In any area of business, a company's reputation is a very important indicator. A good reputation, positive recommendations and customer feedback are one of the best tools for attracting new people, ensuring stability, which contributes to the growth of the enterprise. Today, it is important to build a reputation not only when working with clients, in the media, professional circles, but also on the Internet.
What makes a company's reputation
To enhance the reputation of a firm, it is important to understand what aspects influence its formation. They are divided into external and internal. The following factors are considered external:
- communication with clients, partners, competitors and other organizations;
- activities carried out by the firm;;
- location of the company;
- reputation of the business niche in which the company operates.
Internal aspects are no less important for the formation of a positive reputation of the company:
- special style;
- corporate culture standards;
- the work of employees and representatives of the company;
- the level of subordinates salaries;
- quality of working conditions;
- company structure;
- financial indicators;
- introduction of innovative technologies into activities.
To create a positive reputation, the head of the company and employees in management positions must work through all of these aspects. When each point corresponds to a high level, it will be possible to form a good opinion about the company and develop successfully. It is important to constantly monitor the situation, work out problems as soon as the reputation deteriorates and negative feedback appears.
Stages of forming a positive reputation
As soon as you open a new business, you start interacting with specialists in your field, clients and other people. At this point, the reputation of your company is already beginning to form. The general opinion about your company is formed according to the following stages:
- Formation of the image. At this stage, you need to lay the foundation of your reputation, think over all the details of the image and corporate identity, values, approach to customers, work and corporate culture.
- Reputation assessment according to the target audience. It is important to periodically analyze how people think of the company. You can do polls, questionnaires, politely ask customers after purchasing or ordering services to answer a few simple questions. This will allow you to identify weaknesses, see the problems, start working on them and build the reputation that was originally intended.
- Choosing a strategy and tools for interacting with clients. After a deep analysis, it is important to determine with the help of which technologies, methods, tools you will work with the target audience in order to improve the quality of work and increase your reputation.
The face of the company is the people who work for it. It is they who form the company's reputation in the eyes of customers. It is important to start building a reputation from within the working team: create better working conditions, convey the values and style basics, stimulate employees to work for a positive result and a good reputation.
The main mistakes in the formation of the company's reputation
Creating a positive image of a company is a long and difficult process, which consists of many factors. It takes a long time to build a good reputation, but you can lose it quickly, especially in case of force majeure. To prevent this from happening, you should avoid basic mistakes:
- hiding emerging problems from management;
- not to take responsibility for unsuccessful incidents;
- provide clients and the public with false information;
- concentration only on the external aspects of the formation of reputation;
- lack of work on corporate culture in the team;
- different attitude towards clients and partners;
- elaboration of only certain factors influencing the formation of an opinion about the company.
These are not all the problems that arise in the work of managing and improving the reputation of your business. Such difficulties will arise at different stages of the enterprise's development. It is important to work comprehensively with this issue, involving internal and external aspects to create a positive reputation.
Tips for getting good customer feedback
Positive feedback from customers in any form is the highest assessment of the joint efforts of the entire team of the company. Each firm has its own way of achieving good results. However, you can check out the following life hacks:
- develop a polite culture and create a positive communication style with clients;
- employees must respond as quickly as possible to people and process their requests;
- optimize the site and make it attractive, understandable, convenient;
- use different platforms for work - a website, a blog, social networks, message boards and messengers;
- unobtrusively ask customers to submit feedback and offer a bonus for leaving an opinion;
- be sure to add a feedback form to the site so that people can see the opinions of others and, having a good experience, they would also want to share this with others;
- in the mailing list, ask customers to leave feedback;
- conduct feedback contests offering rewards, discounts, gifts;
- respond to the opinion of each person, even negative ones, but these should be personalized responses, not standard;
- show customer feedback from social networks on the website;
- sincerely thanking people for sharing their opinion of your company.
With a competent approach to building a reputation, you can not only get good feedback from customers, but also learn about the problems of your company and improve the service. A reputation is not built in one day; it is the hard daily work of the entire team. It is important for the manager to lay the foundations of the style and culture of the company, train his employees well, control the situation and solve all problems in time. It is important to form friendly and reliable relationships with clients that speak positively about your business, which will help you get more new clients in the future and succeed.