7 WAYS TO STAY IN TOUCH WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS DURING THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the business ecosystem and has affected many businesses all around the world. In Nigeria, companies are struggling to respond to the effects of this pandemic. With the shutdown of Lagos, Abuja and Ogun States, this struggle has intensified. Many businesses and their employees are working from home following the social distancing regulation and other regulations of Covid-19 management. Whether your business has closed its physical operations or you’re struggling to stay afloat in the market, effective communication with your customers is crucial.

The big question remains, “How can Nigerian businesses stay in touch with their customers during the covid-19 pandemic.”

How Nigerian Entrepreneurs and Business Owners can stay in touch with their customers during the Covid-19 Pandemic?

Undeniably, for you to achieve results with keeping in touch with your customers, you need to do so through different channels. People communicate in different ways and are doing different things during this shutdown. For you to reach your customers, you need to cover every possible medium where they are.

In this piece, we highlight seven ways to stay in touch with your customers during this covid-19 pandemic.

Send Text messages to your customers

Sending personalized text message updates and words of hope during this time is one of the best ways you can recapture your customers’ attention during this time. If you have a list of your customers’ contacts (which we believe you do), you can keep in touch with everyone personally. A quick text message is easy to send and is a simple way for you to share short information with them.

Put Calls Across

Though this might sound expensive to you, putting calls across to your customers is not a bad idea. As you may know, ‘you invest money to get money.’ You can start by compiling a list of your most important clients and focus on them. This should be long term customers and other potential long term customers. Reaching out to them personally to tell them about any changes to your business and answer questions they may have can go a long way in cementing your relationship with them.

Send Email Updates

This is one of the easiest and most direct ways for you to stay in touch with your clients. These are confusing times, and many customers are wondering how the pandemic will affect their life entirely. Sending out email updates, updating them on the changes in your business and giving them tips on how to be safe and sane during this time is a great idea. By now, you should have an email list where you send newsletters and updates about sales or new products and services you’re launching. YOU can use this list to reach out to your customers.

Host Livestreams

People are at home, and a significant number will be on their smart devices surfing away on the internet and killing boredom. You can take this opportunity to engage with them and teach them one or two things via live streams. Live streaming is a real-time option that can help you communicate with your customers. With your live stream, you can broadcast video messages and interact with your client base, answering questions they may have.

Start a Video Chat

Video chat is another perfect way you can communicate with your customers during this time. With video chat, it’s easy for you to communicate with clients you’d instead meet on a face to face basis. With it, your business won’t feel affected because you’ll get to conduct business as usual.

Use Chat Apps

This is ideal for providing your customers with virtual customer support services in real-time. These chat apps can be Facebook, whatsapp or the live chat on your website. To make it easy for your customers and yourself, you can share the link to your chat profile so people can reach out to you when they have questions, and you’ll help them in real-time.

Social Media Updates

As you may have heard before now, social media has brought about a marketing revolution. It brings a level playground where businesses of all scales can compete equally. Assuredly, your business has channels on one social media or another (if not all). This is the ideal time for you to engage with your customers, share updates with them and find out what they think about your business so far (customer feedback). You can go a step further to find out what they expect from your business. This way, you can serve them better and build a strong community around your brand.

Besides these seven ways to stay in touch with your customers through the coronavirus pandemic, there are other ways you and other Nigerian entrepreneurs and business owners can keep in touch with your customers during this covid-19 pandemic.

Some of these include;

• Hosting webinars.
• Creating video content.
• Starting and hosting a YouTube channel.
• Starting and hosting a Podcast channel.
• Publishing blog posts and other forms of content on your website.
• Adding live chat to your website.
• Updating your Google listing.
• Hosting virtual events.
• Sending direct mails to your customers’ addresses if you operate a local business.
• Sending a handwritten appreciation or information note to go with online deliveries if your business ships or delivers products.
• Posting in online forums and answering questions related to your industry to help others.
• Commenting on online posts, especially in related fields.
• If you operate a local/neighborhood business, you may need to create and update neighborhood groups where you’ll share information and discuss with them.
• Responding to online reviews that you’ve had not had to time to respond to.
• Adding a dedicated covid-19 section to your website.
• Working with online influencers.
• Amongst others.

Conclusively, do your best to keep in touch with your clients/customers. If you can do an excellent work keeping in touch, updating them, giving them hope and making friends with them during this period, it’ll pay you excessively when the pandemic is over.

We wish you the best this period.

Stay Safe!