New Year Resolutions for 2009 Must Mean Business

We’re only a few days into 2009 and many New Year resolutions have already been broken or put on hold.

Many of us set ourselves personal goals for this year, with getting fit and healthy rating highly in the post Christmas detox. The government is adopting a marketing approach to help us stick to these goals in 2009 – spending £275m on the Change4Life campaign. Keeping fit and healthy should also be the government’s advice to the business community this year with the current economic downturn set to continue. Many companies are focusing on becoming lean organisations – shedding staff and trimming extras. However, these are often short-term activities which are forgotten and relaxed over time.

Surely keeping service levels high is key for all businesses to retain clients and have a healthy 2009. Jeremy Clarkson provides some strong advice for high-street retailers in his comment in The Sunday Times. However, B2B and B2C companies need to also shape up their service provisions with online forming part of everyone’s 2009 business workout. Service needs to be efficient and effective from the moment a customer makes contact – via any touchpoint.

Increasingly, a company’s Website is the main point of contact with customers. The success of this approach has led to recent announcements by the NHS asking patients to rate and review their GP service on the NHS website. Ben Bradshaw, health minister, told the Guardian that he “wants the site to do for healthcare what Amazon has done for the book trade and Trip Advisor for the travel industry”.

These companies have proven the value of proactively asking customers for their feedback, but only as long as this input is listened to and acted upon to improve their products and services. The Web offers an amazing marketing tool, but it also has its dangers as individual’s thoughts and opinions can be shared within minutes with a global audience.

Positively managing reputations is crucial, not only to achieve success but also to survive. Failure to listen to customer feedback can be devastating to a company’s reputation and extremely hard to recover from. Offering excellent customer service is therefore vital.

With the start of the New Year, it’s a good time to exercise those customer service skills and get active listening to customers – face-to-face as well as online. It’s the first step to effectively managing your reputation with an ever present and energetic audience.