Reinventing The Customer Experience – Key Ideas to Retain Customers During The COVID 19 Situation

[#1]

In an unforeseen challenge, we either become hyper-focused or lose all focus. At such a time, our current customers are the best bet for staying profitable in the months to come. Digital engagement is one of the strongest lever for any organization, today. Prioritizing clear, consistent, and empathetic messaging across digital channels helps and I have outlined some of these ways to retain customers and strengthen the relationship further during the Coronavirus outbreak.

1. Communicate & outreach: Enhance your communication to support meaningful relationships. Communicate with clients proactively and help them with immediate challenges and build long term loyalty. Increase proactive, personalized, and timely communication aligned to customer context. Your regular updates can show you care and are there for them. Most crucial now is to be authentic with your customers about the challenges you’re facing while reinforcing your commitment to serving them through personalized communications relevant to their situation.
2. Engage & Understand Your Customer: Understand customer priorities, challenges and propose solutions considering current market conditions. Brands that are captivating and acting now are building a unique trust capital that will live long after the crisis and won't be forgotten. Use your data insights to generate actionable insights and improve customer outcomes, uncover specific areas of interest or where they are running into friction, share the best practices, share useful insights or light content they can consume from their homes, and to stay top of mind. Be conscious of the message you're sending and make the best of the resources you have at hand. Make sure you are delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time that can help them in a challenging time.
3. Adoption of digital self-service: It’s time to encourage digital adoption. Keep experimenting and modifying your marketing plan to find what works right now. We all are living in a unique time in history, nobody knows exactly what's going to happen next or what the timeline is. This is a time to go from breakdown to breakthrough, pivoting to the new demand while working for the future.
4. Listen: Pay attention to the truth that matters. Enhance communications to support meaningful relationships. Do hear your customers and be sensitive to what they are going through, keep all channels of communication such as emails or feedback forms open, to understand what your customers need, their changing behavior and wants, and how you can help them during this pandemic. 
5. Embrace the new ways of working: Leverage remote collaboration, workflows, and meeting platforms, give virtual training, webinars. Revise your current marketing strategy; your business likely already had a marketing plan in place for the coming months. But during a crisis, that plan might be no longer relevant. Review your all advertising, analyzing trends, email marketing, social media calendar, and any other planned marketing efforts. If you don’t do this, you risk sharing something that your customers might view as insensitive or inappropriate. Review where are we now, what can we do to close the gap? Reframe and focus on actions that will minimize the negative consequences and maximize the positive. Focus on tuning budget cuts to reflect overall business goals and enhancing geo-based planning, executions, and measurement (recognizing that different markets have different hotspot scores).
6. Exceed customer expectations in unexpected ways: Improve customer experience. Do reassure that we are uniquely able to help the customers. Surpassing customer expectations, during this time, can be hugely rewarding. Let’s reset the expectations by envisioning a bold and bright future.

To everybody EXPERIENCES matters more than ever now; how you leave your footprints to your customers, building the connections, personalized experience, and contribute to the community is what matters now. And when this crisis is behind us, customers will recall the brands that satisfied their rational needs and those that genuinely met their needs during a very tough time.

How are you managing the impact of coronavirus on your business?

[#2]

Thanks for sharing essential aspects in these unprecedented times. Good read Divya!