We’re in the middle of one of the hardest years in recent memory. The pandemic has hit everyone hard, and it’s been especially difficult for businesses. Some go under because they kept getting charged rent without any revenue to help balance it out. Others, like travel agencies, just lost their customer bases altogether.
It’s necessary to adapt to the new normal to ensure that your business doesn’t go under. There are new expectations and new services that most businesses need to have nowadays to continue growing despite the more difficult conditions nowadays. Here are a couple of suggestions to help you adapt and hopefully save your business from Covid.
Online Service Needed
With it being so risky to go outside nowadays, it’s necessary to do business remotely. While more traditional over-the-phone service is still viable for some businesses, the convenience of filling out order forms online can’t be beaten.
If you’re able to use a website hosting service or hire a developer to build you a website, it will help both the visibility and the usability of your business to the average customer. So if your business doesn’t have much of an online footprint yet, it would be a good idea to start changing that quickly if you don’t want to get left behind by your competition.
Delivery is King
With everyone stuck indoors and the risks associated with going outdoors, it should go without saying that if your business revolves around selling a product, you must provide a delivery service to stay competitive. The quicker and more reliable the delivery, the more likely your customers will recognize how easy your business is to deal with and recommend it to their friends.
Even if your business is more service-oriented, there are still ways to take advantage of couriers. Businesses like keyboard modification services often pick up their customer’s keyboards via a courier, work on their requests, and send them back in disinfected packaging. How you can implement this depends on your business’s exact nature, but the bottom line is that the more convenient you can make things for your customers, the better.
Pay Attention to the Customer Experience
Some businesses implement the above tips but don’t consider what the customer experience is actually like. It doesn’t matter how fancy your website looks if it’s laid out in a convoluted way that’s difficult to understand. Likewise, even if you do offer delivery, customers will still be displeased if you can’t follow your advertised turnaround time.
When changing how your business works, do your best to think like a customer and don’t cut corners. Every cut corner is a potential snag that can ruin the customer experience and your business’ reputation. Test every change you make, and get multiple opinions to avoid getting stuck in an echo chamber. Every customer is different, so the more opinions you can get, the better.
Be Honest
Delays are to be expected, given everything that’s going on. Don’t try to make it sound like your business or service is completely unaffected and that you can operate at 100 percent efficiency. Be as honest as possible with your customers. Transparency can help them understand why a delay is happening and help avoid bad reviews.
Don’t lie for the sake of saving face either. With how easy getting information is nowadays, it’s possible that someone can call you out on it and blow the whole incident out of proportion. So if your shipment of products is a bad batch and you need to order replacements, be honest and avoid that mess entirely.
Explore Related Services
Since your business will likely slow down in one way or another, it might be worthwhile to do a little lateral thinking. For example, if you mostly deal with a specialty product like custom mechanical keyboards produced and sold in small batches, you can expect manufacturing to slow down because of quarantine. Your ability to stock your main product will suffer, and your business will slow down.
If that’s the case, take into consideration the other things that your customers will likely buy. People who buy custom mechanical keyboards also spend money on specialty keycaps, custom cables, modding services, etc. There’s an entire other side to the business that you can capitalize on if one side is slowing down. Taking the time to evaluate your business and what it offers to your customers could be the key to saving it from failing because of Covid.
