Sometimes, your business needs to close up for the day. After all, everyone needs a break, and not everyone’s services are in top demand 24/7.
How well do your customers know your business’s hours though? Do you have them posted on Google, Facebook, and (maybe) Yelp? Or do you simply leave up a sign saying “Closed” in your building’s front door window and then hope for the best? There are some good reasons why you need to maintain that kind of information online. Here they are.
- You won’t lose customers unwittingly
Don’t you hate it when you try to call a business and find out that they’re closed—even though the hours on their website say otherwise? That’s the kind of confusion you will avoid causing when you maintain your business’s information. You’ll also avoid negative reviews from popping up claiming as such on Facebook and the like!
- It’s a big part of customer service
Sometimes posting closures and hour revisions to your website lend a hand towards ensuring you’re providing good customer service. Another benefit to showing that you’re being proactive about maintaining this information is that you’re showing you care about keeping your customers informed and aware of your own business and how it runs. Even if someone needs something after business hours, you should be responsive enough to acknowledge that you’ll get back to them during regular hours of operation. To do that, your online tools (i.e. your website, profiles, etc.) should reflect that sense of awareness.
- You can offer other things while offline (literally and figuratively)
Let’s suppose you have a physical building but you also sell products as opposed to services; meanwhile, people can peruse your website even after office hours are over. This is one example of what a business can offer while their staff is unavailable (it’s a double-edged sword, mind you; your staff may be available during office hours to address technical issues, but not so much so if the site crashes after hours!).
Regardless of its cons, your site enables you with the opportunity to offer your services while offline—both literally and figuratively. By maintaining the information people need online in regards to that, you’re letting them know that even if your hours are closed, you are still in touch even if they need to wait, and a lot of the time that’s what most people want to hear from you—that even though they will have to wait, they’ll be fine with waiting because you’ve proven that your services are worth waiting for.
- It improves your online presence
Having a consistent NAP (name, address, and phone number) online will not only inform your customers that you are accessible online, but also by making it consistent, search engines will come to understand that, yes, this is the correct information to reach you, thereby ensuring your rank is up on the front page if someone were to Google your company’s services. If that information is not maintained, however, such as not changing the address if you move to a new physical office, then the information will become inconsistent and Google will list both addresses and cause even more confusion to yourself and, even worse, your customers.
Remember: be consistent in maintenance
You may think it’s a good idea to only maintain one other resource where your information can be found, such as your website, and Google…and that’s it. However, if you have a social media profile set up on several websites, but then forget to maintain those registries as well, that will lend to the confusion all over again. Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on are all at this point considered to be trustworthy sites because so many people use them now. If one address is listed on Facebook, and then you move to a new address and change it on your website and Google, but then forget to change your current one on Facebook, you’ll end up confusing search engines by having two addresses listed!
By maintaining your contact information everywhere online—and we mean everywhere—you’ll lessen the risk of search engines becoming as confused as your customers, and thus lessen the likelihood of being knocked off of page 1 of search engine results and letting all those sales go to your competitors.
At the end of the day, updating and maintaining these aspects of your business online will improve your business overall. If you don’t have time to maintain this information while running your business, you can assign our V3 staff to be managers. Consistency is a big part of the regular maintenance standards we adhere to. Give us a call today to get started.