How to Win Back Your Customers After a Crisis

Author: Kelley Donald - MarCom/Tuesday, November 10, 2020/Categories: Business Internet

Whether your company faced a PR crisis or a cyberattack that resulted in the theft of sensitive customer information, it’s crucial for a business to respond to a crisis immediately and openly.

HubSpot customer relationship management software bloggers identify five different types of business crises your company might face:

  • Financial (such as a drop in stock prices or asset valuation)
  • Personnel-related (such as diversity & inclusion issues caused by an individual, department, or group in the organization)
  • Organizational (often stems from exploiting consumers or not acting in their best interests)
  • Technological (such as a cyberattack resulting in a data breach)
  • Natural (such as destruction of your physical headquarters)

If you’re fighting back from a natural disaster, you can win your customer base back simply by providing the same customer service, responsiveness, and offerings you did before the crisis. Most of your recovery will take place internally, notably the rebuilding of your physical location and the technology that keeps your business running. A natural crisis, however, will often create additional financial, organizational, and technological crises. Your business must gather its forces to respond to each of these threats in the best way possible.

Use Diplomacy and Transparency in Communications

Open and honest yet diplomatic communications through all channels in a timely manner can help businesses recover quickly from a crisis and win back their customer base.

Depending on the type of crisis, this might include:

  • Revealing the amount and type of data stolen following a cyber attack
  • Sharing plans to recover financially after stock prices dropped
  • Discussing planned measures to rectify a personnel-related crisis, whether that means firing the individual or employing new human relations policies in your business

The moment a crisis occurs, it’s time to get your communications team on the job crafting the right messaging to show that you:

  • Recognize there’s an issue
  • Are working to resolve it
  • Have begun executing solutions (if this is the case)

Rely on an omnichannel approach to deliver your message, using:

  • Email
  • Social media
  • Videos and your company blog
  • SMS
  • Press releases
  • Media interviews

Put your high-speed business broadband to work ensuring you reach all your customers, and rely on rock-solid business Wifi service for after-hours and mobile communications. When a crisis occurs, it’s “all hands on deck” until your customers feel at ease again.

Present a Unified Voice with Consistent Messaging

If your PR and crisis communications team is blogging about solutions your company will take but your employees are tweeting different information on their personal social media streams, you won’t easily rebuild your customers’ trust.

Ensure that all employees are on the same page in regard to post-crisis messaging and solutions. You may want to create a document outlining acceptable messaging and responses to questions. Use file-sharing capabilities to make these documents available to all employees in real-time. Leverage instant messaging programs to share urgent updates with employees at the same time, including those who may be working remotely. Of course, rely on your business ISP to provide high-speed business Wifi service to deliver those messages across channels to your employees and customers.

Rebuild Customers’ Trust by Showing Them How You’ve Fixed the Problems

Transparency and communication mean a lot when it comes to your company’s initial response to a crisis. But only once you’ve shared the solution can you truly begin to rebuild trust and win back their loyalty.

Depending on the nature and the extent of the crisis, this rebuilding process can take place overnight, or it may take days or weeks. Solutions might include:

  • Implementing better network security following a data breach
  • Deploying a more robust business network in the event of a crash
  • Implementing new employee policies and standards of behavior
  • Evaluating your budget and expenses — along with company leadership — in the wake of a financial crisis

In-house collaboration is key as you develop your company-wide response to a crisis. Telepresence solutions, instant messaging, and video conferencing can help your team stay connected as you devise solutions.

You can also utilize these tools from your business ISP to communicate directly with your customers. Perhaps a shareholder meeting delivered using the latest in telepresence technology will help convey your sincerity and concern over the crisis while also allowing you to outline your solutions in a clear way.

Today’s telepresence and collaboration technology offered through Consolidated Communications’ ProConnect platform can keep your business running at top speed to face any crisis. Contact us today to learn more.

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