If you run a business, you have a company culture. It may not be posted online. In fact, you may not even realize that you have one. But, all aspects of how you do business, whether you define them or not, tell your clients and employees about your company attitudes, direction and focus.
You have a choice: define your company culture or let it haphazardly define your company to the world. Think about the following six company culture elements that help attract the right people to your business.
Social media and online reviews have given your customers unprecedented abilities to complain about your business in front of the world. While that may sound like a bad thing, hearing the hard truth about your business via customer complaints can actually benefit you in the long run. What do customers complain about most—and what can you learn from it?
Poor customer service is the top cause of customer complaints, a study by Corra reports. More than half (52 percent) of survey respondents say they would complain about a service issue, 31.4 percent about a product problem, and 16.6 percent about a policy issue.
Chief among the specific service issues that motivate complaints are rude customer service reps, poor service at a store, uninformed customer service reps and slow service at check-in.
I think it’s human nature to focus on our shortcomings. Instead of seeing the happiness captured in a photograph, we focus on our crooked smile or lousy haircut. Rather than appreciating the wonderful view from the windows of our retail store, we fret about the parking shortage.
To a certain degree, though, being critical can help us excel. Think about it…if you could identify weaknesses and transform them into strengths, your company would benefit big time!
Let’s take a look at a couple of examples of turning weakness into strength:
Nextiva's team of developers is committed to enhancing our products, creating new solutions, and improving our customers’ experiences with them. We are dedicated to providing the tools that businesses need, and often build solutions with our own business needs in mind.
Nextiva Analytics was born from this process. We use call data to make decisions on a daily basis, from staffing needs to measuring marketing campaign effectiveness. But, we didn’t have a simple analytics tool to gather and analyze this information, which led to the creation of Nextiva Analytics. Since releasing Nextiva Analytics in 2016, we have continued to search for ways to improve the product, including integrating call recording with the platform. We are now happy to offer Advanced Call Recording!
When you start a business, it's all about passion and excitement. You burn the candle at both ends. You put in the hard work of planning to make sure you set up your company for success. The last thing you want to think about is getting out of the business. But that's a mistake. If you don't have an exit strategy, you could create a new set of problems.
“Remember when you woke up and didn’t need any more traffic to your website? No more traffic at all? That you were totally overrun with traffic and everything was perfect?” asked Oli Gardner to a crowd last November at NextCon16 in Scottsdale. “No? Of course not because it didn’t (explicative) happen.”
It is not uncommon for new small businesses to get their start without the expense of a brick and mortar presence. Transporting products directly to customers can be quite cost-effective. For example, restaurants can start with a food truck or retail stores with pop-up shops as a way to reach new customers with lower fixed costs, all while testing their business models.
