What makes a good business? If the answer to this question was obvious we would all now be millionaires. Yet, there are a few criteria that are more important than all the others in establishing how successful a company might be. Paying attention to these will give you a much better chance of swimming rather than sinking.
First ensure you have a product that people need or want, and either offer better prices or a unique selling point compared to the others already in that market. Next, having good market presence is important. This involves many aspects from thorough and unique marketing strategies to simply having a clear and concise website that shows up in internet searches.
However, once these are established, by far the most important factor for success is clear communication and good customer service. Ensuring you go out of your way to help a customer will make the difference between a repeat sale and a customer telling their friends not to bother with you. Make sure customers know exactly what they are getting and that you are easy to reach and polite and concise when they do reach you.
For smaller companies this can be an issue. With fewer, or even just single members of staff, having someone on hand to answer the phone can either be time consuming and impractical, costly or simply totally impossible. The best answer in these situations is to use a telephone answering service.
A telephone answering service is essentially your own personal receptionist who only works when they are needed, thus saving you huge amounts of money and ensuring that customers can get hold of you any time of the day or night. However, picking the right answering service is very important. Whilst taking information and relaying it to you is very important, a good answering service will be willing to give out information that customers are likely to need too, meaning the whole customer service side can often be done thoroughly with very little need to take up your own time.