When you run a small business, you have to accept that part of your role is to keep people happy. This is absolutely essential when it comes to your success.
After all, if you leave a string of disgruntled individuals behind you, you will see sales plummet and can find yourself experiencing difficulty in finding people who want to work for you or with you.
Maintaining a good reputation all round is key to success! So, to help you along the way, here are a few different things that you can do in order to ensure that your customers and employees are as satisfied as possible at all times!
Customers
Customer satisfaction should always be at the forefront of your mind when you run a small business. After all, the happier people are with your products and services, the more likely they will be to return and spend with you again.
Content customers are also likely to leave good reviews online and to recommend your brand to others. This can help to significantly boost your profits – word of mouth and reviews from real, unpaid people do tend to be one of the best forms of advertising out there and they won’t cost you a penny! Here are just a couple of different ways to determine where you can improve
Generating Feedback
It can be relatively difficult to generate feedback from customers. Especially nowadays when the majority of business is carried out online.
You don’t really get the opportunity to talk to your customers as they are checking out to find out how they have found the process.
This is why you should consider using a customer satisfaction software tool. This will encourage customers to fill out a little feedback form at the end of each transaction, allowing you to see what you are doing right and where there is room for improvement!
Acting on Feedback
Remember that generating feedback alone simply isn’t enough. There’s no point hearing back from customers if you don’t need act on the feedback they have provided you with.
If you notice regular complaints regarding a particular aspect of your business, put wrongs to rights as quickly and effectively as possible. Once you’ve got major problems out of the way, you can start to focus on smaller and less frequent complaints.
Employees
Of course, we should keep our customers happy. This is only logical – they are ultimately the people who determine whether our products sell or not and consequently determine whether we generate a profit or not.
But these are not the only people we need to keep satisfied and content. We should also focus on ensuring that our employees are happy too! Remember that your employees are the backbone of your company.
They are the individuals that keep the basics up and running by engaging with customers, replying to queries and requests, and even keeping our commercial properties clean and functioning.
They are the people who manufacture and package our products. They are the people who get our products from A to B. They are the people who pitch our products to mass suppliers who can give our brand huge exposure.
They are the people who advertise and market our goods for us. As you can see, without them, we wouldn’t sell many products either!
So, here are a few steps that you can take to ensure that every employee has a positive experience in the workplace. This could also help with staff retention rates, which in turn can also save you a whole lot of money in recruitment.
Establish a HR Department
Remember that staff are human – no matter how professional or independent they may be, there is always a chance that problems or disputes may develop between different staff members.
While you may be able to manage one or two staff members around your usual tasks, you’re going to have too much work on your plate if you expand and take on more staff.
This is when you should establish a HR department. HR stands for “human relations” and part the role of individuals working within this department will be to resolve disputes in the workplace, bringing disputes to a fair resolve.
They will also ensure that all employees receive the benefits they are entitled to, such as annual leave, maternity leave, and sick leave. Having a HR department ensures that staff are well monitored and that all of their workplace needs are met!
Conduct Anonymous Surveys
No matter how functional you may believe your workplace may be, it’s important to remember that there is always room for improvement.
Employees may have gripes that you would never consider or pick up on, so a good way to identify these is to conduct anonymous surveys.
Sure, you could ask employees for areas of improvement directly, but many will feel reluctant to criticise your company, so will remain silent. Conducting anonymous surveys ensures you get honest feedback with no restraints. Ensure that you have a complete set of questions and then leave extra space at the end for further comments or suggestions.
Hopefully, the above information and ideas will help you to maintain satisfied customers and employees! This really isn’t an area to be taken lightly. So, incorporate the above steps into your business plan as soon as possible!
