4 Essential Ways Your Business Must be Reachable
We live in a world that is more interconnected than ever and we expect to be able to reach and talk to people and businesses we need quickly and easily. In today’s business world, being reachable by customers and potential customers is incredibly important because if you’re not, those customers will quickly move on to a competitor that they can contact. With this in mind, your business should strive to have as many options to be contacted as possible, and here are a few of the most important ones.
Website Contact
Most people’s first port of call is going to be your website, even if not to use it to contact you but to get your contact information. This means that your contact pages should be very visible and visitors to your website should be able to find it within a few seconds. All of the ways you are contactable should be listed, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a contact form in the same place. More importantly, make sure the contact form is monitored and customers are contacted quickly once they submit it. Many businesses are also starting to include a live chat service on their websites to great success, as a chat can be had by your customer without having to stop what they are doing.
Email is likely going to be one of the primary methods of communication for your business, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Because it’s going to be so important, you should spend some time thinking about the structure of your email addresses and ensuring that generic or departmental addresses are well managed and any queries are quickly directed to the correct person or department and answered timeously.
Postal Mail
A postal address serves a few purposes for your business. Of course, it’s a place that your customers, vendors, suppliers, and other business contacts can send post or packages should it be required. It is also often required by many vendors who will require a physical address for verification of your company before onboarding. It’s easier than ever to maintain thanks to the rise in virtual mailbox services, which provide a physical address for your mail to be delivered to and assist in the management of your mail by scanning and uploading anything received to a virtual mailbox.
By Telephone
Don’t have your customers navigate through a maze of automated voice prompts and call funneling methods to get where they want to go. If your call volume is too high to have it answered by a human being right away, make sure any automated systems are succinct and not painful to use, or potential customers might abandon their attempts to call you.
Being contactable and easily reachable is the bread and butter of good business, and thus enabling as many avenues as possible for your customers and vendors to contact you makes great business sense. Don’t lose sales because you’re not reachable, because that’s a fundamental mistake in the pursuit of profits.
