A Resolution for Ward Water

Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution only to find that after a few months (or even days) all of your good intentions ended up going down the drain, along with all the other well intended resolutions of New Year’s past?

Go with your strong suit.

We at Ward Water decided that if we were going to make a New Year’s Resolution that we better make sure it was one that we knew we would stick to- one that we had already been practicing for too many years to count- taking care of our customers.

I know, probably doesn’t sound incredibly new or exciting, but we figured when you have a good thing going why change it?

Old school values catch up to the digital age

Although we’ve always remained extremely open about the way in which we’ve conducted our business and cared for the clients we served, we realized a crucial piece of the puzzle was missing for us.

We weren’t giving enough attention to how today’s customers preferred to communicate, and how they perceive the companies they do business with.  More on the perception part later.

Word of mouth is HUGE, but today it all starts online

Depending on the study you read, on average somewhere between 97% and 100% percent of consumers research companies online before purchasing locally.

When the impact of this realization finally settled in, it hit us like a ton of bricks.

Until just a couple of years ago, our company didn’t even have a website. We just simply didn’t feel it was a priority. Our customer base has always been very loyal and incredibly consistent, even in today’s economy. Word of mouth has always insured a steady stream of phone calls and an ample supply of work.

Now at this point you might assume one of two things;

  1. You might be starting to think we’re a little bit crazy and/or unappreciative for having a thriving business in an economy that could be considered less than fantastic.
  2. You might also assume that our biggest concern was that we were worried we might be losing business by not having a strong online presence.

Neither option number 1 nor number 2 would in fact be correct.

For all intents and purposes our mental faculties (as far as we can tell) remain fairly intact and to my knowledge there is no evidence of mental illness that exists anywhere in the Ward family tree. So I guess we can rule out the crazy thing.

We also consider ourselves incredibly fortunate for having a successful business that has been around for more than 100 years and has been able to help so many people. We definitely do not take this for granted.

Attracting more business wasn’t even a concern at all. In fact, the prospect of attracting more business actually scared us a bit- we didn’t want to put ourselves in a position where we couldn’t respond to our current customers with the same timeliness and quality that we had always been known to provide.

We were in no way willing to risk this happening.

So, what you might ask was the problem?

Please read Ringing in the New Year- Part II