Owning a small business can be exciting, especially if your business encompasses a lot of the dreams and passions that you’ve always worked towards. However, small businesses also come along with a lot of responsibilities, including maintaining a good company reputation. Here are a few big mistakes that can tank your company’s reputation that you need to be aware of.
Ignoring Customer Service Requests
First off, one of the biggest mistakes that you can make is ignoring customer service requests that come in. Customer service requests or complaints will usually come through your normal customer service routes, but in recent years, businesses have also started getting these types of communications via social media messaging. Since you don’t have to pick up a phone or answer a door to respond to a social media message, they are a lot easier to ignore. However, you need to avoid ignoring any customer service requests. If your customers don’t feel like their concerns are responded to, they won’t be likely to return to your business, and might even dissuade their friends from doing so.
Failing to Protect Data
Another big mistake that you can make that might tank your company’s reputation is failing to protect data. Any kind of data breach can be dangerous, since it can threaten your company. However, data breaches that involve personal customer data is very risky for your company’s reputation. You need to be very cautious with customer data such as payment information or personal information details. Data breaches due to negligence can result in a loss of trust among your customers.
Bad Reviews
Finally, a big mistake that you can make is allowing your business to generate bad reviews. Nowadays, everyone checks online reviews before shopping from a new business, and around 86% of customers won’t continue their shopping if they see negative reviews online. Of course, you can’t always control what people post when they write reviews, but if you do everything that you can to help your customers to have positive experiences, they won’t have any reason to post negative reviews. If you’ve noticed that you have accumulated negative reviews, try to incentivize your customers to post about their positive experiences to highlight those instead.
Now that you’re aware of some of the biggest mistakes that your company can make, try to avoid these mistakes at all costs. Ignoring customer service requests, failing to protect customer data, and accumulating bad reviews would all be incredibly harmful to your company. Make sure you avoid these mistakes and take more time to research other mistakes so you can ensure your company’s success.
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