Staying in touch with buyers when the monsoon floods cut the roads

Landslides close the road through the Dima Hasao hills, and the shopkeeper in Silchar waiting for your goods hears nothing from you. By the fifth day the shopkeeper assumes the order has been dropped and buys from whoever has stock nearby. The flood is not your fault. The silence is. Tell buyers before the rains how dispatch will change. Send a short WhatsApp status the day a route closes, with the time of your next update. Then keep that time, even when nothing has moved.

Why a buyer reads silence as a cancelled order

The buyer can see the news and knows the road is shut. What the buyer cannot see is your order: whether it left the godown, whether it is in a truck on the wrong side of the landslide, or whether you have quietly given the stock to a Guwahati customer. Their own customers are asking for the goods, and another supplier is on the phone offering to send them round through Meghalaya. Your silence answers the question for them, and answers it wrongly.

The flood season is also when buyers learn which suppliers keep talking. Our Assam page lists it among the places businesses in the state lose orders.

Before the rains, one note to every regular buyer

Before the first closure, send each regular buyer one message in their own language. It covers four things. The road their orders travel, and what changes when it closes. What they could stock up on now, and the last date an order reaches them on the usual road. How you will tell them about a delay, and who will do it. And the one thing you will not do, which is promise a date the road has not given you.

That note sells. The retailer who stocks up early buys from you, not from whoever happens to have goods on the day the road shuts.

Sort the list by route, then use one status format

Not every buyer needs every message. Split your regular buyers into three groups before the season starts.

• Routes that close: the Barak valley, Tripura, Mizoram, and Manipur by way of Jiribam. These buyers get a status message whenever their order's position changes, and a call from the owner if it is held for long.
• Slower routes: upper Assam towns along the highway, where traffic crawls past Kaziranga as animals cross to the hills, the north bank when the rivers rise, and Majuli when the ferries stop. They hear from you when the delay passes what you told them.
• Buyers who are not affected, in Guwahati and on roads that stay open, get no flood messages at all. News that does not concern them teaches them to ignore you.

The status message stays in one format, so the buyer learns to read it at a glance. Here is a filled version, with invented details.

Order 2231 for Sen Electricals, Silchar.

Where it is: on the road via Jorabat, held at Haflong.

Why: landslide on the hill road since Tuesday.

Next update from me: Thursday 5 pm, even if nothing changes.

Need part of it urgently? Reply PART and I will check what can go by the Meghalaya road.

Send it to one buyer, or to a small group on the same route, never to everyone. Keep the templates and the route labels in one place, such as saved replies on WhatsApp Business, so nobody types the update from scratch at nine at night.

Keep the update time, even when nothing has changed

"No change: the road is still closed, your order is still in our godown, next update at five tomorrow" looks like a wasted message. It is the one that keeps the order. The buyer who got it at five, as promised, trusts the next date you give. The buyer who waited until seven and heard nothing has started ringing other suppliers.

Two cautions. Do not message more often than you said you would, because an update every hour reads as panic. And do not guess a reopening date to fill the silence.

Sometimes you will not know where the truck is: the driver is out of network on the wrong side of a slide. Say exactly that, and say when you will ring the transporter again. "Driver not reachable since morning, I call the transporter at four and write to you by five" keeps more trust than a confident guess that turns out wrong.

For example: a fan and cable distributor in Guwahati

This is an invented case. A Guwahati distributor of fans, cables and switches has retailers in Silchar and Agartala. One season the road through the hills closes for days. The owner sends nothing, reasoning that everyone knows about the floods. A Silchar retailer with a pending order, and customers asking for fans in the heat, takes stock from a local stockist and cancels. When the road opens, the distributor's truck arrives to a refused delivery of about ₹2 lakh and a retailer who now has another supplier's number saved.

The next season the owner sends the pre-rains note, with a suggestion to stock fans before the first closure. Silchar and Agartala retailers are labelled as close-route buyers. When the road shuts, each gets the status format with a time for the next update. One retailer replies PART, and a few cartons go by the Meghalaya road at a freight agreed before dispatch. The rest of the orders still wait for the road, and two retailers cancel anyway, but every buyer knows where their order is.

After the water goes down

Reopening is not the end of it. Dispatch the held orders in the order they were placed, and tell each buyer where they stand in the queue. Call every buyer whose order was held for long and ask whether anything arrived damaged, or late enough to cost a sale. Write down who left during the closure and why, and go back to each of them before the next season with the note, not a discount.

Write the note while the roads are open

List your regular buyers with the road each one's orders travel. Mark the roads that closed last season. That list tells you who gets the pre-rains note and who gets the status messages. If a buyer is already lost, service recovery programmes is the related service, and you can tell us what you need.