How businesses can inadvertently turn off their patrons.

As a business owner you use all your resources on acquiring clients, so why aren't your focused on holding onto them?

It's worth noting that 95% of loyal customers spend 67% more than first-timers and it costs up to 7 times more to acquire new regulars than by retaining old ones.

Here's why 82% of patrons permanently shun businesses following bad service...

Wait times

Nearly 60% of any kind of caller finds being on hold to be a frustrating part of the service experience.

I recently rang my phone carrier to inquire about my bill and the wait time to speak with a representative was 10 minutes. In my frustration of the elevator music and the repeated options of how to connect, I hung up.

I called another business and while the wait wasn’t quick, they stated they would call me in less than 10 minutes, if I provided a number. Someone actually valued my minutes!

Self-service options
Using my phone carrier situation, prior to calling the company, I went to the self-service option on the website and found myself clicking, seeking and wondering why it was so complicated. The FAQs didn’t answer my question, the prompts weren’t helpful and I decided to use one of those interminable programs designed to simulate conversation with real-life customers.

Chatbots

This automation was created to instantly answer the most frequently asked questions. It's cost-effective, but they are failing in many instances because they lack empathy and an inability to respond to a customer’s frustration.

I realized they are only programmed to assist with certain issues. It didn’t provide a resolution to my issue, nor did it connect me to a human representative leading me to make the dreaded call to support.
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Not my department

When I finally reached a support person---one that has been trained to assist customers with any issue---I shared my reason for calling. Then it happens: “That’s not my department”.

While 80% of businesses believe they provide superior customer service, only 8% of their customers agree.

The best way to ensure your clientele comes back is as simple as good service. 
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Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/
Image Credit: Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

Your website is an integral part of your business. Not only does it provide information about what you do, why you’re great at it, and your pricing, it also serves as an opportunity to establish yourself as an industry expert any time someone does an online search about what you have to offer.

Business sites also enable efficiency, as your prospects get a sense of your brand and can browse at their leisure instead of having to call you several times any time they have a question. It also enables you to better promote your business, particularly if you’ve discovered the wonders of inbound marketing.
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Therefore, it behooves you to design a website that provides a good user experience (UX). But when you look at your options, you realize that there’s a wide range of options and prices. Specifically, it all hinges on whether you create a custom website or build it using templates. Let’s take a closer look at both options.

What Is Custom Website Design?

Whether it is a b2b website design or b2c, custom websites are built from scratch. This involves using code to create the customizable elements you want to include on your site. As a result, you have full control over how the site will look and function.

Because of its complexity, you’ll need to either hire an in-house developer or hire a web design agency to design it for you.

Pros of Building a Custom Website

Building a custom website allows you to create exactly what you’re envisioning. You also won’t have any limitations regarding integrations with applications, functionalities, or scalability.

Cons of Building a Custom Website

Building a custom website is expensive and takes a long time to complete. While the timeframe may vary, you should expect it to take close to four to six months. You also need to look for a highly skilled team of web developers to do this for you, since it’s unlikely that the tech savvy go-to person on your team knows everything there is to know about coding (if they do, kudos to them — and give them a raise!)

What Is a Website Template?

Website templates are predesigned elements that you piece together to bring your website to life. You can browse through a platform’s template library to look for any that match what you’re looking for. You can then make slight modifications regarding layout and colors to align them with your brand identity. You can also add more personality by including visual elements, such as images, videos, and modules.

Pros of Building a Website Using a Template

Website templates are helpful if you are looking to design a simple website. There are hundreds of thousands of templates to choose from, so you don’t necessarily have to feel too limited by going with this option.

Templates are also easy to use; and depending on the website builder you choose (such as HubSpot), they may come with drag-and-drop capabilities that require no coding knowledge.

Cons of Building a Website Using a Template

Although you don’t have to feel too limited by using a template, there are limits to what you can do with this type of website. Some templates may not be designed to enable some of the features you’d like to include; or implement a layout that makes sense for your business; or make it easy to modify as your business grows.

When to Use a Website Template Design

Just because custom websites can give you exactly what you want, it doesn’t mean that templates can’t provide you what you need. In fact, templates are an ideal solution if any of these circumstances apply to your business:

Low Budget

Maybe you’re a startup or there are bigger priorities for which you need to allocate your resources. Using templates can still allow you to design a beautiful website with all of the main functionalities you need, such as background banners, desired typography, and a responsive design. 

Simple Website

Some websites don’t really need bells and whistles. This is especially the case for smaller businesses and solopreneurs. This doesn’t mean that your site has to look basic or cheap. You can purchase higher end templates or hire a web developer to make it look state-of-the-art.

