Romark AC & Plumbing was a local plumbing and air conditioning contractor in Delray Beach, Florida. They were in business for over 20 years. However, it all came to a halt during the year we had hurricane Dorian knocking on the door. We were trying to get a hold of the owner for two weeks with no response. We called and called and no answer. I finally asked a few of my friends who live in West Palm Beach to pretend they are potential customers and call him. Same result! No answer! Not even a return phone call. This went on for an entire month. A year later, I find out that he went out of business. I wonder why!

Losing customers is never fun. Sometimes it is a necessary part of doing business because some business owners will welcome it if they are a problem client. If the customer is unprofitable and just costing you money, then you want to encourage that customer to leave and do business elsewhere. Every customer has a profit and loss attached to them, so you need to know how much gross profit each customer represents. If it is a net loss, cut them loose. This way you can focus your resources on serving your profitable customers.

Now, let’s say you are like Romark AC & Plumbing, who works hard to build a business and bring in new customers. When a company like this loses customers, it stings. Sometimes you will lose a customer and not know why. That one hurts even more! In this article we’re going to share the top 3 reasons you might be losing customers that you’re not even aware of. If you are a serious business owner, then fixing these issues can stop the bleeding that is costing your business every month.

1. Not Answering Your Phone and Not Communicating With Prospects

For some odd reason, there are some business owners that think this is no big deal. In fact, it is! How many times as a customer or a potential customer have you called a business and nobody ever answers the phone? It makes you wonder if this is really a legitimate business or not. How do you expect to get new business, and keep your current business if you are not answering your phone and communicating with your prospects and customers? Not answering your phone is the BIGGEST turnoff among consumers! You are in business to make money! If you’re not answering that phone, you’re losing business!

How many times have you went to someone’s website, filled out their form, and waited for a response? You end up waiting two days and still no response. Sometimes weeks will go by and you realize you still have not received a response from that company. So you move on to the next business. These types of business are not professional because they lack the communication abilities to succeed. Why are you even in business if you are not even going to respond to a customer request? If your prospects have to wait three or four days or even a week or two for a response from you, you are going to lose potential customers. That’s a fact!

We’ve run paid advertising and social media management campaigns for lots of different small businesses. When we run mostly Facebook advertising campaigns. As part of our service, we set it up so people can use messenger to message the business, and then we monitor their messenger so we can respond in a timely manner on behalf of the client. If someone clicks on an ad and sends us a message, we can then track those messages so our client can know exactly what he or she is getting out of the campaign.

As these prospects say yes to an appointment, we can get their phone number and save their information in a secured data center for our clients to review so they can see who turned into a lead from paid Facebook Ads.

As a little side benefit from this, you can learn a lot about how a business operates by how the phone is answered. Spot checking some of these calls for paid advertising clients of ours has revealed some interesting things. Just think about Romark AC & Plumbing as an example. My friends and staff calling the business posing as potential customers and nobody answering the phone for an entire month. That speaks volumes!

We’ve heard some terrible, terrible recordings where the owner of a company who very unprofessionally answers the phone and loses potential customers. We’ve heard secretaries at an accounting office absolutely butcher phone calls, and being so rude to a prospective customer that the owner of the firm is paying $300 a day in ad spend to get to the point where they’ve got an inbound lead. So, the owner of the company is paying really big money to promote their business using paid advertising, and the leads are getting cut off before they even have a chance of turning into a real client because of how the phone is answered.

This point cannot be stressed enough! How you answer the phone is a direct correlation to the success of your business. Now, I get it that some millennials, Gen Y and Gen Z have zero experience with phones. In fact, some of these generations just down right hate phones so much that they don’t even answer their cell phones. If you are a SERIOUS business owner, it is extremely important that you answer you answer your phone professionally. That means you will be hiring from this generation. So you will need to screen out who is good on the phone, if not train them! This is one of the first customer touch points in your business since it is one of their first interactions with you.

Here are some simple tips on how to answer the phone properly for you small business:

1. Try to answer the phone by the 3rd ring. The quicker you answer the phone the better.
2. If you are on the line with a customer, and you hear another call beeping in, ask the customer if you can place them on a brief hold to answer this call really quick. Go over and answer the call and say you are on another call, can I call you back? Get their name and phone number. Proceed back to your original call.
3. Don’t be an ass when you answer the call! Have a pleasant demeanor. Every small business owner is busy. Every front desk administrator is busy. However, how you answer the phone can speak volumes.
4. Ask questions and get their name and phone number for follow up, and the reason for their call so you can follow up with an answer. Fortune is in the follow up!

2. Your Website Looks Like a Two Year Old Built It

The second reason you can be losing business is because you do not have a website, or you have one and it looks like a two year old put it together on one of those website builder platforms. Serious business owners realize that the look and feel of their website is one of those first customer touch points. Your website is the digital front door of your business. Every business needs a website! When someone is looking for a solution to their problem, they go to a search engine and find a professional that can help them. If they stumble upon a business that has a website that was put together in 30 minutes on the GoDaddy website builder, that will be a turn off.

Here are a couple of examples. Would you prefer A or B?

3. Having an Unprofessional Business Email Address

Another one is just having unprofessional email such as a gmail account. We’ve seen some pretty bad emails on small business websites in our days. If your email address is not @yourbusinessdomain.com, you are going to lose potential customers.

This is quite an easy fix. Many hosting accounts come with email where you can setup an email like @yourbusinessdomain.com. You can then set it up to receive your email in Outlook on your computer and on your phone.

A method that is gaining in popularity is Google Workspace. This is where you still setup your email accounts in your hosting account, but you use the Gmail interface to check your email. For a low $6 per month per user, you can set up @yourbusinessdomain.com to go through Google Workspace. This is money well spent and will give your potential customers the confidence to reach out to you.

How To Fix These Issues?

• Always answer your phone!
• Always check and respond to your email in a timely manner!
• Always be professional! That’s a big thing. Care about your customers. Do the right thing for them.
• Be active on your social media!
• Always do a great job for your clients! That will goes a long way as it will lead to referral business.
• Always view your business from the eyes of your prospective clients and customers.

Take some time to Google your business to see what comes up. If your business is properly setup, you will have a Google My Business profile that shows up on this search results page. If you do not already have this set up, I will be writing another article soon on how to do it. In the meantime, Googling yourself will provide you with a big indicator of what you need to work on such as getting listed in more directories or encouraging your customers to leave more reviews.

These are things that are easily fixable right now and you could start to work on it.

So what does your overall online presence look like? Do you need help with it? We are always here to help. Contact us to see if we can help you.

---