3 Communications Tactics to Build Customer Loyalty during the Pandemic.

COVID-19 is changing the way we do business, from shifting overall buying behaviors, to transforming our living rooms into our in-home offices. This abrupt change can be isolating for employees and channel partners who are accustomed to interacting with their teams and customers every day.

Keeping your sales teams, employees, and customers engaged and focused during these uncertain times is essential to furthering your business and driving results, even when companies are struggling. And communicating with your audiences is now more important than ever. But not to worry – there are a variety of ways you can utilize your rewards program to generate excitement and engage these newly-virtual teams, all while keeping your business top-of-mind.

Here are 3 communication tactics to get you started:

1. Use online training, quizzes, and daily trivia to boost engagement.

Sharpening up your team’s skills and knowledge about your business or products is a great way to utilize their downtime.

• Educate sales reps and channel partners about new products. Teach them how to sell your product, or why they should buy it.
• Create instructional videos or recorded program tutorials for internal teams. Teach them about how to talk about the program, how to present it to their sales teams, and/or how to navigate the website.
• Host webinar trainings. This provides your audiences more opportunities to interact with their peers and gives them the feeling of being a part of a group.
• Setup quizzes about these trainings using the and reward your audience for participating in them.
• Get them engaged with some fun daily trivia! This can be as simple as Movie Night or Sports Trivia. Each time they log in to the rewards website, they will be presented with a new question for the opportunity to earn a couple of extra points.
• If you utilize the mobile app, educate your audiences about the time-saving benefits of using it. Host a series of app-exclusive push promotions to keep them engaged and excited.

Learning and earning opportunities will help continue to make your program thrive by driving your audience back to the website and giving them more opportunities to earn. You already have the all tools you need, right at your fingertips. If you don’t, ask your dedicated account manager about our Learn & Earn module offerings!

2. Take time to survey your audiences and find out what they need to be successful.

Take this time to get to know your audiences and understand the struggles they may be facing, how they may be feeling.

• Gather feedback about what they like and don’t like about the program. (Do they need more training? Are they motivated by the current promotions?)
• Ask participants about the challenges of selling new products. (Are they suffering from extended time to market? Is it taking too long to get new products into the market?)
• Are they struggling with a lack of visibility through the channel? (Do they know their buyers?)
• Find out how could you improve the program so that they are more engaged and successful. (Do they want more earning opportunities? Do they participant in contests/spiffs – why or why not?)

Don’t be afraid to ask them what you want to know. Showing your audience that you’re willing to listen to what they have to say not only improves employee engagement and work-relationships but strengthens the understanding of an organization’s core values.

3. Recognize sales teams, employees, and customers for their loyalty or hard work, even when they aren’t in the office.

• Send top customers and high-performers an email to let them know they’re appreciated!
• Give a positive shout-out to high performers during the next virtual team meeting.
• If they are in the office, give them a random day off to be with their families.
• Surprise them with dinner (from afar) by sending them a Uber Eats gift card.
• Let them know about the online reward catalog’s charitable donation opportunities in the rewards catalog. Many people want to give back and what better way to do so than with their points?

Recognition goes beyond rewards. Showing your people that you care about their work and wellbeing goes a long way during times of uncertainty. This short-term gesture could turn into long-term loyalty.