...it says customer service is poor, and this and that. So, I spend DAYS AND DAYS training the staff, both individually and collectively... but on further analysis, it says customer service is still poor.
You get 3 messages for your staff:
1. Do you have the right amount of employees (..."understaffed", "...needs quite a few more employees...", "...somewhat understaffed...",
...right number of employees..., "...too many employees..." and "...more employees than customers...") -> Hire or fire employees.
2. Are your employees intelligent enough to do the work (intelligence of staff is controled)? ("...clueless idiots...", "...fairly incompetent...", "...quite decent...", "
...well-oiled machine...") -> improve intelligence skills with "Train technical skills". 2 points are added to your employees intelligence, so you need to train them 25 times to improve intelligence by 50 points.
3. Do your employees have social competences (interpersonal of staff is controled)? ("...socially inept...", "...both quite poor...", "...deliver decent customer service." and "
...show excellent level..." -> train interpersonal skills with "Train customer service". Each training adds 2 points to your employees interpersonal.
Edit: Be aware that the real change in values depends on the difficulty level.
...It's the same with advertising, the business is still almost entirely unknown, no matter how much I promote it.
Is this broken, or should I just spend every hour of every day for 10 years trying to improve the business?
Edit: (Tested it after changing the scene)
While analyzing your business there will the value of 'business_reputation' be controlled and "Promote locally" is the action for the improvement of your local reputation. Each promotion adds 0.5 only to your reputation so it is a very long way to become locally known.
I add a zip.file. Extract to 'vin_Base' and put that folder in your 'Modules' folder in game. Overwrite existing files. After, each local promotion will change local reputation randomly between 0.5 and 5 so you should become popular faster. I also changed the lpaction file, so your jobexperience and jobperformance will be increased a bit (that's especially because if you don't have a regulary job, both values will be reduced by time). Be aware, that after each update you must copy the folder again...