Do you ask friends and family for their advice when you need a tradesman for a job at home? Do you find yourself scrolling through sites such as TrustPilot when you’re looking to buy from a certain retailer? In a world which has developed from word of mouth recommendations to online reviews, never forget that your reputation is only as good as your last review. What do we mean by this?
A World Of Expectations
When we offer a service to customers and clients, what we do is set expectations. Let’s take a someone who installs bathrooms as an example. They might have the skills to do the plumbing, the tiling, the creation of a studded wall for an en-suite but what expectations are they setting? The quality of the work, the time taken and the price as the three main expectations, as well as how much coffee they drink on the job! If they give you, the customer, an exact duration, cost and show you examples of previous work, you know what to expect. If these are met, brilliant, happy customer. If these are missed, you’re likely to have upset clients. Remember, people don’t always tell people about positive experiences as they just get on with their happy lives. They will always vocalise negative experiences, posting online about what went wrong, which then becomes the latest review of your business.
Create Happy Customers
Sometimes, mistakes are unavoidable. It’s about how you deal with errors that matters. A massive cock up and how you turn it around and deal with it can show just how professional you are. If you walk off the job, back chat to the customer, miss the mark on the quality of the workmanship, you’re doing yourself no favours. The customer is always right, if that means you putting in an extra hour to right a wrong, do it. It’s the difference between getting potential word of mouth recommendations in the future and a glowing review on your Facebook page, to people bad mouthing you, leading to a lack of work and bad reviews on trades people websites.
Set expectations for clients and customers and follow through on them. If they say they have chosen you because of the quality of your work, ensure you hit that same quality they’ve spotted elsewhere, even exceed it! Do a good job and they’ll recommend you at some point in the future. Do a poor job and they’ll tell everyone just how terrible an experience working with you it was. Your reputation is only as good as your last review. Make sure it’s a good one!