A Coronavirus Update From the Userlike Team
Dear Userlike customers and partners,
I hope you and your loved ones are well despite these difficult and extraordinary times.
I’ve been slow to comment on the current crisis, thinking that the last thing you need is more news concerning the coronavirus. But when some of you reached out to me asking about the status of Userlike, and whether the coronavirus will have an impact on our operations, I realized that a statement was needed.
So first things first: The coronavirus has had no impact on the bottomline of our operations so far, and we don’t expect it to for the foreseeable future.
I say the bottomline because we did of course have to make drastic changes to our working setup. For two weeks, the entire Userlike team has been working from home. I think this hasn’t been as big of a shock for us as it has been for many other companies. We love our office, but remote work has always been part of our DNA .
The current pandemic is awful, but I feel grateful that it came at a time when we have access to a lot of great software for digital communication. Imagine it having struck before the internet got up to speed with web conference calls, live chat and e-commerce. We would have already been down for the count.
As one of those digital communication solutions, we are very much aware of the heightened responsibility this crisis has given us, since almost all of your customer interactions will likely happen from afar. We see it as our duty to ensure that your customers can easily contact you even in these difficult times.
Beyond this core responsibility, over the past days we’ve been talking a lot within the team about ways we could possibly contribute to the greater good. We want to help alleviate the stress and struggles this crisis caused. A recent event gave us an idea.
Last weekend, one of our teammates tried to call the medical emergency center because his 18-month son had a heavy fever. Even though extra teams were on duty to deal with the surge in coronavirus-related questions, waiting queues were long. And once he talked to a supporting nurse, it was obvious that they were under a lot of pressure.
This experience made us realize: we may not know anything about medicine, but we can help with communication at scale. This is why we teamed up with our partner OMQ to develop a chatbot to help healthcare institutions answer questions regarding the coronavirus and COVID-19.
With information from the Robert Koch Institute , we hope this chatbot will free up resources for healthcare institutes and help the German population better inform themselves.
What the world really needs more of right now, of course, are doctors. But I hope that through creative thinking, businesses and industries can find ways to support them by using their unique strengths.
I am convinced that we can overcome this crisis together in good cooperation. Please feel free to contact me or the team at any time if you have questions!
Yours,
Timoor Taufig
