When you’re a business owner, the most important things to you are your product and your reputation. If one or the other suffers, then your business loses out.
While there are many things that can affect these two things separately, one thing that can affect them both is your supply chain. You depend on it to provide your customers what they want, and when it works, you win.
What you have to worry about is when it doesn’t. Here’s how your supply chain could be killing your brand reputation.
Poor Practices And Ethics
A company wants to sell its customers the best product possible because that’s what they want to buy. This is why your supplier’s reputation is your reputation as well.
The problem lies in the fact that good products and materials cost money, which drives up production costs and cuts into overhead. Combine that with the consumer’s desire to buy at the lowest price possible, and you’ve got a troubling equation that puts a lot of pressure on the suppliers.
If a supplier tries to save money or cut corners, then production suffers. Shoddy, inferior, incorrect, or even toxic materials used in your products will lead to unhappy consumers, and your reputation will plummet.
It Doesn’t Stop There
It’s more than just the product that’s put out, though. Unsafe labor practices, sweatshop working conditions, and environmental issues can also present themselves in supply chains as ways to cut costs.
While these problems may not be as visible as inferior products, word of these conditions and issues always gets out. If your company is linked to one of these troubled suppliers, then your reputation is shot.
It doesn’t matter that you didn’t engage in any of the practices yourself. Your company knowingly associated with those companies, so you might as well have. Even if you didn’t know, that shows a lack of knowledge or care, which also destroys your brand reputation.
Inefficient Supply Management
Having good product is just half of the battle. That means nothing if your customers don’t get exactly what they ordered when they’re supposed to get it.
Breakdowns in the supply chain, no matter where they are, affect everything. It could be insufficient production runs, an error in the picking process, or a lag in shipping, but it still means customer dissatisfaction at the end of the line.
If any link in your supply chain is managed poorly, then the whole thing fails and your brand reputation suffers. You have to know that things are going to work right every step of the way.
Using a Multi-Channel Fulfillment system is one way that you can take steps in making that supply chain stays strong.
Worried About Your Brand Reputation?
Monitoring your online reputation is one way to help catch potential problems before they get worse.
Even if you do this already, sometimes it takes an extra set of eyes to examine every angle.
We can help with this! Take our free reputation audit today and see where your brand stands with your customers.