It is certainly clear that COVID-19 created a serious health crisis around the world. Apart from that, it ruined the world’s economy. Businesses of all sizes have closed temporarily while others permanently shut down due to losses and the risk of infection.
Business leaders are facing a greater challenge as the United States starts to reopen after months of lockdown. These challenges include lost revenue and the decreasing number of clients or customers due to economic downfall.
The challenges that business leaders today are facing are eerily similar to what happened during the Great Recession that lasted for 3 years from 2007 to 2009 in the US. During that time, business owners were either closing their business for good or downsizing their employees to half the workforce.
However, many companies and businesses survived because of their ability to maintain strong relationships with their customers.
Building a stronger relationship with your customer in this time of crisis is imperative for your business to thrive. To do that, you need to implement these different strategies:
Create a Dedicated Task Force in Communicating With Your Customers
As a business leader, you should establish a team within your company dedicated to customer support. This enables your business to communicate clearly with your old and new customers. The team must be composed of people within your company. You should accept their suggestions and ideas with an open heart to come up with a more effective communication strategy for your customers. If the strategies and protocols are executed and maintained very well, it will improve your business’s customer experience.
Regroup your company and review
This pandemic will surely end, but there’s no specific timeline for that yet. Once this pandemic ends, you should bring your entire team together and point out the mistakes, lessons, and ideas learned during the pandemic that can contribute to the company’s overall improvement. As a business leader, you have to keep in mind that you should start fixing your company first internally. By doing that, you can smoothly serve your customers again.
Provide promotional offers for loyal and first-time customers
You should come up with a welcome program or a promotional offer to your current and first-time customers to somehow cheer them up after surviving the pandemic. Welcome programs and promotional offers are great marketing tools to attract more customers. You can send them welcome emails that come with a discount or a freebie voucher for your product or service, or you can send them onboarding emails to establish good communication with your new customers. This kind of strategy will set the tone positively, which will impact your future business transactions with your customer. Aside from being a welcoming and friendly gesture, this kind of strategy will encourage your current customers to patronize your brand while setting a good first impression on new customers.
Be transparent to your customers to earn more trust
Customers nowadays always have high expectations with the brands they patronize, and they want them to be transparent all the time. Transparency means providing your customers with all the needed info of new changes in the company, especially nowadays that many brands have disrupted supply chains and services because of the pandemic. Inform your customers right away if some adjustments or changes are needed to be done in your company so that they will be aware of what is happening. Show them your brand’s human side. Always resolve customer issues as soon as possible
The task force that you’ve formed to communicate with your current and new customers will be assigned for this. You can start by categorizing the issues that usually affect your clients. You should rank your clients from most to least affected by the pandemic. Next, utilize the tools to communicate with your clients by sending them emails that focus on providing helpful information to aid your clients and assure them that you have their back all the time. One great idea is to create a separate email for your clients to contact if they have important questions or use social media to engage with them in a better way.
Reach out and talk to your customers as soon as possible
Reaching out to your customers makes them feel valued and encourages them even more to patronize your brand. Make sure you have a hotline for them to call so that they can talk to you or your dedicated team that is tasked to communicate with them. Talking to them through the phone is a great insight to see how your clients feel in this pandemic. Ask them how they are doing, ask them for any suggestions to improve your products or service, and provide them updates of your company and how your industry is doing amidst the pandemic.
Make follow-ups regularly
After you’ve communicated with your customers, make sure that you don’t leave them hanging. Always make a follow-up email, call, or text after you contact them. This is crucial in building trust with your customers. This also shows empathy and concern about them. This will also provide your brand with better insights to further improve your services to your customers, especially in this time of a pandemic.
Conclusion
Your customers will always be the foundation of your business. A caring gesture will positively affect your business in the long run. You may not feel it right away, but when this pandemic ends, your customers will surely value your brand for always being there for them. By doing social media marketing in Orlando you can build a stronger relationship with your customers during a pandemic.
