Make a difference to your customers during COVID-19

Listen, Understand, and Respond to what they care about

Now more than ever, your customers need their concerns addressed and questions answered to put their minds at ease. This is particularly true in travel and hospitality, healthcare, health insurance, senior care, and home services, as well as any business that works face-to-face with people during the COVID-19 outbreak.

During this rapidly changing crisis, sales people need to step back on a regular basis and think about what has changed in the minds of their customers over the last few days. Are they more or less likely to contact your business? Do you need to reach out to address widespread concerns, or is quieting communications more appropriate right now? In order to be prepared to respond and communicate with your customers quickly and effectively at scale, you must first understand what their concerns are.

Many companies use conversational analytics tools — specifically keyword spotting — to monitor inbound calls for mentions of coronavirus and related terms. Keyword spotting is a technology in which predefined spoken “keywords” are automatically identified from any conversation or voicemail.

By automating this, companies are isolating calls that mention coronavirus - making it easier to find and listen to call recordings & better understand customer concerns. Once new conversations are flagged, you can analyze it to understand COVID concerns by company location, by region, or just what really matters to them.

Salesibyl has predefined keyword signals for coronavirus-related inquiries that we can deploy on your platform upon request.

First, consumers are distracted and overwhelmed. We have all had moments in the last few weeks where we just had no idea what to do, and random web shopping is sometimes a suitable therapy. Additionally, consumers are being more careful about where they spend their money right now, and prioritizing expenditures can lead to that “going dark” behavior.

The need to learn about rapidly shifting consumer behavior is getting frontline sales people even more in tune with data-driven sales calling approaches. “This is a unique opportunity to learn and to test things we might not have ever tested.” “We can really learn about our customers and try and get the most out of this time.”

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

While things look dark now, there are still signs of light in this resilient business. “While we expect an epidemic in the US will cause contraction in advertising revenues, we expect it to normalize after the threat passes.” wrote Moody’s Senior Vice President Neil Begley. The business owners we spoke with see some positive changes occurring in the market already. “The good news is that we’re noticing people are getting over the shock and things are starting to pick up again,” said one owner.

Focus on Community and Compassion

Sales Performance management is well known for being a tight-knit community. This has become especially apparent during the crisis we are now facing. “We’re seeing some bad behavior, but most of us are trying to be thoughtful in everything we do right now with customers, peers, and partners,” said one sales professional. We keep asking ourselves, ‘what and where are the business wins?’” Another reiterated this point saying, “While we’re looking at this year and wondering how bad it will get…it’s been awesome to hear compassion is at the center of so many discussions and so many of our peers are putting people first and business second.”

The sales people we spoke with are seeing themselves less as competitors and more of a support group. They are working together to figure out what’s working and what’s not and just generally providing support during uncertain times. “Circling the wagons will help us all come out of this stronger — the sales community really is a community and there’s a lot of compassion and help here.