Figuring out how to build a great business reputation can seem challenging at first. With so many different goals to balance, where do you even start? Thinking about some of these ideas can help you start making progress.

Slow Customer Service

When it comes to developing a strong business reputation, there is little else that can affect your reputation as much as your responsiveness to customers. When you respond quickly to customers, they feel like their concerns are valued and heard. When you respond quickly, customers feel like they can trust you with their business.

This feeling of trust applies in practically every setting. If you can perform all the necessary repairs on a customer’s car within the set timeframe, customers will feel happy to bring their vehicle back to you. If you can start a hair appointment on time, customers will feel like their time won’t be wasted by going to your salon.

Negative Reviews

While it is true that even bad publicity is good publicity because it gets your name out in the open, negative reviews can have a significant effect on your reputation. Usually, one of the first places that people go to better understand a company is Google—if you manage apartments, prospective tenants will look at your Google reviews. Have you been responsive? Reasonable? Have you addressed tenants’ issues quickly and satisfactorily? If there are too many bad reviews, potential customers will likely shy away from you and look to other companies instead.

Shipping Errors

 When it comes to the customer experience, there are only a few things that make or break it. One of them is shipping. When your customers order anything online, they expect their item to arrive on time or early. Arriving late is bound to mean a dissatisfying experience. And arriving in the wrong location can mean a dissatisfying experience as well.

Try to develop shipping options that enable you to send your products as quickly and cheaply as possible. Consider having pickup in store for free for customers. Usually, you can arrange to have certain orders come in with other shipments which will be less complicated for you.

IT Issues

When it comes to running your business, there are a lot of highly technical aspects of your website that significantly affect the customer’s experience. When a customer can’t easily navigate the website or when they can’t find answers to questions quickly, they are likely to just take their business elsewhere.

Dealing with IT issues takes time and energy that you don’t always have. Instead of trying to fix these issues yourself, outsource them to different companies who can manage your website efficiently and can fix problems immediately. Having someone on your website will also prove particularly helpful when you have to update things—having a good tech team will allow you to redesign things or add different pages quickly and professionally.

Overly Political Messages

It’s also important that you don’t align your company too heavily with any political parties on the political spectrum. Even though you may feel a pull to help ameliorate your company by contributing to different causes, try and separate your efforts to build the community from any overtly political stance or party.

Getting too involved in politics can alienate potential customers. And even more than that, aligning yourself with a political party, platform, or candidate can result in people associating your company with a host of different ideas that may or may not be connected to what your company stands for.

Workplace Discrimination

Eliminating workplace discrimination is essential when it comes to your business. Make your company a clear advocate of equality for all. When your company develops this type of accepting reputation, you’ll dramatically build customer loyalty.

And the best way to start building that reputation is in your company culture, from the inside out. If you don’t value principles of equality in your team interactions, it will be hard for employees to reflect their valuing of those same principles with customers.

Not Keeping Promises

One of the most damaging things you can do for your company reputation is to make promises you cannot keep—and that goes for promises made to employees as well as customers. Be vigilant about making your different deals and promotions extremely clear so that it isn’t possible to misunderstand what you are offering. Then, do your best to completely honor those promotional deals so that none of your customers feel taken advantage of or let down.

Similarly, make sure that you communicate expectations, salary, and rewards clearly and fairly to all of your employees. Don’t promise employees Christmas bonuses if you aren’t sure you’ll be able to keep the promise. Making sure you treat your employees well will help you have better retention but, it will also help you have employees who carry themselves in a way that reflects positively on the company.

Annoying Social Media Updates

Social media can be one of your biggest tools when it comes to marketing, but you must figure out how to use it correctly. Posting updates consistently but not overwhelmingly is a good way to better interact with your customers and market your products. But when you post irrelevant posts or even worse, when you frequently post irrelevant posts, your potential customers will be annoyed and will likely unfollow you.

Worse than just unfollowing you, spamming customers sends a message about your brand that you may not want to be sending—it seems to communicate that you are desperate, that you care only about selling your product, and that you don’t respect your customers’ time.

You want to build a solid reputation. You have a great product. But implementing some of these solutions will take things to the next level so that you can start developing real customer loyalty among your clients.

Let us help you with your reputation with a great marketing plan! Book a call with us to get started.