Helping your customers through the COVID-19 crisis

Here’s what some of our clients are doing to continue delivering great experiences to their customers.

We live in difficult and tumultuous times. The COVID-19 pandemic has massively disrupted multiple industries. While some industries are doing well (think online streaming, web conferencing, healthTech, etc.), most are not.

We spoke to some of our customers to better understand how they continue to provide their customers with great experiences given the difficult circumstances they operate in. They span a variety of sectors — banking, insurance, consumer goods, and transport & logistics — but all have a history of great customer experience and there are similarities in what they are doing.

We uncovered 5 core themes:

Have your clients feel safe and valued:

From ripping up the fine print for medical insurance that did not have pandemic cover to reimbursing drivers for under-utilised motor insurance; insurers and brokers are proactively looking at how their clients can benefit better from their policies and get more value for money on on their insurance premiums. They are also pro-actively reaching out to their customers on this.

“Our business (transport and logistics) is an essential service during the crisis and it’s still very hands on. This means that we have to make our clients feel safe when they interact with us. Some of the things we’ve implemented include having our drivers temperature tested before leaving our premises for client deliveries. All of our staff, whether client facing or not, are always wearing masks. We are also constantly educating our staff on on social distancing and hand hygiene. For our warehouses, we have introduced time gaps between different clients arriving for pick up of their goods, so that there are not too many people at our premises at the same time.”

“We (consumer goods) still have walk-in customers and we need to ensure their safety in our premises. We’ve made sure that our employees and customers have access to hand sanitisers. We’re also carrying out temperature checks on our employees and equipping them with masks and gloves. We also ensure social distancing between the employees and the customers within the store and at the check out lines.”

Communicate, communicate, communicate:

We’re seeing lots of businesses setting up COVID-19 information portals on their websites with both important health and medical information as well as information related to operational changes. This has been further enhanced through webinars, newsletters, social media as well as client relationship managers actively reaching out to their customers.

However, it’s also important that communication is two way and prompt. “We’re ensuring that our clients can easily reach us even though the majority of our staff are working from home and we do our best to respond quickly to them.”

Digitise the business:

A lot of businesses have been moving their customers to digital channels and also educating their customers on the best ways to use them. We’ve also seen a dramatic reduction in paper being used in offices and more use of digital documents. Companies that had invested in digitising their services are now not experiencing too much disruption to their operations as a result.

We’re also seeing more digitisation of procedures by regulatory bodies such as KPA and KEBS. As a result, any new online systems or procedures launched by them should be tested immediately and feedback provided for changes and corrections.

Look after your employees:

Your employee experience is the backbone of your customer experience. As your business is disrupted, remember that your employees are likely worried during this time too. There will be financial concerns, concerns about the family’s health and safety, concerns on schooling for the children, etc.

As a business you need to ensure that your employees are as physically and mentally safe and sound as possible.

We’ve seen that a few businesses have utilised a buddy system; where buddies are to regularly check in with their partners and ensure that they’re OK. Businesses are also continuously communicating ways to stay safe and healthy to their employees, whether they are working remotely or on site.

A lot of businesses are also using down times to enhance their employees’ skills and expertise through increased virtual training sessions.

Consistency and continuity:

“Despite the disruptions, we want to keep it as business as usual (banking) as possible for our customers. This means that collection of customer feedback is even more important and we’re putting in extra efforts to trace and close the loop with unsatisfied customers. We’ve also enhanced our feedback collection points through different channels and ensure that they are handled wisely and still within communicated TATs (turn around times).”

“Even though we have lots of digital ways for customers to interact with us, we’re getting walk-in clients. We do educate them on our digital services but we continue to service them as normal. We are also continuing with all our meetings internally and externally, albeit virtually.”

Let us know if you’re doing something that’s working well for you and your customers and we’ll continue to add them to this list to help benefit other businesses.