Whether you’re in a business franchise or in retail, your response time to emails, phone calls, and inquiries is incredibly important to your reputation and what your brand means. If you don’t have a great response time, you may not seem like the most reliable business partner or person to do business with. While you don’t need to answer every call or email that comes in immediately, you must evaluate their importance and how long you think is a reasonable amount of time to wait and when you’re overreaching. You must be realistic in these expectations. So before you put answering that call on hold, consider what it might say about you.
The longer you put off answering inquiries, the more it affects your brand; whether on a personal or national level, it’s up to the customer or business partner. If a statement like, ‘urgent’ comes along with the inquiry or message, your subject is much more time sensitive and the longer you put it off, the more your personal reputation will suffer. You must keep in mind that as a franchise, your customers will likely have experience with other locations, so your business franchise will suffer personally if your standards don’t meet their expectations. That means anything with your name on it, they may avoid after your lack of reasonable response time.
This can be done with an easy social media setup or some other way of contacting, such as email. The easier it is to respond, the more likely you are to do it in a time-efficient manner. Keep your business franchise up-to-date with the best response equipment and easy-to-use software.
Many business professionals use the response time for their inquiries as an indicator for how professional and punctual the business owner is. If you want your business franchise to be known as prompt, responsible, and easy to work with, you will need to be on top of that response time. If you let responses linger, you may pick up the unwanted title of, ‘business who drops the ball’.
The longer your business franchise takes to respond to inquiries from consumers or business partners, the more it costs your business. To minimize cost and maximize profits, respond reasonably. There are often business plans that can’t go through without a proper response. There are also sales, future business partnerships, and much more that will cost your company if they are forgotten about.