Letter from Animaker’s CEO: How are we fighting Corona Outbreak?

These are challenging times. Times that we are not accustomed to. Times that truly test our capabilities and perseverance. As COVID19 grows to be a global concern, we at Animaker have activated our Business continuity plan. Instead of rushing through and going ahead with a hastily made BCP plan, we have created a plan that will ensure a great experience in every possible scenario. To start off, our first step in the BCP plan was to create a new BCP Team that includes critical functions like the Customer Success team, Financial Security team, Impact Analysis team and so on. While there are countless things we have worked on to execute this BCP plan, we want to highlight the important ones so that you can use it to build a similar plan for your own startup or small business. There are 4 sections where we put most of our efforts into.

1. Health & Safety:

Without a question, the health and safety of its employees should come first at any organization. To ensure the safety of our employees, we have mandated Work from Home at all our global locations (San Francisco, Bengaluru, and Chennai). We are also ready to support all our 5 Million users directly from our homes. We have purchased new laptops for those who use desktops at office And we also have software and communication systems in place to support that. Apart from this, we have also introduced and new policies and ceremonies to ensure the mental well being of our remote-working employees. A fun part of this new policy is to have a virtual coffee meet every morning via video call before we jump onto our responsibilities.

2. Awareness initiatives for Employees, Families, and Communities

To make people aware, we decided to do what we do best. Help people create videos! We have introduced video templates that are relevant to the current crisis the world is dealing with right now. We hope you find them as useful as we have.

3. Mandated internal communication through Videos:

Firstly, we have to agree that no meeting will be better than a Face to Face meeting. But what if you wanted to convey the same information to 10 different people from different timezones. Pre-recorded videos are the answer that has helped us a lot here. Pre-recorded videos are much better than simple voice notes and seem to be a trend that people at Animaker really love. ;)

4. Revamped Customer Success Goals

There is a reason why physical offices exist even at this digital age. These are intellectual hubs where the best minds can collaborate and create something truly amazing. When you talk specifically about Customer Success at a nimble company like ours, its easier to just walk up a technical person’s desk and solve a user issue. To ensure that this seamless focus on customer experience continues, we have redefined our Customer Success Goals. Today, every single team at Animaker is a stakeholder in customer success. Now this is something that we recommend every company to follow. In addition, we have assigned multiple people responsible for each of the customer success goals. This way we can ensure continuity even when an employee has to disconnect for a health concern or any other reason. These are 4 sections that play a critical part in our new and refined BCP plan at Animaker. We hope these points help define a BCP plan at your company as well. I want to end this blog by quoting Darwin’s theory I feel this is more relevant to today’s world than ever before as being adaptable is the need of the hour. Companies and individuals who adapt the fastest will continue to thrive. If you think we can add any other point to our BCP plan, please let us know in the comments below.