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Common Small Business Mistakes – Breaking your promises

By Becky McCray

Common mistakes can kill your small business, but most of them can be easily corrected or avoided.

Today’s Bad Example: Breaking your promises to customers
I asked for some examples of small biz mistakes on Twitter, and you answered! This time, let’s combine two real-world examples of mistakes:

Barbara K. Baker BarbaraKB Not “call me back” in the 24 hours that they promised. If it will be 48 hours, then just say that. ;-)

Jon Swanson jnswanson smilingly give great directions to another location… but with the wrong highway number.


In both cases, the person representing the company broke a promise to a customer by providing bad information.

Right now you are probably thinking that you don’t do this, that you give only good information, and that you don’t break promises. Think again. During your every day conversations with customers, you will inevitably make a mistake, or circumstances will change and keep you from doing what you promised. It will happen, and it probably happens more than you think.

Solutions
This is squarely under the customer service heading. I can’t claim a magic knowledge of your business and your customers, so I recommend a few favorite sites that consistently share good advice on serving your customers.

  • Zane Safrit, Conference Calls Unlimited CEO
  • Customers Are Always
  • Flooring the Consumer

Once again, Zane will probably come up with some better advice than I did on this one!

Your Assignment
Together, we are going to try to help each other out of these most common, deadly mistakes. You can use real world examples, real small businesses. Write it up, take a picture, or shoot a short video. Take care not to embarrass the offenders! Key point: include suggestions on how to do it right!


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  • About the Author
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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
  • Downtown is your town’s core: How to make your case - February 22, 2021
  • Zoom Towns: attracting and supporting remote workers in rural small towns - December 10, 2020
  • In an economic crisis, spend your brainpower before your dollars - November 25, 2020
  • Video: How to fill empty car dealership buildings for the holidays - November 6, 2020
  • How has 2020 changed the challenges rural small towns face? Tell us here - October 20, 2020
  • The Idea Friendly Method to surviving a business crisis - October 6, 2020
  • Join me for the Rural Renewal Symposium online Oct 13 - September 26, 2020
  • Cheap placemaking idea: instant murals - September 11, 2020
  • Refilling the rural business pipeline - July 7, 2020
  • Huge vacant buildings: grants to renovate? - June 9, 2020

November 13, 2007 Filed Under: customer service, mistakes

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Trackbacks

  1. Common Small Biz Mistakes – Awful web presence says:
    April 23, 2013 at 5:16 am

    […] just talked about bad customer service, so let’s focus on web presence, including Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine […]

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