If you’ve recently suffered a business disaster, whether it’s a data breach, fraudulent activity, or you’ve been struggling in the sales department, regaining your business reputation can be a long road. You’ve still got to rebuild the most important bridge between you and your customers: trust. How can you regain your business reputation after something disastrous?
Regaining Your Business Reputation: Learning From Your Obvious Mistakes
The first thing we need to do when we rebuild our business reputation is to look at mitigating any additional damage. When we suffer a breach, we must take the opportunity to look inward and address those pertinent components that can help us improve our business next time around. Sometimes it can be straightforward, especially with regards to security problems. Installing CCTV security systems and arming our employees with better practices can be all you need, but even when the issues aren’t that obvious, we must remember that we truly learn from what has happened.
Transparency Is Key
If you have suffered a so-called business disaster no doubt, you will be having your fair share of customer complaints. After something has gone wrong, transparency is essential. And if your company has a culture of transparency this can help customers to stick with you despite things taking a turn for the worse. You must remember that when you build a relationship with a customer it’s all about trust. Businesses that make it clear that they are to protect the privacy of their customers with transparency will build better relationships in the long run.
Look At Your Risk Management Strategy
While it may have been panic stations for a while, this means that you need to look at your risk management strategy and if it was comprehensive in the first place. The fallout from any breach could threaten to put any company out of business. And with emerging technologies continuing to increase the scope of every business, this means that we have to revisit our strategy so our security is as sophisticated as possible. When you look at having a risk management strategy, it’s always a good idea to take inspiration from those that have been there before you.
Many companies have suffered at the hands of hackers and cyber terrorists, and if you can look at where they’ve gone wrong, you will able to progress with a more focused mindset. By proactively employing a pentest service you can identify any weaknesses that hackers could exploit and deal with them. This process should form a key part of your risk management strategy as the legal and financial costs associated with these kinds of breaches can be catastrophic, not to mention the hit to a business’ reputation.
Regaining Your Business Reputation: Improve Your Communications
Once you’ve held up your hands, explained what’s gone wrong, as well as highlighted the steps you are going to minimise this, you need to start focusing on the positives. When your business is losing its reputation, it’s time to start focusing on the output and making it positive and intelligent to promote your business. You must remember that with any social media campaign, it can help turn things around in the public consciousness quickly. Any good feedback or reviews from clients can help you to regain that overall positive image. While it is important not to ignore what has happened, you can’t dwell on it either. The world of PR is complex, especially when you’ve broken the most important bond between you and your customers, their trust. When you start to show an honest approach, especially when customers will now look at you with a sense of trepidation, you still must focus on the things you are currently doing that is yielding positive results.
Regaining Your Business Reputation – Don’t Promise The Earth
Managing expectations will always serve you. You should never promise something that cannot be achieved. Again, this goes back to being honest. And when you’ve stated to a specific customer that something will be addressed in a certain timeframe, when in fact it will take much longer, these little white lies can cause nothing but a headache. We should not provide misleading information, and while the customer believes they are right, this isn’t always the case. You should always remember to under-promise and over-deliver.
You Must Try Harder
Any business disaster can take a while to recover from, and while we can learn from these mistakes, if we don’t treat the customer with the respect that they deserve, especially when they stuck by us during this difficult time, it can be very insulting. We shouldn’t disrespect customers but we must also remember that as a business begins to fix these issues, that our customers don’t necessarily care; it is our problem after all.