Tight Deadline

Since templates don’t require complex coding (and many of the modules are already created), websites that are designed using them can be completed in a much shorter time frame.

No Coding Knowledge

Using premade modules, CTA builders, and drag-and-drop functionalities eliminates the need to have any coding knowledge. That being said, you still can implement code to achieve exactly what you want to achieve, but you can still create a functional website without it.

When to Create a Custom Website

Custom websites can be created around your specific needs and marketing strategies. This is the best solution for your business if any of the following considerations apply to you:

Unique Requirements
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If the nature of your business requires that you incorporate a complicated website structure, a custom design will save you a lot of time going back and forth trying to get it right. In addition, since so many websites are created using templates, yours may end up looking similar to others.

Complex Features

Custom websites are also ideal for businesses who want to include a lot of graphics, interactive content, a modern storefront, quizzes, online scheduling, order status, or customer portals, for example.

Scalability Concerns

Custom websites can be modified whenever you want, and include whatever you want. This makes it much easier to include additional features and functionalities as you expand your products/service offerings.

You Have Plenty of Time

Building a website from scratch requires a lot of time and patience. You’ll be waiting several months before you can launch it, so even if you do have the money to pay for a big ticket website, make sure you aren’t constrained by a specific deadline.

You Have a Larger Budget

Custom websites cost tens of thousands of dollars. The bigger the website and the more features and functionalities you want to add, the more expensive it’ll become. You’re also paying for highly skilled professionals to do the job for you.

More Control Over User Experience (UX)

You want your website to be intuitive and easy to navigate. You want to create specific paths for website visitors, depending on where they are on their buyer’s journey. You may also want people who browse through their mobile phones to be able to do so by simply using their thumb to click around. While a lot of templates do allow for many of these functionalities, creating a custom website lets you incorporate every single requirement you have.

​Require Multiple Integrations

A website’s ability to integrate with other software is crucial to provide a seamless customer experience. This is also necessary to make things easier for your team. For example, you may need your site to communicate with your CRM, email, customer service software, social media accounts, and any other critical tools your business relies on. The more add-ons you need, the more it makes sense to create a custom website that conforms to these requirements.

Things to Consider If You Have a Lower Budget

What happens if you would love to get a custom website, but it’s not possible to do so with your current budget? You can still create a visually appealing and effective website using templates. However, look for those that allow you to easily incorporate the following:

Mobile Optimization

Not all website templates are responsive to smaller screens. This is a problem, since most people conduct a significant amount of online searches from their phones; and if your site isn’t loading fast enough or they have to keep scrolling sideways to get your info, they’ll simply go look for a competitor that offers a better user experience.

SEO

Search engine optimization is what increases the likelihood of your website being found when your target audience does a Google search. There are many factors to consider to make this possible — such as page loading times, HTML tags, including appropriate headings, meta descriptions, alt text for images, URL format, etc… Some templates include HTML that makes it a lot easier for search engines to make sense of the content. Others don’t load fast enough, or (as mentioned in the point above) aren’t responsive to mobile devices. If you’re using templates, make sure they don’t interfere with any SEO elements.

Whether Third-Party Applications Will Slow Down Page Speed

Sometimes you need features that aren’t included with certain templates. This is solved by integrating third-party applications, which can enable things such as eCommerce, creating pop up forms, or getting SEO recommendations. While they are great ways to implement functionalities that the template alone doesn’t provide, some of them may cause your site to load slower. So if you choose to go the template route, make sure to work with developers who know how to address this issue.

As you can see, there are many considerations that come into play when deciding whether you should build a custom site or use templates. But with the right web developers, the process can become as simple as possible. 




Source: business2community.com
Image Credit: Photo by Monoar Rahman from Pexels

Most business owners want to invest in their business to help it grow. In the early days, you might experience exponential growth; people are finding out about your business for the first time, they’re having great initial experiences, and the novelty of your brand is still fresh enough to help it spread.

This is both exciting and reassuring, opening up new streams of revenue while justifying the existence of your business model.

But what happens when this growth hits a plateau?

Fortunately, there are plenty of small business growth strategies you can use to jumpstart your business back to life – and restore the momentum of your growth.

Is Your Business Stagnated?

First, assess whether your business has actually stagnated in growth. Most businesses go through cycles of activity, including busy periods and slow periods. They also tend to fluctuate in line with economic conditions; if the broader economy is going through a recession, it’s only natural that you’d see a slight decrease in sales or eliminate growth.

You can tell that your business has hit a plateau if you have experienced a flattening in sales for longer than six months, or if you’re seeing halted momentum in a number of different areas. This isn’t a hard rule, since different industries have different growth rates and different paths to expansion, but it’s still important to have a long-term mentality when considering your business’s growth.

