New ways to work and deliver proactive customer care

At Arcadis our purpose is to improve the quality of life for our people, our clients and our community. But the pandemic has not only upended all our lives, but also the way we will work going forward.

As Governments around the globe continue to encourage social distancing, companies have been adopting new virtual and flexible ways of working. For the vast majority of our people, partners and clients that means not only learning new ways of working internally, but also new ways of working together. 

Arcadis already had a flexible working policy in place for some years, and many of our people were regularly working remotely and utilising digital collaboration tools. From this experience we have collated four learnings from our client facing teams to best adopt and excel within new work strategies.

Understand: Understanding and communicating with our clients is more important than ever. In order to keep our clients at the centre of what we do, we need to make sure we understand the context, challenges and pipelines of their business. Arcadis does this by continuing our regular catch-ups in the virtual world, an outcome that has also seen an improved understanding of our global offering from some of our key technical experts. This was certainly harder to do before where people were required to be here in person.

Collaborate: As the world adjusts to the changes brought on by COVID-19, our clients are looking to their partners to guide them towards new and innovative ways of working collaboratively. It seems that whilst we have attempted to ensure normalcy during this period of social distancing, we have overshot and surprisingly become more connected and open than before. Embracing this newfound connectedness can ultimately lead to further prosperity, not only for our clients, but for our people too. 

Transform: Many of our clients are maintaining projects while bidding on future opportunities also remains strong, but something has changed too. The temptation during a crisis like this is to batten down the hatches and hope that business continues as usual, but a situation like this will change every business in one way or another. Our clients want to ensure we know their pain points but can support them through innovation to help their project continue whether in the delivery or the opportunity stage. Pretending that it is ‘business as usual’ is to deny the new realities and all clients see then is an organisation that lacks empathy and understanding.

Act: Most of our clients are also working from home, trying to understand how their clients are managing and wondering what the future of their business will be. For many of them this new environment is a challenge. We are trying to ensure their interactions with us are as seamless as possible whilst accelerating our digital innovation through things like Arcadis Gen that brings out the best from across the world through our global solutions details.

Our understanding of the client experience has fundamentally changed since this crisis. As a client focused company, we will continue to provide care to our clients, but with increased empathy about what they are facing. We will innovate and anticipate how our existing and new clients will change how they do business. We believe this will build stronger relationships that will continue for many years to come as we create our new business as usual.