Customer engagement, care and connection

Whilst we are still in social distancing, for most businesses, customer engagement has changed. There are new expectations and customers can be harder to reach. Here we look at how we can understand customer need and care and connection.

Understand where customers are

Have you picked up the phone to them? Hi, how are you? Is the simplest question to ask. How you treat your customers and employees, the empathy and care you have for them in this period will remain with people for a long time.

Take the time to properly connect with your customers and find out what they need and understand if you can serve them. This is about building better and stronger relationships.

Care and Connection

Whilst your business needs to remain afloat and thrive, your customers more than ever need your support right now not your marketing. Individuals and organisations are being judged on how well they are caring for their employees, customers and community.

Some great examples we have seen include:

● Marriot – being open with employees about their financial situation and senior leadership teams taking a pay cut.

● Mortgage provider - immediately offering payment holidays to customers and making them easy to access

● Luxury goods manufacturers repurposing perfume plants to make hand sanitizer.

● Budweiser donating their marketing and entertainment budget to the American Red Cross.

Ways in which you can serve customers

Recognise that your customers will be at different stages of digital maturity and the solutions you can provide for them may need to recognise that.

There are 3 distinct avenues for you:

Accelerate Digital Options – enable your services to be available online and, where needed, with guided supports. Chinese and UK financial institutions were quick to respond to this by offering ‘do it at home’ guided services.

Bring your business home – we are used to food home delivery, but what can you do to offer an ‘at home’ service. A good example we have seen is a car repair company offering to pick up service and drop back cars.

Protecting people in a physical environment – now that social distancing is easing, if your products and services are delivered at physical locations consider how best to protect customers whilst allowing interactions: touch free payment, courtesy screens, one way flow, and a social distanced set up.