While it may be difficult to prepare for how a crisis may impact your customers, you can prepare for how to communicate with them in a way that is both productive and effective should they be affected.
Adam Binder is the Founder & Creative Director of Creative Click Media, a full-service digital marketing agency headquartered in New Jersey. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, business owners have had no choice but to reevaluate the way their companies are equipped to handle crisis situations. While it may be difficult to prepare for how a crisis may impact your customers, you can prepare for how to communicate with them in a way that is both productive and effective should they be affected.1. Adjust Your Tone Few things muddle a message more than missing the speaker’s intended tone. Unfortunately for those of us who communicate primarily through text on digital mediums, we can’t use facial expressions and vocal inflections to provide context clues. Take the already stressful nature of living through a global crisis into account, and your customers may mistake written messages with even the most neutral tones as something with more bite than your company intended. One of the most effective ways to ensure that you’re conveying your tone properly through text is by increasing your number of visual cues. This might mean using exclamation points when appropriate or even including emojis in less formal communications to make up for the lack of facial expressions via text. Including an exclamation point instead of a period after “Thank you » can completely alter the way your reader interprets your message, especially when tensions are already high. Adjusting your tone also means softening your language to add a necessary humanlike quality to your copy.
