4 Bad Habits Small Businesses Need to Break in 2020

SMBs can use CallJoy to provide positive phone experiences for customers even when employees are focused on other tasks.


Is your New Year's resolution simply to get your business under control? You’re not alone. The day-to-day responsibilities that keep a small business running can be so time-consuming that owners and managers may find themselves letting opportunities for growth fall through the cracks. Don’t fret! You can improve business operations without spending a dime by making small changes in your daily operations and marketing. Here are a few common bad habits you should break in order to step into the new decade with your sights on success.

Lackluster Employee Training

Being on the front lines, your employees are often the first impression your small business makes on a new customer. Once you've found the right hire, you may assume, based on their resume, that they can handle their role and figure things out after a few brief training sessions. Although this approach may work for some tasks, it often leads to inconsistencies, especially in terms of communications with customers. Your CallJoy recording and transcription features can be used to create training materials. Using good examples of employee/customer interactions in your onboarding process will ensure new employees can confidently represent your brand and correctly answer commonly asked questions in person or over the phone.

Poor Delegation

As a small business owner, you’ve likely learned to do most things for your business yourself and have a little trouble letting go of some of the daily tasks. With CallJoy, you don’t have to be glued to the phone anymore. The phone agent offers a 24/7 virtual agent to answer your customers’ most common questions. This shift in roles can increase your bandwidth and allow you to focus on strategic growth like employee recruitment or increased marketing efforts. Once you sign up for CallJoy’s 14-day trial, we encourage you to take another look at your daily workload and see the items on the to-do list you can delegate to an employee or software you trust.

Minimal Online Presence

If the majority of your time is spent running the daily operations at a brick-and-mortar location, you may be missing opportunities to grow your business’s online presence. Since more than 90% of web searches happen on Google, Google My Business is a great place to start. It’s a free and easy-to-use tool designed to help you manage your business’s online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. Additionally, once you’ve connected your Google My Business profile to your CallJoy account, the listed operating hours on your Business Profile page will automatically sync with your CallJoy greeting. Because Google My Business plays a big role in how often your business appears in local search results, if you haven’t claimed your business yet, you should make it a top priority, because who wouldn’t want to appear first in a search for “best salon in San Francisco?”

Just Guessing?

With web traffic, phone calls, social media and emails, you may have more customer data and insights than you realize. However, having information about consumer preferences, and what works and what doesn’t is only valuable if you act on it. It’s important to regularly review your communication platforms to analyze trends and insights in order to strategically make changes versus just playing the anecdotal guessing game. For example, if you’re posting regularly on social media (which we hope you are), pay attention to which types of content get the most follower engagement and adjust your future posts accordingly. Or if you’re using CallJoy, be sure to reference the dashboard and daily email digest to see how well your agent is able to handle customer calls. If you learn that there are common questions being asked, you can easily make changes to your Call Actions as needed to ensure your customers’ needs are being addressed intelligently by your CallJoy agent.

Are you taking advantage of CallJoy’s newest AI features? Let us help you break some of your bad habits in the new year.