We hope our actions will provide you, our customers, with guidance and relief as we navigate these difficult times. Feel free to reach out to us to share your thoughts. We’d love to hear from you.

Stay healthy and stay productive,
Jim Kaskade