Keep Your Company Operational and Your Customers Happy During COVID-19

Last Updated on March 6, 2021 by Corepay

How are you and your company coping with the pandemic? How are you helping your customers? Are you making progress to emerging from the shutdown and getting ready ramp back up?

As states are continuing to reopen and allowing more and more people to gather in public, businesses are returning to work. Still, others are continuing to work from home.

Regardless of what you’re doing, there are things that you need to do to help your clients, your associates, and your company.

Greensheet.com recently asked their advisory board for suggestions on what they’re doing for their own companies and recommending to their clients and customers. These are a few things we learned from their answers.

First, you must be able to keep a pulse of the needs of your client base.

We know things have changed, but how much? How differently? How badly? Are you keeping in touch with your clients and customers? It’s not enough to just send them a newsletter or do a quick survey. Reach out to your customers and find out. Ask them what they need and find a way to provide it.

If nothing else, this helps you maintain and strengthen your relationships with your existing customers so you can keep them when they return. Second, it helps you adapt your own sales and marketing strategies. For example, if you were helping a client upgrade some of their office technology, they certainly wouldn’t need it now, which means putting a hold on any sales efforts you might have had. However, you might even be able to help them find new solutions that could help them find and create their new normal more easily.

It’s not only important that you are able to pivot as you need, but you need to be able to help your customers pivot as well. There will be plenty of companies who will be inflexible and demand that everything stay the same. But by helping your customers pivot, you can help them stay afloat.

Second, learn to work safely and securely from home.

After six months of a pandemic, you’ve no doubt figured this out and everyone has hit their groove and has their new home office set up the way they would like. But what will you do when the economy is fully open and offices are opening up again? Will you go back to your own office, or will you let people stay home or work in a coworking space?

If your company is committed to working remotely for a while longer, look for the tools and hardware that will let you do so. Switch to a cloud-based CRM, customer service tools, and even cloud-based servers. Find the security solutions that will keep your proprietary data and financials safe. And develop policies that let your workers maintain a work-life balance without expecting them to keep working and answering emails at 9:00 PM.

Third, pay attention to company morale.

Everyone is taking a big hit emotionally, and our nation’s and corporate community’s morale is at a major low. People are on edge, depressed, and scared. They were either sick, know someone who got sick, or they’re caring for family members who shouldn’t get sick. So they’re having a tough time.

Figure out ways to show your people that they’re important and find ways to show how much you appreciate them. Be proactive in the news you give them, find ways to help them do their jobs effectively, and help them to relax.

Also, everyone is probably overloaded on Zoom calls, so look for a way to reduce those. Remember, not everything has to involve a meeting. We learned in the beginning of the pandemic that there were so many meetings that could have been handled with an email until someone remembered Zoom, and then it was like that lesson just flew right out the window.

Bottom line, if you keep your staff happy, they’ll keep your customers happy. You can help your team feel important and boost their morale, which will have an effect on their abilities to execute their own responsibilities.

Finally, figure out how to invoice or charge clients, and how to collect money.

If you’ve been processing credit cards, you can still do that virtually. But don’t overlook alternative payment methods like ACH, which are becoming easier and more convenient for smaller payments, such as paying freelancers and contractors.

Find different tools that let you accept payments, and maybe even switch providers. If you’re working with a bank to handle your credit card processing, how many methods do they have for you to accept payments? Are they still requiring the same fees and percentages of your sales? (Remember we talked about inflexible suppliers who demand everything stay the same?) And are you still writing checks to vendors? If you want to work remotely, it doesn’t help that you have to have someone come in and sign checks once a week. So look for new and additional ways to accept/make payments as a way to help your customers in their own success.

If you would like to learn more about finding new ways to accept payments from customers and further help your company, Corepay can help. To learn more, please visit our website or call us at (866) 987-1969.

Photo credit: Conbey (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)