19 ways to keep your customers amid COVID-19 concerns.

According to deBBie akwara

Reading the COVID-19: Implications For Business report by McKinseygot me thinking about how businesses across the globe can retain their customers amid the concerns for health and safety especially when one of the tips for avoiding the virus is avoiding crowded places.

The report highlights 7 actions that can help businesses of all kinds and this article is inspired by the fifth action which is 'stay close to your customers'.

How can you do this considering that you also have to think of the health and safety of your team? Well, I gave this a lot of thought and came up with the 19 Ways To Keep Your Customers Amid COVID-19 Concerns.

1. Think remote service channelsi.e. online (also captured in the above reference report). Create an opportunity for customers to engage (learn about your offerings), buy and get after-sale support from you remotely i.e. online. Think mobile apps, web assistance, social media assistance, etc.
2. Create sufficient and easy to understand customer education contentto help your customers navigate your online channels in different variants i.e. SMS, graphics, infographics, videos, articles, etc and circulate. Track engagement to find out what is working, what is not working and edit accordingly.
3. Move more resources into your contact centerespecially if you need to close down your brick and mortar business centers because trust me, your customers will be calling you, sending you emails or engaging you on social media/online so be ready. It is a great way to keep your customers and team safe healthwise.
4. Consider allowing your contact center/support team to work remotely (A). This will require some investment in technology, providing remote access to your contact center and CRM solutions so that your support team responses seamlessly and promptly resolve customer queries while you track remotely as well to ensure compliance with your service standards and SLAs.
5. Consider allowing your contact center/support team to work remotely (B). If your team uses only desktop computers, it is a good time to provide laptops or mobile devices, soundproof headsets, internet and airtime to help them offer service support to customers remotely.
6. Reduce your query resolution SLAs. Focus on getting more customer queries resolved at first contact thereby giving swift service in the absence of face to face interactions.
7. Share authentic, verified and periodic COVID-19 messageswith your customers to show you care beyond communication or customer engagement geared towards keeping you in business
8. Think about technology!Now is the time (if you have not explored this) to make a good case for investment in technology if your business and customer processes are manual and have to be executed by your customers and team in person with high use of paper/printed correspondence. It is time to see how you can centralize your operations leveraging technology especially when it comes to business and customer process management and approvals.
9. Conduct the necessary/preliminary health checksbefore your customers access your business locations in person as is currently done in Nigeria to curb the spread of the virus.
10. Protect your staff by rearranging your business area to create safety distances between customers and your team. Also, for your staff that falls ill, do not compromise and give them 2 to 5 days off to treat themselves.
11. Review/monitor your customers' transactions in real-timeand act immediately on insights you glean to improve your business and customer processes that directly or indirectly impact your customer's experience negatively
12. Integrate online payment solutions on your online channelsfor reduced customer effort in making payment for your product or service.
13. Find an effective logistics company that can deliver your products to your customersif you have to close down a physical store or if you are driving more traffic to your online service channels. Be sure to select a vendor that you can train on your customer experience (CX) blueprint and check back with your customers to monitor the level of service quality the vendor delivers.
14. Reinforce your customer experience blueprint(i.e. how you want customers to feel after they interact with your business across multiple remote channels) to your employees working remotely using different message variants in bite sizes for swift and easy execution.
15. Constantly get and act on customer feedback across all stages of their experience. Follow through on feedback especially between the product payment, product delivery, and post product usage
16. This is a great time to initiate customer loyalty schemes for your customers that shop or do business with you remotely. By rewarding them, you increase their usage of the platform and use this as strategy to attract more customers to your online service channels
17. Check-in with your customers!Periodically call, send an email, text message, etc to see how they and their loved ones are doing. Show you care. If peradventure a customer of yours tests positive to the virus, do likewise and keep in touch all the more.
18. Take the time to study trends and patterns in your customers' interactions and engagementsacross your alternative/remote service channels and review your customer and business processes inline
19. Create, innovate and design!Do not be closed-minded. Keep asking yourself how else can you keep your customers happy? Ask your customers what else you can do to help them enjoy your product/service and also keep them safe and create it! You never know, you may just be creating your most successful product/service till date

There you have it! What do you think? Anything else we can add to help businesses keep customers amid the COVID-19 concerns? Please share in the comments below.