How Las communicated with its clients and external audience during the pandemic. Interview with Pietro Tartarelli, Las Sales office manager.
During the pandemic, many companies had to face a necessary and sudden change in terms of communication strategy, shifting it towards the digital: Las was no exception, immediately planning and organising new activities on various channels.
Among these is the design and creation of the new, lucky format Las Room: a virtual room where a series of free live webinars enabled people to meet and discuss themes and topics related to the office world with experts of the sector and Las professionals. During the pandemic months, the company has always stayed close to its retailers, designing, planning and activating social advertising campaigns with ad hoc offers on home office related products.
However, Las continued to promptly work, communicate and reassure its clients when needed and when offices were closed, through the use of digital technologies. Piero Tartarelli, Las sales office manager, answered a few questions about this transtition.
What did LAS do as a company, to improve its relationship with customers during the pandemic?
Since the very beginning, the company has applied all security measures to contain the virus spread and to ensure safe working conditions to its factory workers and office employees. In March and April 2020, we were all forced to work from home and we used digital platforms to keep in touch with each other, including the managers and the responsibles of the various departments. This in order to monitor the situation, analyse it and react to it by adapting our strategies, when necessary. We did the same for the commercial department, establishing continuous contacts with the sales and marketing director, area managers and agents, who also were in contact with our clients all the time, updating them on our activities and initative evolutions.
What were the issues you faced in managing customer relationship?
Luckily, we have a vast clientele, high customer trust and retention rate.
Our effort was, and still is, to keep the relationship with our customers alive, even more with the smallest realities which are the most affected by this situation. For the most part, the relationships we built with our clients over the years, have been healthy ones, based on mutual professional but also human connection. That is definitely an added value. Our job is to give the greatest importance to their needs, anticipate them and assure them that they can always count on us and on our service.
What needs do you think current retailers have and how can LAS answer to them, transforming those answers in strengths for the company?
Circumstances like this carry the risk of changing people’s sentitivity towards society forever, as well as changing their buying and working behaviours. At the base of this transformation are new consumer behaviours and sharing of information. Consequently, all companies’ efforts need to aim at digital transformation, each in its own field, and consider them as growth and speedup processes. Las is working in this direction and new projects and instruments will soon be available to our clients in order to reduce and save time and dialogue space with us.