Reputation is extremely important for today’s businesses. No matter what type of business you run, your reputation will ultimately decide whether you succeed or fail.
There are a lot of factors which are important for building a good reputation and one of them is transparency. This includes both transparency outside of the business, as well as inside the business. Here, you’ll discover how transparency can raise the reputation of businesses.
Customers want transparency
Research has shown that customers today want transparency from a business. In 2016, a transparency survey revealed that a staggering 94% of consumers were more likely to remain loyal to brands which provide transparency.
Transparency inside the business boosts performance
It’s not just transparency outside of the business that matters, you’ll also want to improve your transparency inside the business too.
Ensuring you have good, open communication with your employees and being honest regarding your operations is key to boosting performance. When your employees know what is going on and they feel like they are being kept in the loop, morale is boosted, which in turn improves performance.
Helping you to show the human side of your business
Another way transparency helps your brand, is that it shows the human side of your business. Customers want to see the human side of a brand. Thanks to social media, companies can now personally interact with their customers. This has led to a demand in more personalised and emotional connections with businesses.
So, by showing transparency, it helps to reveal the more human side of the business, keeping you customers happier and therefore more likely to do business with you.
How can you provide more transparency?
There are a number of ways you can improve transparency in your business. You’ll need to ensure you’re open and informative about your business, including your goals, performance, operations and history. Data protection is another thing you’ll need to be on top of, particularly after the data regulation changes that have recently taken place.
Going through a legal and financial expert like RSM, gives you the opportunity and satisfaction of publishing information transparency about your brand, with the protection of confidentiality company data.
Finally, to improve transparency, it’s also important to own up to any mistakes you might have made. While it may be embarrassing and worrying admitting a mistake, it actually causes your customers to trust you more. It’s much better to admit to your mistakes than to try and cover them up.
Overall, transparency is crucial in business. The above are just some of the reasons it matters and the ways you can improve it. It’s not always easy being transparent, but it is important to your success.
