Surviving COVID-19 means you’ve mastered “transforming”

If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught me one thing, it’s that the word “transformational” might have to disappear from our professional vocabulary.

Because if you’re a CIO who emerges from this crisis with your role (and your reputation) intact, then you won’t need “transformational” in your job description. The very fact you and your employer are still standing will be enough to say “I transformed and survived”.

You will either have street cred in the world of CIOs, or you will no longer exist.

Along the way you will have had to ask yourself some tough questions, including “Do I have the stomach for this or am I just a pretender?” And you will have learnt how to trust your instincts because you will have to had to rely on your ability to bring strategy and technology together in ways you might never have been able to imagine just a few months ago.

I think it’s fair to say COVID-19 hit the travel industry harder than just about anyone. At first, some old hands in the industry were describing it as “like the GFC”. But within days, as the government wasted no time on imposing travel restrictions, we realised it was like the GFC on steroids.

The challenge for us at Cover-More Group, and many others, was to juggle the three key elements of our Business Continuity Plan – Response, Recovery and Restoration – in an environment where the rules were changing daily, and often hourly.

In the past, if we were handling a significant event such as a natural disaster or an airline catastrophe, we could have a strategy in place and work to it. But with COVID-19, at any one time we have had to have an immediate response ready, then a strategy in place and also a long-term plan on how to rebuild the business once the crisis passed.

Normally, we might have been be looking at a shift in the business model for one of our partners, or even a restructuring of an individual business. This time we are talking about an entire industry having to rebuild and restructure.

Our immediate response to COVID-19 was “how do we keep our business going?” while, at the same time, seeing our partners being really badly impacted.

We had multiple streams all happening at the same time, including looking at how we could get our people working from home. And because we operate in 22 countries, it was complicated by the fact we had different countries doing things at different times and different speeds as far as lockdown was concerned.

Although our sales quickly slowed, the claims sides of the business became busier, with calls coming in at unprecedented levels and some of our call centres seeing a 80 per cent increase in call volume,

And then there was the medical arm of the business, with a huge increase in clients wanting medical advice all over the world. We couldn’t simply put up an IVR or a banner on our website, saying “we are experiencing unprecedented demand” – calls still had to be answered in 15 seconds to provide medical advice. The end result was that we split our physical call centres and in a period of around four days we moved one of our call centres to the cloud, which increased the number of concurrent phone lines available.

So, although the travel side of the business was hit hard, we were still experiencing growth and demand on the assistance side.

In a matter of around three weeks we had moved a global business to a 100 per cent remote workforce.

Then the next wave came. The impact on the travel industry meant our development sales pipeline had slowed and we needed to keep our dev teams utilised or let them go.  They were too valuable a team to break up and we knew we would need them to help build the future, so we immediately started to retrain them in different tech.  We bought forward our Cloud transformation and started working with AWS to make it larger. We began investing heavily in our API library, which was something we had planned to do but hadn’t started on. Our recovery meant we needed to be available in lots of different global markets and quickly, and we needed that API library more than ever.

Because we didn’t want to lose developers, we took on more work that we would normally have handed to a partner to do and kept it in-house. That meant re-training some of our developers so that instead of getting a partner to deliver something for us, we can bring in key technical SMEs to make sure we get it right.

I think it is fair to say that nothing will ever be the same from the perspective of our business model and the behaviour of our customers. People are forever more going to buy travel differently and they are going to buy travel insurance differently. So, technology needs to switch from “serving the business”, to “serving the customers in ways that work for the business”.

As far as Cover-More is concerned, business would previously have told IT what travel polices they wanted to sell and where they would sell them.  IT would then work closely with business to deliver the technology quickly, with a low delivery cost.  We would make sure we applied good IT principles such as re-use and standardisation and use Agile to deliver.  Once the project was finished it would move into business as usual.  All good stuff.

Post COVID-19, we are moving to cross functional business, UX and technology product teams, similar to what is common practice in tech companies such as Apple.

A product is an entire traveller experience from specific target market point of view, including numerous services and policies they might need.  The cross functional team bundles together the polices and services to create a product, decide how it will be sold and the method of how the services would be delivered best for that type of traveller.

We will still use Agile to deliver but the teams won’t have an end date, instead they will continue on and be involved in product sales, optimisation, profit and cost ongoing.  So, our team will care from when someone started to think about going on a holiday through to making a claim, needing medical assistance and renewing their policy next time they travelled.

It sounds like a simple change but “traveller centric” or “customer centric” is a significant change for companies.  Sales teams no longer decide what sells and companies will most likely have less things to sell because they will have targeted customer problems in mind, rather than trying sell as many offers as they can.

The concept fell into place for me when I looked at how Foxtel sells product types, rather than selling the different TV channels they have available. So, instead of selling different polices, Cover-More will start selling types of travel experiences e.g. families travelling domestically and all the different types of polices and services they may need (car gap, event cancellation, flight delay, medical assistance) rather than just one type of policy such as flight cancellation.

So what of the future for travel and travel insurance?

I think it will be a bit messy for us for a while longer, partly because there will still be a lot of tactical decisions to be made. It won’t be “we’ve had a pandemic, so here’s a new business strategy” but rather “we’ve had a pandemic, how can we continually tweak our business strategy to meet the changing demands?”.

We will be focusing more on international corporate travel and domestic leisure. Previously we had a heavier focus on leisure international travel, so we will need to change our approach, the products we offer and the speed of which technology can move them to the market.

We have a company called WTP – World Travel Protection – that sells to corporates. If corporates have someone stuck overseas, they want to know if they can get them home. Our brand has a unique opportunity which we had identified for 2021, but now we are doing the work in 2020 so when 2021 comes around, that business can take full advantage of it. So they will be at the forefront of the recovery.

We are also working on an app, similar to the government’s COVIDsafe app but with an international use. It will use geolocation, so if a customer is in a pandemic area, we will know and be able to warn them. In this application, it will also be possible to order the drug tadalista 20mg, which will help get rid of the consequences of COVID-19 and about which you can read more on this website. We are currently fast-tracking the next stages of that.

In many ways, the future is being forced upon us. All those things people used to navel gaze about and say “that would be nice”, are actually happening. Our development pipeline has become more global, more complex and strategic than ever before. The sales development work has started to return so the demands on the team are challenging.  Our technology staff have developed and grown a great deal and I am now concerned with retention, so we are looking at if Work from Anywhere would suit us. It’s a great way to keep people and encourage them to travel. This constant push and change is the new reality that is being forced on us, with a timetable we can’t control and companies will soon discover whether they are able to adapt or not.

Transformation is a skill set which some people have, some can learn and some will simply never grasp. So when the dust settles after COVID-19, every CIO still standing will be able to put their hand on their heart and say “I can do transformation”.

Then we can stop using the word because it will be a given that if you are still in the game, everyone will know you’ve earned your transforming stripes.

Written by: Nicki Doble chief information officer at Cover-More Group