Communication tips to help you manage COVID-19
With the worldwide coverage on COVID-19 impacting people everywhere, and responses being varied, from panic buying of loo paper and other essentials like cup-a-soups, to “there's nothing to worry about”, we wanted to share some communicate tips to help you keep your customers up-to-date during this ever-changing situation.
We suggest putting a communication plan into place to keep everyone updated with what you are able to provide them, and what services or products may become limited.
Everyone includes:
- your people
- your customers
- your stakeholders
- basically anyone who has contact with your business
Given the rapidly changing environment, we suggest keeping your plan pretty simple so that you can be flexible with it. In fact, your plan can be as simple as a calendar for the next few weeks with a reminder to send your COVID-19 Update daily/weekly/fortnightly.
Think about how often you might have to adjust your service/product delivery and plan your updates around that. Your plan should also include where you're going to share your updates, as well as key points that you want to get across.
Where to communicate
Think about how and where people reach or come into contact with your business:
- website
- social media
- business premises – your team and your customers
- advertising (digital and traditional)
- snail mail
- etc
Wherever people have a touch-point with you and your business, this is where you want to be keeping people updated.
Your key points
Your messages should be tailored to your business and individual situation.However, key points to include could be:
- that the safety and health of your community is important
- what actions your are taking, eg limiting face-to-face contact, implementing remote working, cancelling events, temporarily closing your shopfront and focusing online
- how this may impact on your customers and how you plan to minimise that impact
- how often you plan to keep your custmoers updated with any changes
- how people can get in touch with you
- thank them for their understanding
- stay safe, take care of each other
Know your customers
Understanding how sensitive your customers are to the situation can also influence how often to send and what to send.
For example, if you have customers who like lots of detail, then you could plan to send a daily update. And, if there's no change in the situation daily, simple send a short reassuring email saying no change to your product/service delivery from the last update. In this instance you cannot over communicate enough.
If you have customers who prefer an overview of things, then your initial communication should be an outline what you're doing and/or going to do. Then communicating only when there's a change would be more appropriate.
You may have a mix of both, so know your customers, what they prefer, and tailor your communications accordingly.
What's happening at starfish marketing
We are committed to providing you with the best support possible at all times.We have worked remotely from day dot, so the COVID-19 situation should not impact our services.If anything occurs that changes our ability to deliver our services we will keep you updated. Otherwise, it's business as usual for us. If you need to get in touch with us you can do so here.In the meantime don't panic, stay safe, be kind, and look after each other.
