While in a meeting with a client the other day at Rinish.com’s offices in the Innovation Center (or Rinivation Center as we like to call it) he mentioned some reasons as to why he decided to go with our company in redesigning and rebuilding his company’s website.  Those primary reasons were 1) We had a live person answering the phone, 2) We were local and 3) We did what we said we would.  And with that, I began to reflect on some of the smaller things I believed in when building the company that seems have made the biggest impact.

Answering the phone

We all know how much of a pain in the ass it is to call a company or business only to get a recording on the end with long winded directions on how to contact a live person only to never really get to that live person.  The majority of times we are often left feeling angry and never having our questions answered.  When starting my business it probably would have been a hell of a lot easier to use a recording system instead of having to forward all office calls to our cell phones when nobody was in the office.  However, I never wanted to take the chance of missing that one call.  Before I got into the website building industry I remember trying to contact some of my now local competition only to get an answering machine or voice operator that would eventually send me to voice mail.  I promised myself that I would never let this happen to anyone who contacted my business office.

Eventually and thankfully, the business began to grow and my time in the office was less and less.  The company was already a virtual company in terms of where we’d perform our work.  My lead designer lives in Maryland while I have offices in Wilkes-Barre City, another one 10 minutes away in Dallas, PA and yet another one in my home where I do some of my best work.  I  have 3 different development teams and a boatload of offshore companies that I partner with.  So in every conceivable way, Rinish.com is a virtual company.  What makes us successful is our ability to leverage and utilize online communications technology effectively.  But one of the things that I had to remember to do was to ensure that when a client or prospect called they got an answer from a live person… and one who spoke their language as a first language.

So today, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, there is always a person answering our business line at Rinish.com. My office assistants perform the task of tying in the virtual aspect of our work into the concrete.  And as a result, the client and prospect always get a real person answering the phone.  It’s amazing how happy this makes people.

Location

The primary thing responsible for a mass exodus of local talent many years ago is one of the primary reasons Rinish.com continues to become a very successful entity.  Being headquartered in the Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, Pennsylvania area has been tremendous for business.  Not only are we an hour and some change from Philly but also from New York and our state capital of Harrisburg.  This allows me the opportunity to attend important networking conferences on the web industry but at the same times gives our clients a sense of intimacy.  Case in point: The Arc of PA is a statewide organization that labor for the rights of the disabled individual.

The Arc of PA recently acquired the right to develop a new program for school age disabled children to be included in general classrooms.  There were many larger corporate companies vying for this project to include large higher-education institutions.  However, in the end it came down to the fact that the work in which Rinish.com produced was the just as good if not better of these other organizations and my company was a local business that had a face with the name.  At the same time, the corporate offices of The Arc of PA were in Harrisburg (an hour and a half trip from our headquarters) and they had a local county office in Wilkes-Barre.

Doing What We Said We Would

It’s amazing how many professionals do not return phone calls or show up for appointments or generally do what they said they would do.  I can no longer count on my fingers how many times a client has come to us from another competitor due to the fact that they client was sick and tired of being told one thing only to be given another.

The reason that I eventually named and branded the company after myself is due to my belief that I would give that much extra to ensure customer satisfaction.  I just took it as gospel that if you made an appointment with a client you kept it and if a client calls you it’s natural to call them back.  But apparently returning phone calls, showing up for meetings when you scheduled them and otherwise doing what you said is something hard to come by nowadays.

So that’s it.  Three of the biggest secrets to Wilkes-Barre areas leading provider of web design services.  If I am missing the obvious please feel free to jump in and comment!