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Delivering customer service in the face of a pandemic of the nature of COVID-19 can be quite challenging. But regardless of the challenges, businesses (those still in operations) need to put everything in place to forge good customer relationships as well as address their customers’ acute needs.

Consumers holed up inside their houses now demand more from businesses of all kinds to make their stay at home comfortable or to help with work from home.

Right now is a great time to turn customer service up a notch to build the foundation for brand loyalty and excellent brand reputation that will last long into the future. But before we go right down into how to prepare customer service to excel in this precarious situation, let’s take a moment to evaluate how this may affect your business, customers, and service.

Impact of Coronavirus on Customer Service

Countries across the world are grappling with a global pandemic that has dealt huge blows on the global economies and threatening to cripple many small and large businesses.

This is definitely a tough time for businesses. Supply chains are being disrupted left and right. Staff members face possible risks of infection as well as a lot of other things that could deteriorate customer service quality. 

Importance of Customer Support in a Pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic is not an enough excuse to neglect your customers during this time.

We are hoping that all of these will be over soon. But businesses that want to retain their customers as well as maintain their brand reputation will know better than to not take customer support seriously. Here at One Contact Center, our work from home strategy has helped us safeguard the safety and well-being of our staff members so we can better support you and your business during this time.

Through our usual way of sincere care and creative thinking, we have been able to perfect our work from home strategy in a way that has had little to no effect on normal business operations. Your small business can also take a cue from us and many of the other innovative companies that are still finding a way to help their clients during these tough times.

Proactive Customer Communications

In all, ensuring proper customer communications will still be the main factor that makes a difference. It’s important to ensure that customers are fed the right information at the appropriate time. Having a reliable and easily accessible information source for customers will go a long way.

There should be enough focus on the accuracy of this information and its timeliness as both of these will impact brand perception among customers.

Staying Resilient in the Face of Crisis

While we’ll highlight a few things that could help bolster your customer service during this highly challenging period, the first advice we’ll however give is to ensure proper adherence to standard safety and health practices. That should come first at a time like this.

Data from the UK revealed that up to a fifth of employees may call in sick at the peak of this coronavirus epidemic. Even when workers are not sick, there may be a need to reduce or completely prevent exposure to customers for health and safety reasons.

Leveraging Support for a Better Experience

We are at that stage where we are trying to reduce human interaction (physical) to stem the spread of the covid-19 virus. Rather than contributing more to the customer’s problem with reduced service quality and slow turnaround times, businesses can leverage support to better customer experience.

Thankfully, support can always be rendered with physical interaction on different platforms.

These can include via phone calls, live chat, text messages, social media platforms, and more. In addition to this, customers should also be made aware of available self-service channels, if available, to reduce the burden on your customer service team.

Conclusion

The coronavirus outbreak is threatening to bring the world to a halt. While businesses across different sectors may have been shut off or restricted somehow, those who are still operating should take the opportunity to rise up to the increased customer expectations brought on by this pandemic.

By adopting honesty and transparency, as well as being proactive and customer-centric, businesses may still be able to turn the tide in their favor, to an extent, as the whole world continues to try and beat this menacing virus.