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A Good Reputation is Hard to Win and Easy to Lose

Guest post by: Susan Leigh

Article Overview: Business management is about steering your company through potential crises and seeing the bigger picture. Providing the best quality service to your customer involves many different factors. Let us look at some of the components in ensuring that you build and maintain a good business reputation.

A Good Reputation is Hard to Win and Easy to Lose

In business, ones reputation is the key to success or failure. The way that your business is perceived can stay with you for years. It is importantto recognise all the different factors that contribute to your brand being identified as agood, efficient and reliable supplier of your goods or services.

- Be clear as to your niche. Somes businesses try to be everything to everybody and end up losing their way. It is important, especially in the early years, to define your role clearly and concisely. There is no need to be a jack of all trades. It is far more efficient and effective to form allegiances with associated companies if it appears that that would workwell for all parties. That way you become recognised as a specialist and can tap into the other businesses leads too.

- Deal with complaints efficiently. Nothing travels as fast as bad news. Dealing with complaints and dissatisfaction speedily and respectfully can turn a bad situation into a good one. Everyone makes mistakes and people will accept that, but only if a mistake is acknowledged and put right quickly and with a good grace.

- Have an efficient answering service. Customers often get frustrated at having to queue to have their order, query or complaint dealt with. Try to have targets in place where phone lines are answered within an allotted time span.

- Train staff. Staff are often your customer facingpart of the business. Ensure that they are clear as to their roles, the company ethos, the importance of being neat, smart and respectful to customers. Whatever the business, money has to change hands for staff to be paid. Sometimes staff can lose sight of that fact and they need to be reminded of it regularly.

- Recognise that whilst price is an important factor, often reliability, speed and quality of service are often equally important, if not more so. Providing what people want, when they want and need it is the most important aspect of building a successful, long lasting business reputation. Customer satisfaction is the key to longevity.

- Be inviting. Having the best product in the world in ugly packagingmight work well as an occasional gimmick. But having an inviting looking product with clear user instructions is an important way to build up product loyalty.

- Customer feedback is a useful way to get opinions and different users viewpoints on your companys' performance. A short relevant survey can get specific information about your company that can be used to enhance any areas that need improvement.

- Taking customers email addresses is an efficient way to build a useful database that can keep in touch with customers, mail shot them about specific promotions and provide them with valuable informationabout developments in their business niche. By providing generous informative mail shots your customers may well keep them to hand and look out for them arriving in their in-box.

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Article Tags: best quality service, business management, business reputation, good business, good reputation, key to success
Referred by: http://www.bespoke-sales-training.co.uk



Related Forum Posts
Re: Five Personality Traits of Successful Business Owners - 1. Focus 2. Ability to Adapt 3. Hard Work 4. Good planning 5. People Skills
Delegating - Good info and interesting list. Easy to see how the authority or power is slowly passed to the person - the secret would be knowing WHEN to move to the next step. I like to avoid people who are stuck at the #1 level. Chris
Re: QUESTION: What's the most important thing you do for your bu - Good Question Evan, Hard to answer as we always seem to be keeping several balls in the air at the same time so my answer would be to stay disciplined and focussed and trust your long term plan. It seems a bit cheesy to say that but I find it's true because if I don't stay focussed I will lose all discipline and that is something that is a must for any aspiring Internet Marketer. regards, Mal.
Re: e-Commerce and e-Payment providers - When I came back to Japan in 1999 I sometimes used to ask my students if they would buy anything on the Internet and at that time most thought it was too risky. I'd encourage them to try by using well known sites such as Amazon.co.jp and also pointed out that using a credit card on a reputable site was safer than using it at a restaurant. I can't remember the last time I had that discussion or when the "tipping point" occurred in Japan. To answer your other question, I use Paypal for several reasons: 1. Brand familiarity 2. Easy to use 3. Free to withdraw 50,000yen+ to my Japanese bank account - a huge benefit (but maybe other systems also offer that...?) 4. Easy to cancel subscriptions On the down side, their transaction fees are quite costly, they are difficult to contact and when disputes arise you can sometimes lose even when you can prove via your tracking service that the disputed item was "delivered" to the customer's address!
Re: Domain name sugestion - Hi Anelly, Support-Box.com sounds very good to me. Easy and catchy.


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