Brand management during Coronavirus and beyond

Responding to a crisis like COVID-19 is difficult and we’re all figuring it out together. Many brands have provided powerful, empathetic responses and we want to help others navigate this time with empathy and understanding.

At Khoros, we’re committed to supporting our customers (and their customers) through this challenging time. As a brand, you always have an opportunity and a responsibility to take care of the people that define you — your customers and employees. Times of crisis make this responsibility doubly important, but also more difficult to execute.

Here are 3 things to keep in mind as you face the unique challenges of crisis.

The first step to take in a time of crisis is to understand the situation as well as you can. There are many tools to help you understand what people are saying — Google Alerts, native social platforms, and specialized social listening tools like Khoros Marketing. To help our Social Marketing customers listen to what’s happening, we created this Intelligence dashboard. This dashboard gives you a real-time glimpse of what is happening on Twitter, for example.

Social listening tools are highly customizable and can give you special insights from your industry, geography, or related to your brand specifically. To get the full picture, use various spellings and styles (eg. coronavirus, corona virus, covid19, covid 19). If you’d like to see how Khoros Marketing can help with this, reach out and request a demo.

Brands can connect and proactively serve their customers in their community spaces. Communities can be a helpful resource for customers, as a public-facing page, of business updates. It’s also useful for employees, as an internal page, to share company and operational updates. During crises, it can be easy to focus only on customers and forget about employees. Prioritizing employee wellbeing, listening to their concerns, and responding to their needs will help you take better care of customers.

Combining Marketing and Community, by sharing links to community posts on social is a proven way to distribute these helpful resources. We’ll continue to post updates and new tools to our customer Group Hub and share those links on social.

As Khoros, we’ve created a Group Hub in our Atlas community for our customers. If you're a customer and have an Atlas account, use this page to find pertinent information about using Khoros during this time, and for crisis management generally.

Brands are receiving more inbound questions than ever before. Customers are curious how their favorite brands, services, and stores are responding to and prepared during this time. It’s helpful to make a proactive statement that's empathetic and forward-thinking. H-E-B Grocery does a good job striking a tone of being prepared and supportive of their customers in this Tweet below:

As support volumes increase, there are many tactical things that brands and care teams can do to set themselves up for success as a partner and reliable source in times of crisis for your customer. While these specific responses may vary according to the products and services offered, there are principles that apply across the board.

We’re in this together, and your company may not have the perfect response to the COVID-19 pandemic, or any other crisis, but by listening, serving, and connecting with empathy, you can help your customers through this time. As our commitment to you, we’ll be posting additional resources for our Care, Community, Marketing customers in the coming days.

For Khoros Customers, now is a great time to create your Atlas Community account to stay up-to-date with the latest information about COVID-19 best practices and how we can help you.