In any business, the unexpected can happen and when the services you provide to your customers are disrupted you need to be ready to communicate with your customers. If you don’t have a communication plan in place, you risk looking unprepared and unprofessional in the eyes of your customers. Additionally, you risk losing any goodwill that you built up over time with them. In short, if you don’t have a communication plan in place when things go wrong then it won’t go well for you.
I’ve had the benefit of working with several great businesses and communication professionals who understood the benefits of being able to communicate with their customers when a disruption has occurred. Here are some things you should consider when building out your communication plan:
I’ve had the benefit of working with several great businesses and communication professionals who understood the benefits of being able to communicate with their customers when a disruption has occurred. Here are some things you should consider when building out your communication plan:
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- Don’t minimize the pain to your customer – When you provide a service to a customer, you never want to minimize the importance of that service to the customer. When there is a disruption to the service you provide then make sure to tell the customer how much you understand how this loss is impactful to them. Don’t minimize the impact by using phrases such as “It was just a brief disruption” but instead try “Regardless of the length of disruption, we take this seriously and are working to ensure it does not happen again”.
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- Take ownership of the disruption – Finger pointing is never productive. Even if the disruption to your customers was caused by one of your service providers you should take ownership of it so your customers know that you are the one in charge and will work to address this either by working to ensure better service provider reliability or by changing service providers.
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- Find an Effective Way to Communicate With Your Customers – Depending on the number of clients you have and how you’re used to communicating with them, this can be complex. Always have a plan to reach your customers over multiple methods of communication (eg. E-mail, text, telephone, online updates) and a way to push out this communication if your internal environment is compromised. This may mean keeping a contact list for customers, vendors, staff, and other key stakeholders in a secondary secure location that can be used with an external service to help push out updates until your internal environment is back online.
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- Communicate Early On and Communicate Regularly – When you realize there is an issue in your ability to provide services to your customers then you should prepare a communication to your customers letting them know that you are aware of the situation and are working to diagnose and resolve it with a timeline for the next update. For a short outage, this may mean that you’re informing your customers that the disruption has been resolved soon after. For a longer outage, you should develop a regular cadence of communication providing updates on your progress to resolving the disruption. The regular cadence tells your customers that you are working to resolve the disruption. Sometimes, this may mean that no progress was made between updates, so you need to highlight the fact that work has not stopped to resolve the disruption. Remember, the disruption is causing pain to your customers, and they need to know that you’re doing what you can to fix it.
- Be Transparent – Give your customers as much information as you can without disclosing confidential information when you are communicating with them. Transparency sends the message to your customers that you’re going to be honest about what has happened and will help keep the trust you’ve earned between you and your customers. This is important because your customers will lose confidence in your ability to deliver your services to them because of this disruption.
- Don’t Stop Communicating After the Disruption Ends – After the disruption ends, it’s important that you communicate the findings of the disruption to your customers and what remediation plans you are putting in place to minimize the chance of future occurrences. This will help you build back the confidence your customers have in your business.