When you run a business, you need to think about what matters to your customers and your clients. Ultimately, their needs, their desires and whether or not you fulfill them will determine if your business is a success or a failure.
Straight off the bat, we can look at one of the factors that matters to your audience, and that’s online reviews. A recent report revealed that eighty percent of online customers take reviews into account before they commit to a purchase. If there’s an issue with your reviews that could have a crippling effect on your company. People won’t want to buy from your business, and this will drive down profits.
To combat bad reviews, we need to think about what causes them. Online, there can be a whole variety of different reasons for negative reviews. For instance, it might be due to a problem with deliveries. There’s nothing some customers hate more than late deliveries or even damaged products in the mail. Or, it might be related to the quality of the product that they order. Perhaps it’s not as it was advertised and this will definitely lead to some disgruntled customers. They might even ask for a full refund for the product, leaving you out of pocket and with financial issues.
This is just one of the problems customers can have with your company. There are many more, and by understanding all of them, you can make your business exactly what customers seek.
Property Problems
If your business operates in the real world, you do need to think about your property. Essentially, this is the heart of your company. It’s where you’re going to bring new clients in the hope of getting them to buy your products or services. It’s also where you’re going to build new business leads and attract investors. So, what does your business property need to be to dazzle your customers?
Well, it definitely needs to be clean and tidy. Otherwise, customers will assume that you don’t care about the little details and they might think this reflects on the level of quality of your work too. You want to avoid your office looking like it’s run down and seen better days. Not only could this alter the perception of your service, but it might also mean that customers assume there’s a cash flow problem in your business. If that’s the case, you’ll struggle to get to some of the bigger clients to sign on with a company that clearly isn’t performing that well on the market.
There are plenty of maintenance issues that can crop up with an office business. For instance, you might have a problem with graffiti on the outside of your company. Again, this is going to make your business seem unprofessional and poorly managed. Issues like this can be quickly rectified with commercial cleaning services that are available for any company to use. They won’t just get rid of graffiti either. The right cleaning company can ensure that your business property is picture perfect for new clients and ready to impress.
Don’t forget, in some cases, your business property is going to be the first impression clients get of your corporation and you definitely want it to be a good one. You don’t want clients to see your business address and immediately think they’d be better off meeting your competition across the street.
One of the best ways to make sure that your property is ready to impress is by investing in new tech. Even just updating your computer’s could send the right impression to new customers. It shows that you have the money to make sure you’re staying ahead with the latest trends in technology. This sends the message that you are prepared to invest if it improves the service for your customers.
Of course, there are plenty of companies that don’t have office addresses. Usually, these businesses are based almost entirely online. However, if you are running a company like this, you should still consider having a virtual office address. WIth a virtual office, you will have a place to take clients when you want to impress them, but you can also save a lot of money by not paying rent or buying a full-time property. It’s also beneficial because you won’t be in charge of the maintenance for the building you are using.
Online Expectations
As we said, generally speaking, online business owners don’t need to worry about the impression they make with customers in the real world. Instead, you should think about the key areas of your business online. These are your website and your social media profiles. Starting with the website, one of the most important factors to consider is whether or not it is secure.
If your business website is not secure, it could be exposed to issues such as hacking. Over the past year, there have been numerous cases of this. The most prominent being the hack on European hospitals last week that crashed thousands of systems and earned hackers at least fifty thousand. This is becoming more of an issue for business owners, but it’s important to understand it doesn’t just affect the company. If there is a hack, it’s highly likely that the customers will be the target and their data could be stolen. When this occurs, it can be difficult to rebuild consumer trust in your brand.
Aside from this, you need to make sure that your website is easy for consumers to use. They shouldn’t have to spend more than a minute searching for a product that they want to buy. If it takes longer than this to complete a search you have probably already lost the customer to the competition. You should confer with a web designer about how to make your site more user-friendly and ensure that it doesn’t trip customers up when they’re already looking to make a purchase.
As for your social media accounts, you need to make sure that they connect to customers in fun and exciting ways. Ideally, you need to use them to add fresh content on a daily basis and make sure that you are constantly providing them with new information. These days, one of the things that customers want most is to be able to interact with the businesses that they buy from. It’s so easy to do this through social media. You can ask them questions, share UGC and even get them to fill out surveys on business performance. The best part is that users don’t see this as intrusive, so it’s far better than sending an email or pushing info through the post.
Customer Service
How effective is your customer support team? They need to be providing the best possible level of care and attention to your customers. This means that customers shouldn’t be left on hold for hours. Nor should they have difficulty reaching and contacting your business when something does go wrong. We’ve already mentioned one of the ways to solve this issue, and that’s social media. However, you may not be comfortable with issues with your company being discussed in a public arena like this. That’s why it is still a good idea to have a customer support team ready and able to solve the issues.
Although, there’s a problem here, and that’s the cost. Hire a team and receive no complaints, you’ll be paying a full staff to do nothing through the day. Or, you could hire a full team and still not have enough people to cover all the complaints your business has been receiving. The solution to this issue is technical support. You should look at investing in call handling software. With this tech, calls can be answered and managed with a small team of staff, and a customer will never be left waiting. If you’re tired of seeing poor service as a reason for bad reviews, this is the solution that you need.
Employee Interactions
Lastly, you do need to make sure you’re hiring a team that are not only able to impress customers but connect with them on a personal level. You need to make sure that your employees are highly trained and able to interact with consumers in a way that makes them feel comfortable and secure. You don’t want them to be in a position where customers are not coming back for multiple purchases because they don’t like the way your staff treated them.
This goes all the way back to the interview process when you are building your team. You have to make sure you are getting the right people for the positions in your company. They need to be friendly, well mannered and above all, accessible. An employee customers feel they can’t connect with will lose you a lot of sales.
As you can see then, there are a lot of different areas to consider that could impact customer opinion of your business. If your company is going to be successful, you really need to cover all these bases and make sure your business is ready to impress.
