A goodly amount of time in any home business is spent solving problems. Whether they are problems that come to us by way of our customers and/or clients or if it is something that has gone wrong in our daily operations—problems can be consuming. Instead of simply treating the symptoms, however, it can be helpful to dig in and try to figure out how the problem got started. Not only can this help you solve the problem at hand, but it can also help to fix a “systems” problem to make sure that it does not happen again.
Let us say that one of your customers calls with a question—he is confused by something that he saw on your web site and it caused him to order the wrong item. Now he is unsatisfied by the product and wants his money back. Of course, you can and should work to solve the immediate problem and help him to get happy with your customer service and your products again, but it would also be well worth your while to go back to the web site and figure out what happened. Is the description of the product or the photo image misleading? Are there improvements you can make to the information to make sure that no one else gets confused? Getting down to the very beginning or root of the problem can help to make sure it never happens again.
How did the misunderstanding get started or where did things go awry? This is the way to do more than just “treat” problems and to actually get down to the nitty gritty and solve them. As a home business owner, the more you can make adjustments and improvements based on feedback from customers and clients (and much of this feedback can come in the way of problems) the more you may be able to streamline your business and keep customers and clients happy and loyal.