Small businesses can struggle to establish themselves as dependable, especially when you consider how many larger and well-renowned companies there are to compete with. These recognizable brands come with inherent trust, even if many consumers use them because they are familiar. But what can you do to make your small business achieve the same level of trust?
Working to establish trust can be challenging. You need someone to take a chance on your business and ensure you do things right at your first opportunity. Although it might feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle, there are several solutions you can consider to establish trust in your company and finally compete with bigger brands. Here are twelve ideas you can embrace to ignite positive changes.
Be Careful with Your Finances
Financial issues are one of the biggest factors that affect consumer trust. Therefore, keeping an eye on business finances is essential, otherwise, you may spend money that isn’t yours or you could discover that funds have been siphoned out of your business under your nose.
Business owners must be diligent with their budgets. You need to know how much comes in and how much goes out. It will also benefit you if you find ways to save money or invest funds in different areas to help grow your company. As long as you know all about your business finances, you can maintain the trust of your customers.
Improve Communication
Communication is another crucial element of a successful and trusted business. If you can’t outline what you need, your business will flounder. Adopting a culture where people say what they mean is essential since passive-aggressive discussions do not benefit anyone.
Emails, phone calls, and instant messaging communication should be quick and to the point to maintain productivity. For businesses on larger premises, you can also use intercom conversion for announcements that ensure everyone will hear them. This is vital in emergencies as you can be sure that everyone knows what to do and will follow the agreed-upon procedure.
Improving communication also avoids second-guessing or becoming mired in semantics, meaning you should have fewer issues with customer and employee complaints.
Of course, it’s not just about the methods of communication that you use, but how you, as an individual communicate with your clients. Improving your skills of communication, practicing habits such as active listening, as recommended by Monty Cerf can help every moment of contact with your clients and customers feel a lot more engaged, involved, and worth their time.
Train Your Employees
Everyone benefits from training, even if you think the job is easy enough to do without training or that employees will pick it up as they go along. This is immediately a sign of a lazy and negligent manager, so training employees should be a priority.
Not only does this ensure that everyone knows how to do the job they were hired for, but it also encourages their professional development which makes them more effective employees and boosts their confidence at work.
Training employees will also minimize the chances of mistakes that could affect customers, so if you want to avoid complaints, make sure you train your employees. You can’t teach them everything, but outlining the basics will make a substantial difference.
Trust Your Employees
Once you have trained your employees, you also need to trust them. No one wants to work for someone who is breathing down their neck throughout the work day, and you hired them for a reason, so trusting them can transform your company.
Trust allows them to feel more comfortable in their role as they know you have faith in their abilities. This freedom enables them to be more creative and find solutions that will benefit the customer and the company. Micromanagement can hinder productivity, too, and it can even make your employees scared to make a mistake which creates a toxic environment that can be challenging to change.
Listen to Customers
Although your customers are not part of the business in the same way you and your employees are, they can still help your company improve. Listening to their feedback, whether they are filing complaints or highlighting an excellent experience proves that you appreciate your customers.
They will recognize your appreciation and understanding and their trust will grow. This boosts their positive association with your company and makes them more likely to use your service again.
You should set up a dependable customer feedback system to help you collect vital information. A dedicated customer service email is a good place to begin, while chatbots or real customer service agents can also help your customers when they come to you with a query.
Utilize Feedback Positively
However, listening to customers won’t matter if you don’t know how to utilize the feedback positively. There could be several complaints you need to deal with and it’s easy to feel personally attacked as a business owner, but you mustn’t feel this way.
Instead, consider the problem and work with your team to identify how to change it and improve your business. While some issues are more pressing and achievable than others, customers that see you have listened to their suggestions to improve their experience will feel satisfied that they can trust your business.
Still, you mustn’t bend over backward for every suggestion, so focus on the things you believe will make a considerable difference.
Be Transparent & Upfront
Every business goes through ups and downs, but trying to hide this can cause more problems than it is worth. While you don’t want to alarm anyone, especially not employees, customers, or investors, you should still alert them in case anything happens.
Common problems include data breaches or product recalls. You don’t want a potentially expensive lawsuit to undo all the hard work you’ve put into the company, so you need to announce the issue before the media or other sources learn about it.
These issues can be hugely damaging for your company, but you can hope that your honesty insulates you from most of the backlash. Yes, you will still lose customers, but those that stick around will likely respect you, although you need to ensure you don’t do it again.
Recognize Achievements
Company trust does not just revolve around the customers’ perception. You also want your employees to have faith in your business. Recognizing them for their achievements is an excellent way to do this, and even small but powerful actions can increase employee satisfaction and reduce the chances of regular and disruptive turnover.
Small bonuses or time off rewards are common, while other experiences such as free tickets also help you highlight excellent work from your team. You can do employee of the month or year, with prizes reflecting different achievements, and these will make your employees feel more connected to the brand.
Strive for Improvement
A company should never rest on its laurels. If you want to maintain momentum and take effective steps to compete with larger corporations, you need to strive for improvement.
Taking employee and customer feedback is one way to do this but it isn’t the only solution. You shouldn’t wait around to learn about what you could be doing better. You should already know or at least have various ideas about how to grow your business.
There are likely several shortcuts or sacrifices you made when launching the company. Now that you have some stability and success, you can work towards implementing policies and resources you missed previously. This can include upgrading your network and systems to ensure better productivity within the workplace.
Be Consistent
Consistency is another area businesses should focus on. This approach is arguably one of the most crucial elements for increasing trust in your brand. If you are consistent, customers know what they are getting. They know you offer excellent products or services. They know you deliver on time or you have a fantastic customer service team ready to help with any issue.
Your entire team should strive to be consistent in everything. Establish policies and expectations that motivate this consistency and you will never struggle to make a name for yourself or earn the trust of customers again.
Learn from Mistakes
It doesn’t matter who you are or how much experience you have, you will make mistakes at work. Often, these mistakes are minor, such as a late email or a missed spelling correction. They can be fixed easily, even if it is inconvenient.
However, there could also be more significant mistakes, especially in your marketing department or when developing new products. It’s possible to get the tone completely wrong and even upset your customers. It was an innocent mistake, but a major one nonetheless.
Swo what can you do? The damage is done, but you can demonstrate your willingness to learn from mistakes. Evaluate why the mistake happened and find ways to ensure it never happens again. This, if nothing else, is a clear sign of growth.
Make the Workplace Inclusive
The modern consumer wants to give their business a company that has its finger on the pulse of social issues. So, how can you represent this? Establishing a business that generates a sense that everyone belongs is one way to achieve this, so celebrate all cultures and creeds, back up social causes, and don’t be afraid to be yourself. You don’t want to be left on the wrong side of history, so embrace what makes people unique.
Trusted
Trust takes years to build but can be shattered instantly if you make the wrong move. While many small businesses can struggle to match the same trust as their more established competitors, the recent push to support small businesses means you are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt, and you can use this to raise your profile and ensure your customers have a spectacular experience with your brand.