Tactics to Try

So what tactics can you try if your business growth has totally stagnated?

1. Set the right goals (and expectations). Take a look at your current goals and expectations, and be willing to reset them. There’s a chance that your perceived stagnation is only the result of poor expectations, supported by a goal that never made sense for your business in the first place. How fast should you be growing, exactly? And keep in mind that if your business grows too fast, that can also be a problem. With better goals and expectations in place, your plateau may no longer look as intimidating.
2. Get outside perspective. Try to get some outside perspective on your business. Depending on your access to resources and how long you’ve been in business, that could mean talking to a mentor, hiring a consultant, or just getting some fresh people into the team. Outside observers will be able to provide a more unbiased take on how your business works and what it could be missing.
3. Change up the leadership. Businesses are strongly dependent on leadership to drive growth and support operations. If things aren’t going your way, consider changing that leadership up. That could mean hiring new people to serve as managers and directors, or it could simply mean changing the perspectives and attitudes of the leaders you already have in place. In any case, change is a practical requirement if you want your business to get back on its feet.
4. Focus on innovation. Even a single prominent innovation could be enough to spark new life and new growth into your business. Make sure you make innovation a focal point for your business; encourage your staff members to come up with new ideas on a regular basis, and direct plenty of funding for the research and development of new products and services.
5. Analyze your competitors. If you’re suffering from slow growth, take a look at your competition. If you notice that all of your competitors are struggling in the same way, this could be an industry wide problem. If there’s one competitor who seems to be thriving in this environment, try to figure out what it is they’re doing differently. Copying your competitors may not be the correct approach, but at the very least, you can learn something from them.
6. Ask your customers for advice. Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, so ask them what they think about it. Are they happy with the services and products they’ve received? Is there more that your business could be doing for them?
7. Get to a new market. You can also try to kickstart your business’s growth by getting to a new market. For example, you could try to reach a new demographic with a new line of products, or you could physically expand to a new geographic area.
8. Periodically reassess. Take the time to reassess your goals and your progress toward those goals. Things change quickly in the business world, so you have to remain adaptable.

These tactics may not be able to pull your business out of stagnation immediately, and some of them may not be a good fit for your brand in particular. But as long as you keep experimenting and pushing your business forward, you should be able to restore and reinvigorate the momentum that led you here.



Source: smallbiztrends.com
Image: Depositphotos

You can often find resources about how to shape the culture inside your company – this is extremely important, as it would determine how well your business would function in the long run.

However, as a startup, influencing the values and behavior of people outside of your organization is equally if not more important than influencing the people inside your business.

Every business has to do this to a degree – in order to get people to become your customers, you need to change their habits and behavior, and this is hard to do without understanding their values. Why the (target) market behaves the way it does is the most important thing for any business to understand.

However, for a startup, this task is made harder by the fact that the project is introducing some form of innovation into the market. This means that the change in behavior is by definition starker, and in some cases, it might require a change in values. 

In a way, all startups are connected with a new cultural wave, and the most innovative and influential startups are the initial force that sets those cultural revolutions in motion.

For example, Microsoft was the beginning of the personal computer revolution, Apple – the smartphone, Facebook was the beginning of modern social media, Tesla was the beginning of modern electric vehicles, Bitcoin - of the blockchain revolution, etc.

While these are the most obvious examples, each innovative startup plays the role of a culture driver at least in some domain on a certain scale.

Needless to say, changing human behavior en masse is very hard. In order to do it intentionally, you need to understand the underlying values that drive the behavior of all the stakeholders in a particular market.
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A great illustration of this effect is Tesla. It is a surprising fact that electric vehicles were relatively common in the very early days of the automobile. What made internal combustion engine cars the standard is the falling price of fuel – so, due to economic factors the electric vehicle producers of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century didn’t succeed.

So, what changed in the early 21st century that allowed Tesla to succeed? First– much better battery technology driven by laptops and smartphones. Second and equally importantly – widespread enough environmental consciousness. Preserving the environment is a much more common value nowadays than it was 100 years ago. This value is what helped Tesla find its first customers and investors (sustainability is one of the reasons Elon Musk was interested in starting a car company in the first place).

Consequently, Tesla managed to find success by riding both a technological and a cultural wave. Later on, when the success and influence of the company grew, they became one of the forces that determine the direction of that cultural wave.

This is a model that any innovation needs to follow in order to be successful. There are cultural movements in each nook and cranny of society, and being at the forefront of one is vital.

This is why timing is one of the crucial success factors for any innovative project – knowing what problem you are solving and what vision of the future you are aiming for (determined by your values) is crucial in order to inspire people to change their behaviors.



Source: forbes.com
Image Credit: Getty