The Greg Parsons Project

This comes from a few different places elsewhere, paraphrased and re-worded into what I think is a solid tip for the foundation of any business.

When you are in business, especially for yourself, expect the unexpected. The worst problems are usually the ones that are least expected. This applies to all aspects of your business. If you’re self-employed, you ARE your business. You are customer support, you are technical support, you are billing, you are accounting, you are the single problem solver for your own well being. Be prepared for the unexpected. Things do happen, sometimes more often than you’d hope for.

Once a problem does occur, you can either make or break your business depending on how you handle it. The single most important thing that most self employed business owners forget about is customer service.

Once you have a problem on your hands, the one single thing you can do to lose all your customers is not to inform them about your situation and leave them wondering if you’ve scammed them or if you’re doing anything to fix it.

Let’s face it, today the technology is so advanced that you can almost do anything from anywhere!!

Personally contacting all of your customers to inform them about the issue is probably not feasible. In these situations, leaving your customers in the dark without informing them about your current status would be the worst possible thing that you could do. Not only will you lose the current project you are working on with them, but also the chances of getting any further business from them becomes almost zero.

You might be the best in your industry, but if you are not well organized, don’t expect to build a solid business.

A simple solution that you may overlook is simply posting a message on your website telling your customers what has happened and that you are working towards a resolution. In the event that your website is unavailable, change the voice mail greeting on your main phone number to a message explaining the problem and that you are working to a resolution. Personally, I would do both.

A happy customer is your best friend. One of my favorite sayings is: A good customer relationship takes years to build, but only seconds to destroy. Keep this in mind as you are handling your next problem.

And for those of you who are wondering, yes, something did recently happen to me with a relationship with one of my vendors which left me wondering “What ever happened to customer service????”. Needless to say, I’ve switched vendors and I’ll never do business with that particular company again.