Tips for Serving Customers During COVID-19 Crisis

This is the time for building strong customer relationships, being of service, being helpful, strengthening credibility and trust in you and your organisation.

Customers are unlikely to be in the mood for buying unless you have products and services that will specifically help manage this crisis. If you do, make sure they clearly understand how you can help them and know how to contact you.

Do postpone marketing and PR campaigns that have the objective of persuading people to purchase something that does not specifically help with their response to the coronavirus.

Instead, focus your marketing communications on how you are continuing to support customers and clients during this time. They are much more likely to respond to offers of support for the challenges/ issues they are facing at the moment.

Organise for marketing, sales and customer service advisors to phone your customers to reassure them and offer support. Ask about their biggest challenges at the moment and how you can help them cope; be prepared not to charge during this time of crisis. This is the time for building relationships.

Be honest about the impacts on your organisation: how staff being ill, self-isolating and working from home are all affecting your ability to serve customers. If you are taking longer to respond be open about saying so.

Many people will be working from home. They may not have high-speed internet or VPN access. They are likely to be opening emails and viewing your website on their mobile handsets. Double-check your email, website and extranet systems work well on mobile and tablet operating systems.

Don’t share rumours. If you do want to help customers find the latest information about the virus, share links to official government sites and professional associations whom you trust. Just share the link rather than copying and pasting information; then you don’t need to worry about keeping what you share up-to-date.

We are looking forward to seeing you on the other side of this crisis. When you are ready, contact us for a conversation about how you can improve customer relationships, marketing and public relations.

If you are struggling now and want support for crisis communications, you can contact AZTech customer service hotline +971 4 427 5400 or send an email to [email protected].

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