Is Your Business Friendly?

Thumbtack, a consumer service for finding and hiring local businesses, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on education and entrepreneurship, recently released the results of their Small Business Friendliness Survey. The study measured data from over 12,000 small business owners and provides insight regarding the impact of friendliness towards customers as it relates to a business’ overall success.

This study demonstrates the importance between business friendliness and business success, as the former is directly correlative to customer loyalty, according to the survey.

For many businesses, in both B2B and B2C, customer loyalty is determined by a myriad of factors, two of which are business friendliness and business efficiency. Frequently, owners regard the two factors as mutually exclusive and believe that a business cannot be both efficient and friendly. As the study indicates, however, a business may likely lose profit and customer retention by not emphasizing business friendliness.

In three steps, owners can work to improve business friendliness, as defined by providing customers with a positive and helpful experience:

1) Make an effort to communicate genuinely with your customers on their problems, needs and frustrations. Many businesses, in numerous industries, handle customer dissatisfaction as if it was a defective product, rather than a human concern.

By taking the time to speak honestly with customers about their problem, a business owner or manager may discover aspects of their product, service or workflow that they did not previously realize were significant. Additionally, communicating with customers on a human level builds customer loyalty.

According to the Jim Moran Institute and Lee Resources, customers will return 70% of the time if the business resolves a complaint in the customer’s favor. Additionally, their research determined up to 95% of customers will give businesses a second chance, if their complaints are handled successfully and in a timely manner.

2) Stress the company-wide importance of business friendliness. Reputations take years to cultivate and only seconds to destroy. Business friendliness must be a goal for each employee, even if someone’s job does not directly entail customer relations. Management has both the ability and the responsibility of keeping business friendliness top-of-mind for all workers throughout an enterprise.

3) Create a system to measure customer satisfaction. As in any policy, or marketing campaign, a business owner must be able to evaluate a project’s success. Business friendliness must be measured in order to isolate attempts that increase customer satisfaction along with those that have no effect and/or decrease customer satisfaction. This metric could be a customer survey, either online, print, or onsite, which customers complete voluntarily as well as tracking customer return rates.

Through communication, prioritizing, and measurement, business friendliness can favorably impact your customers and your business’ bottom line.