Russell Bell: Communication the key to good business

"The more local you get... the better the service and support." Photo / Bevan Conley

Over the past few weeks this column has been highlighting local businesses and initiatives. I have done this because I believe that Whanganui has businesses and professionals which can build robustness and resilience in our economy.

Too often we hear of funds and work heading out of town and even overseas when there are skilled professionals and businesses who could provide the same service to a high quality here in the city.

Such an approach would be counter-intuitive to a region already challenged by today's "viral" economic environment. I am consciously working hard to ensure that our spend benefits local providers.

This week I would like to highlight the challenges faced by consumers when the companies they deal with are "economical" with their communication.

Such communication (or the lack thereof) is often inadvertent, but it appears to me that as the organisation gets larger the communication processes and structures are almost set in place to frustrate or direct consumers down specific communication channels – not unlike sheep.

The sad thing is, where communication is absent or minimal, the customer generally reaches a tipping point where the brand (and product or service) is dispensed with in favour of an alternative.

Communication is the oil that keeps organisations functioning and is the bedrock foundation of relationships.

To me, it is important to invest in mechanisms which increase the flow of information from your customers rather than suppress it.

One such example occurred Saturday night.

After an awesome meal at Lucky Bar (once again I encourage anyone who reads this column to go try their menu out – our experience on Saturday night was first class) where we spent much of the ride home talking about how excellent the doughnut dessert was, we arrived home to a power cut.

Now the power cut was short-lived, thanks to the speedy work of the crew at Downer, but I found the mechanisms to find out about the outage and also register it with our "provider" pretty much second rate.

We are a client of Powershop and, you guessed it, its communication at the marketing end of the spectrum is pretty good.

However, once you are a client it is really interesting to find out a few things when the lights are off in a "Netflix" world.

Firstly the lines company clearly tells you "don't call us, call your retailer" and secondly in our case we got an answerphone at Powershop which said "you have called us out of normal business hours".

Russell Bell, Business Zen

Notwithstanding this, I received more information about the outage from a quick call from our alarm monitoring company (shout out to the fantastic team at Alarm Watch) and a call to a neighbour who was at a local fish and chip shop.

In the rush towards paying the cheapest price we appear to be sacrificing service and relationship – which is concerning (if you don't believe me try contacting Amazon when something goes wrong).

So for this and many other C-19 reasons, we need to be stepping away from the big boys where we can and dealing with real people.

The more local you get, I have found, the better the service and support.