4 ways to evaluate your 2021 success

2021 is drawing to a close and for small businesses, it's time to celebrate the successes of the year, think over the challenges that have been faced and put plans in place to make 2022 the best year yet. By considering customer satisfaction levels, evaluating your staff, appraising your product offering and thinking about CSI projects, you can prepare for a great year ahead. Evaluating your success goes much further than financial statements, and analysing these issues can go a long way towards ensuring growth for your business in 2022 and beyond.

Considering customer satisfaction levels

Simply put, if a first-time customer doesn't receive a great product and great service, they won't be back. Even worse than this, without undertaking regular research, you're unlikely to know why they don't come back. Evaluating your customers' satisfaction is a great way to ensure repeat business and discover any areas in which you're going wrong. There is an assortment of ways to gauge customer satisfaction, from looking at online reviews and doing surveys to simply asking customers whether they have found what they are looking for.

Another way to empirically examine customer satisfaction levels is to look at repeat order statistics and the rate of new customer acquisition. If you're satisfying your customers, both figures should be on the increase.

Evaluating your staff

There are two perspectives to staff evaluation and you should be considering both. The first is how satisfied they are with their job and the second is whether they have the training and the tools to do their jobs as effectively as possible. You can easily measure job satisfaction year on year by measuring changes in the average length of employees' service to the company. Training can be quantified by looking at the percentage of the team that has received some type of training during the year.

South African distance education provider GetSmarter explains that the value of training and development creates a domino effect. When leaders feel competent, they become a positive influence on employees and upskilling employees leads to staff retention and workforce improvements.

Analysing your product offering

When it comes to your product offering, the question you need to ask is whether your goods and services are meeting a need in the market. If a particular product or service is not providing both high numbers of sales and high profit margins, then the end of the year might be time to consider moving in a different direction. Before making a decision, however, it's worth considering whether the product or service has been marketed correctly, whether the price point is correct and whether the after-sales support on offer has been sufficient.

In a report penned in 2020 discussing the return to work in light of COVID-19, McKinsey & Company explored how companies have adapted to the huge changes in demand patterns for products and services. The report makes the point that accelerated product development, together with improved sustainability and increased customer-experience innovation, is the way of the future. Continuous product development and analysis has thus never been more important.

Counting your CSI projects

Corporate Social Investment (CSI) provides advantages not only to the communities that directly benefit from these endeavours but also to your company. CSI puts your company in the public eye, shines a positive light on all that you do and inspires customer loyalty. Ways of evaluating your 2021 CSI efforts include looking at the amount of money raised, the number of projects undertaken and the number of employees who got involved during the course of the year.

The end of the year is also a great time to think about your premises and whether they are meeting the needs of your expanding business. The team from 3Cube Property Solutions is on hand to help every commercial and industrial enterprise find the perfect premises in Gauteng.