5 Things to You Should Continue Doing After You Launch Your Business
Launching a business is never easy. Not only do you have to worry about how you’ll raise the capital and survive during early days where sales might be slow, but you also have to always be exploring growth opportunities. Unfortunately, many businesses get comfortable when they’ve reached a certain point. They stop investing in areas they should be investing in, and their focus may be solely on profit.
With the majority of small businesses shutting down within five years, it’s important to not lose sight of long-term growth. If you want to grow your small business, tread carefully. Here are five things you should continue to do regularly after you’ve launched your business and have some mild success:
1) Improving Your Customer Service
Customer service is a vital part of businesses today. In fact, it can make or break your business. In the beginning, you might be handling all the customer service efforts on your own. However, as you grow, you must continue to reshape and grow your customer service strategy. Assuming that your business makes it beyond the 5-year mark, studies have shown that the average business would lose half of their initial customer base by then.
Even more: every year, crappy customer service cost businesses more than $75 billion. There are many ways you can focus on improving your customer service: this includes incorporating chatbots, launching loyalty programs, building an online support channel, and implementing multi-channel support systems to ensure your customers can reach in multiple ways, depending on their preference.
2) Getting Customer Feedback
It can start to become impossible to improve your customer service strategy if you don’t exactly understand what what your customers are thinking or what they want. It becomes impossible to satisfy their needs if you don’t know what those opinions. Leveraging customer feedback can also increase your profits in the long-run. It will help you improve your products and services, improve customer retention, and provide valuable insight into what future consumers want.
One of the most common ways to collect customer feedback is by sending out customer surveys. Consider enticing your customers to participate by offering discounts and freebies. This could also be a great way to increase sales. You should also add a “Feedback button” to your website. You’d be surprised to know how many people want their voice to be heard. And lastly, use data to understand what questions you should ask which people. For instance, you wouldn’t ask new customers how your customer service could be improved if they don’t have any experience with your business.
3) Building a Company Culture
Your company culture is what drives the company forward; you cannot have a stellar customer service team if your employees aren’t happy to work with you. Whether you have a team of three people or a team of 300, you should always be thinking about ways to maintain the best culture possible. Many people would argue that company culture is even more important than strategy. You don’t need to be a multi-million dollar company to achieve this; offering simple office perks, showing appreciation, adding a remote work plan, and refraining from a micromanagement leadership style are all ways you can build a healthy company culture.
4) Investing In Business Analytics
Business analytics is the process of breaking down information from past performances to help predict future behavior. All the businesses you know and love—especially corporations—use business analytics to determine what tomorrow’s profits will be like, and data is the foundation. It can reveal areas for improvement long before you’re in a sticky situation. If you want to run your business and stay lean by handling your own analytical needs, you can take classes to get an online master’s in business analytics. If you don’t have the time or dispensable income to pay for online tuition, it’s best to outsource this area.
5) Marketing & Market Research
Market research isn’t just necessary pre-launch. This is something you must continue doing time and time again. The most successful companies continuously invest in research to ensure their marketing efforts are on-target.
With this in mind, it’s important to think of marketing as a source of food for your business, rather than a medicine. Many businesses think of marketing as something that should be reactive: for instance, they might ramp up marketing efforts if profits are slow. However, continuous involvement in your marketing efforts are necessary.
