How to Support Your Clients In a Downturn

How to Support Your Clients In a Downturn

Economic turbulence can provide new opportunities to better connect with your customers and gain insight on how you can best support them long-term. Companies that listen and understand how their clients’ needs may be shifting, can create new and ongoing opportunities to provide value and deepen client relationships. Below, we’ve outlined some key considerations to make regarding your clients, as well as your suppliers and the industry at large.

Considerations

The current global crisis has created many challenges in regard to your clients and partners. While some factors may be outside your control, assessing and understanding these challenges can better enable you to find new ways to better serve your clients and strengthen your relationships.

• Assess how well your clients can pivot and adapt to the economic downturn. Can your customers remain solvent and are there any risks to your billing revenue?
• If your clients adjust their operations, such as having their teams work from home, consider how that may impact your communications or interactions with them. For example, would access and security to provide service be impacted?
• Gain an understanding on impacts to the industry that they are servicing, and whether their customers will also feel a large impact.
• If client expectations change, consider if you have the resources or staff on hand to meet their needs.
• Will the crisis impact your supply chain partners, impacting your ability to source products?

Opportunities to Serve Your Customers

While there are a variety of impacts to your customers to consider, we are witnessing many businesses focus on new opportunities to provide greater value to their customers during the current economic crisis. Here are some opportunities to consider, based on successful strategies businesses across the Volaris Group portfolio are implementing.

• Review your product suite to identify product on the shelf that may be more relevant during the crisis
• Focus on active deals that are likely to close in the short-term, whilst not losing sight of long-term sales strategies, in order to ensure a full pipeline.
• Consider digital sales strategies and new marketing campaigns to drive further revenues (e.g. webinars, microsites, personalized marketing)
• Increase your customer communication cadence to strengthen your relationship and consider new digital channels, such as video conferencing, to reach out
• Develop and highlight temporary service offerings or policies that are designed to support your customers
• Consider bundling of your products and services to provide greater value
• Target clients operating with legacy or homegrown technologies to offer upgrades or replacements of management information systems
• Position your company or leaders as thought leaders via sharing best practices specific to your customers
• Keep an eye on your competitors and take advantage of new opportunities that may arise from underserved prospective customers

Conclusion

Economic turbulence can provide new opportunities to better connect with your customers and understand how you can best support them long-term. Throughout the crisis, we’ve seen our businesses strengthen relationships with their clients and find new ways to enhance the value they’re providing to them.

Communicate regularly with your customers in order to continuously identify and understand their needs. Looking for new ways to provide value in every interaction will enable you to adjust your service offerings as your clients’ needs change over time. Through effective outreach and ongoing collaboration, times of crisis can provide new opportunities to collaborate you’re your business partners and strengthen long-lasting relationships.

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