It takes a lot of professionalism to maintain a good relationship with your customers in the middle of a crisis. Often, you will find your company in an unexpected situation that you never see coming. Customers will message you nonstop about their demands, complaints, refunds, and other issues.
If you are not well-prepared, you might find your business suffering great consequences. This may include losing your patrons, having a bad public image, and other nightmares. So, how can you keep your customers satisfied when a certain product or service inside the company is not functioning well?
Do you have a concrete plan of action to resolve such issues? The thing is, what matters most is how you respond to them. Having said that, your best ticket to keep your customers’ trust is to have crisis management planning in store.
In this article, we will be sharing with you tips on how crisis management planning can be properly executed. Let’s get right to it.
What Is A Crisis?
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In a business setup, crises are unexpected situations or events that may cause severe and damaging effects on your company.
According to Zendesk, a crisis may come in a form of the following scenarios:
- Physical or public health emergency
- Service disruption
- Security incident
- Legal entanglement
- Public relations nightmare
Most likely, crises do not only affect a single customer. Oftentimes, these events can impact almost every present or future buyer. The reason behind this is when your company is faced with threats, customers’ worries and trust issues can be inevitable. Thus, communicating with them properly will only be the key solution.
Crisis Management Planning Tips
The backbone of any crisis resolution is a well-planned strategy. Since agents are at the forefront of answering customers’ concerns, they should be equipped with the right crisis management skills.
Take a look at these tips and see how your customer service representatives can improve in communicating with the buyers.
Gather All Necessary Information
A solution can only be deemed effective when it tackles the root of the problem. Therefore, every agent should know the ins and outs of the crisis. They should also know the progress that the company is taking to remedy the issues. This way, when customers ask for an update they won’t have to keep repeating the same answers over and over again.
The gathering of information varies depending on the crisis at hand. However, here is some basic knowledge that the whole team should consider when doing their research:
- Where did the problem originate from? If it is an internal issue, what are the departments involved? If it is from an external factor, who are the people that caused the issue to escalate.
- Look for any relevant news and latest information that may support your reasoning on why the crisis is still not addressed. For example, a crisis that involves the delayed shipment of the products due to COVID-19. If the team is well-aware of the on-going protocols the local and national government-imposed, they can use this to answer the customer’s queries.
- Identify the impact of the crisis. It is common knowledge that customers might be affected. However, the team should also know how bad the situation is. This way they can honestly inform the customers of an estimated time frame when the situation will improve.
Prepare An Answer Key
When customers are frustrated, they would usually ask the same questions repeatedly. Having said this, when drafting a crisis management strategy, you should consider the possible concerns that the buyers may ask.
This is vital because timeliness in answering their questions can make or break how they look at the company. Customers who are already agitated can feel worse when communication is not fast enough. Therefore, an immediate response creates the impression of a reliable and trustworthy image for the company.
Moreover, answer keys hold a single tone or truth. Customers demand honesty. So, if there is no prepared response to the common questions, agents may come up with their version of the story. When this happens, customers may note that the company is just misleading them instead of telling the truth.
Here are some possible questions that may arise during a crisis that you can prepare an answer for:
- Will there be service interruptions? If so, what are the details I should know about? (e.g. date, time, affected services)
- When will normal operations resume?
- Should I be aware of any new policies or rules? If so, what are they?
- What if I want to end my relationship with the company, what options do I have?
Build A Confident Yet Caring Tone
Knowing everything there is about the crisis is vital. However, how the agents make these known to the customers is a different matter.
Customer service representatives should already expect that for a couple of days or weeks, they might be hearing hundreds of complaints from angry customers. Although agents are trained for such scenarios, there might be instances wherein their emotions cannot be controlled.
So, emotional intelligence during a crisis is a priority. Having empathy and compassion when responding to the customers’ questions will set you aside from your competitors. The key to a successful agent-customer interaction is how the former regulates and adjusts their emotion throughout the communication.
Here are some tips that will give a clear picture of how agents should practice emotional intelligence:
- Use facts (e.g. numbers, data, quotes) about the current situation of the company. Inform them how the company is doing during the crisis.
- Let your customers know how the company is addressing the issue. Make them feel that the problem is managed and normal operations will resume soon.
- Listen to your customers’ side especially when they are severely affected by the crisis. They should feel that the company is not only fixing their image but that they also care about the people.
As they say, crises are inevitable in any business. However, as long as the company comes prepared for such events through crisis management planning, customers can keep their trust and loyalty to the business.