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Developing a business of any size is difficult and staying in business is even harder, especially in these extremely uncertain economic times of recession, growth spikes, and Covid-19; it is becoming more and more difficult to accurately gauge whether you will still be in business by the end of next week.
Some industries, such as restaurants and other customer-focused establishments and businesses have had a hard time over the past 12 months, with the catering sector alone losing 15 million employees. Although it has become difficult to identify whether your business is sustainable due to a changing world economy, there are some powerful things you can do to boost your potential, including:
- Identifying Customer Retention Avenues
- Engaging with the Community
- Changing Policies to Reflect World Attitudes
One of the greatest challenges of a business is customer retention but revenue can be kept steady or increased if you nail this one, while many of the best business owners actively engage with their community, whether it’s out in the real world or even online, and in order to survive you must change with the times, even if it means a major shift in operations.
Identifying Customer Retention Avenues
Attracting customers and ensuring that they return is the main goal of any business, and while this sounds easy, it is actually rather difficult. There are many reasons that customer retention is diminished, with the main culprit being poor customer service which accounts for $83 billion of lost revenue in the United States alone.
It is, therefore, necessary to provide customers with a reason to return to your business, with customer service being just one facet of a multi-pronged strategy. CEOs such as gambling mogul Jorge Hank of Grupe Caliente offer such things as free dining experiences, loyalty schemes, and discounted services as a means of attracting new customers while incentivizing existing ones to return.
Engaging with the Community
Active engagement is one of the fundamental core principles of staying in business. When a community sees you as a faceless company, they typically don’t feel anything for your business and are therefore less likely to engage with you or return as a loyal customer, which is why community engagement is so important.
But community engagement isn’t limited to your local area and can extend beyond into such things as social media, running a blog, and keeping an up-to-date website. Social media engagement, for example, has been shown to boost website traffic and has the potential to provide almost limitless marketing potential.
Changing Policies to Reflect World Attitudes
With modern mass movements becoming so prominent in our daily lives, almost no one has been untouched or unaffected in some way by such movements as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the sustainability movement. Many of the issues that these movements aim to highlight have been around for too long with too little action to combat them.
As a prominent and respected voice in your community, you can stand firm with causes that you believe in and change company policy to reflect these values. You could, for example, publicly announce that you are to implement a zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment, will support local black communities, or actively reduce waste and switch to renewable energy sources.
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