Help your customers with crisis communication and assistance

Right now you have customers with questions. If you have a lot of customers that’s a lot of questions that need answering and you also want to maintain your high service levels.

At a recent WHO conference, Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it well, “Our greatest enemy right now is not the virus itself. It’s fear, rumours and stigma. And our greatest assets are facts, reason and solidarity”.

Why not leverage your investment in Pardot to help your customers and suppliers by communicating help via the facts, reason and solidarity of your company.

Getting timely, context sensitive and helpful communications to those that would like your help and advice is important during normal business, and so it becomes vital now.

Gathering the facts

• Who in your organisation best understands the needs of your customers and suppliers?
• Gather your key stakeholders to create an understanding of cancellations, delayed payments, etc. and how you can add further help in these testing times.

Create a timeline of future communications, based on what you know about customer needs and how often updates are required. Produce visual aids to show the timeline on delayed orders, what that means for delivery times, processing times etc. Keeping everyone closer to your business will inspire confidence through your helpful and empathetic communication.

Speak with one voice
Create a central place for documenation on your intranet related to the crisis and create a page, which delivers at least two key pieces of information:

• Show the customer-impacting decisions made so far, such as refund policies
• Detail where to find appropriate language for speaking with customers

Pardot will help you communicate and automate your messages. Don’t overcomplicate it, the idea is to inform as much as you can up front to give your service teams breathing space, of course a percentage of visitors will still want to talk, so get all those communications options open on line.

Finally, assemble key fields of information you believe are helpful to your customers on account level and bring these fields from your Salesforce coulds into Pardot, expose these key data points in your email communications to your clients. Examples might be: list current products on order, cancellation time remaining for each for full refund.

The basic Pardot elements of help:

• Pardot landing pages - to show your intention to help and inform
• Pardot forms - to capture queries and comments if on reading the page, further clarification, help is needed.
• Engagement studio journeys - to ensure you keep in touch with rereregular updates, to be sent on particular dates, rather than x days after initial engagement.
• Dynamic lists, to capture who has registered for regular updates, dont forget to act on what you have promised, when you promised it.
• Salesforce fields exposed in Pardot - expose any Salesforce field in your email communications to get useful data to your customers.

Pardot is a tool that is designed to react quickly, in context to your customers’ desires, exactly when your customers need it.