Now is not the time to become complacent. In fact, there is never a right time to take your eye off the ball, but when you’ve been in business a while it can be easy to fall into a comfortable trap of ticking over. Or is it less ticking over, and more like stagnant?
You need to continually be looking at ways to improve your business to stay ahead of the game, and your business strategies need to be aligned to keep the momentum moving towards growth. Here are four areas you need to review to help you achieve your business goals.
Review Your Customers’ Experience
You have no business without your customers, and so you must review how they experience dealing with your business. You need to think about how they interact with you – more than likely it will be through your website initially, and so you need to provide them with a responsive website design that fully engages them with your brand and the products or services that you offer them. If your site is difficult to navigate, not user friendly for mobile devices or takes too long to open, your customers are going to click away to your competitors.
Do your employees talk to customers on the phone? How is your business’ customer service? You need to ensure that your customer service doesn’t let your business down at the last hurdle. Any complaints should be dealt with as a matter of urgency and any issues resolved in a polite and timely manner.
Review Your Reviews
The greatest insight that potential customers have into your business is by the reviews that they read on the internet. If you’ve been left reviews online, you need to acknowledge and act on them – good and bad. You’ll also be able to gage where you need to turn your attention to improve your business. If you’re consistently receiving feedback about the quality of your product or the time it takes for refunds to be paid, you need to act on the information that you’re being provided. A public dressing down for a poor product can be mitigated by a swift response that pacifies the disgruntled customer.
Review Your Processes
Just because you’ve always done a task a certain way, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the best way to do it! The easiest way to review your business practices is by asking the people who do them: your employees. It may simply be a matter of moving the office furniture around so that the sun doesn’t glare onto computer screens, or it may be that part of a process is being duplicated across departments and collaboration issues need to be addressed – whatever it is, productivity is affected negatively. Seek feedback, and act on it.
Review Your Technology
We live in a digital age, and the technologies that we use in the workplace can quickly become outdated. You can find that there are so many different versions of software floating around the office that licenses continually need to be renewed. It may be time to upgrade your IT and seek a cloud based solution. By choosing a cloud solution to your IT problems you can standardize the programs that are being used, encourage collaboration and provide a flexible platform for your employees to use. You’ll be giving your business the competitive edge by streamlining your processes.
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