There’s no doubt that a crisis implies uncertainty, nerves, and raw feelings both within your business and clients. It can have an impact internally and externally. And communication has a crucial role in this context.


Communication is key to manage uncertainty, explain the circumstances, express what your business is going through and how you’re dealing with it. This is the moment when clients expect more updates and to be reassured that everything will be managed in the most efficient way.


Clients expect that your business will go the extra mile, so everything runs as smoothly as possible during a crisis. And, even if you do so, they may not be aware of your efforts unless you pay attention to the way you communicate with them.

How should you communicate with your clients during a crisis?

Transparency is key

There’s no reason to hide the facts. Crisis are never welcomed, and it will probably have an impact on your business and the way you interact with your clients.


Clients deserve to know what’s going on and how this is going to affect your relationship with them. Hiding crucial information from them can backfire in the long term.


Explain your clients what they can expect from you moving forward. Acknowledge that this is a difficult moment and list the measures that you’ll implement to manage uncertainty.


You may be worried thinking that you could lose an important part of your client base or turnover. To minimise the impact that a crisis may have on your business, it’s important to reassure your clients that you’re doing everything it takes so their experience remains the same or as similar as possible compared to their experience before the crisis.


– Will your offices remain close? For how long?
– How are you going to deliver your customer service?
– Will your working hours remain the same?
– Will the workload you can handle remain the same?


Address your clients’ concerns. One way to minimise the impact of a crisis on your relationships with your clients is to reassure them that you’re doing everything it takes to handle their concerns.

Use reliable sources of information

Internet is overflowing with information. But is all this information reliable? You have probably seen recently experts debunking information, and even the bad consequences that the wrong information may have in clients and in the population in a greater scale.


Your priority should be to provide information that helps your clients stay healthy and safe both personally and professionally. And you need reliable sources of information to make sure you’re giving the best advice.

Communicate regularly and consistently

Anxiety and uncertainty reduce our attention span, especially with all the information available online. That’s why you need to let your clients know when they should expect news from you.


How much information do your clients need? This will depend on your industry, the size of your client base and the changes you’ll have to make to adapt to the new situation.


Try to stick to a specific day and time, so your clients will know when to expect news from you and they’ll be more likely to read and pay attention to your communication.


Go a step ahead of your clients’ concerns. Addressing future or potential concern that your clients still don’t know that they may have in the future will guarantee their peace of mind in the long run.

Go straight to the point

As mentioned before, there’re endless sources of information online, and people get tired of going from one site to another in search of the piece of information they need. Save this effort to your clients.


Keep it simple and effective. Due to the extreme situations that your clients may be facing, it could be difficult for them to pick up every single nuance in your communications. We tend to be in a rush when we look for information, and that makes us scan through websites, instead of stopping to read carefully every single word.


Use headers to highlight your main points, actions or resources that your clients will be able to use during the crisis, and use paragraph to split the information and help your readers scan your message.


Keep the most essential information in short sentences, and then elaborate. Then, the reader will be able to decide if the main idea is enough, or if they want to continue reading to know the rest.

Use an omnichannel approach to communicate

Your message won’t reach all your clients unless you make it available through different channels and in different formats.


Do all your clients have access to the Internet during the crisis? Do they use the same online platforms? Do all of them follow your social media channels? Do you keep a record with all their email addresses?


Consider the best strategy to deliver your message to make sure as many clients as possible are likely to receive and read it.

Don’t be too positive or negative

Even if we know that a crisis normally implies bad news, using an overly negative message will only bring people down. Whereas, using an overly positive language will damage the reliability of your message.


Don’t hide the bad news, because your clients will take for granted that there will be bad news. However, compensate these bad news with all the efforts and measures that your business in taking to minimise the impact on your relationships with your clients.

6 tips to communicate with your clients during a crisis

1. Identify the main fears and concerns

This should be the very first step. In order to come up with the best course of action, you need to know what you need to tackle first. And this also applies when it comes to communication.


You need to know what your clients expect from you to make your communication as effective as possible. Empathy is key to understand what your clients are going through and what actions you can take to help them better through a crisis.


This will be reflected in your communication strategy. Once you have identified their concerns, you’ll be able to define to course of action to address them. And then, you’ll be able to elaborate your communication strategy to explain what actions your company is taking to minimise the impact of the crisis on your relationship with them.

2. Don’t lose your brand personality

If your brand uses an informal tone of voice, you don’t need to lose this tone to talk about more serious issues. Keep the essence of your brand when communicating with your clients and even use it to your advantage to deliver information in a creative way.


Turning suddenly into a robot and speaking to you audience in a more artificial way won’t help you to convey your message better.

3. Add a call-to-action: what do you want your clients to do?

Make sure that your message specifies what your clients should do in case of queries.

• Is a person in charge to address your clients’ queries?
• Have you published a FAQ page with information for your clients?

Add a call-to-action and make sure your message guides your clients to take the right actions. This will save you time to handle the queries in a more consistent and efficient way, and your clients will be better informed about the actions and resources available to them.

4. Add value through free content

If your relationships with your clients are going to be affected somehow due to the crisis, it’d be a good idea to add some extra value during a crisis.


The way you can do that may vary depending on your industry. Use your online platforms to be creative and offer a valuable experience to your client to keep them entertained and engaged.

5. Share your experience

This is a great opportunity to be honest with your audience and tell them what you’re going through, especially if your clients can use your experience to learn from it.


Storytelling can keep your audience engaged with your brand. And, if there’s a positive outcome at end of your story, you’ll be providing value to them. Don’t be scared of being honest and tell your clients the problems you’re facing and what you’re doing to overcome them.

6. Speak the language of your clients

There’s no doubt that keeping your clients informed is your best asset to not lose your relationships with them. That’s why you need to make sure your communication reaches all your clients.


Translate your communications into all your clients’ languages so all of them can understand the message. If your message doesn’t reach all your clients, this can result in losing clients in the long term, which may have a big impact on your business, especially when going through a crisis.


Remember, during a crisis, communicate, be honest, put yourself in your clients’ shoes, be creative and add value.