Small Business Blog

Posts Tagged ‘customer’

Providing excellent customer service is essential for any business that wants to retain as many customers as possible and gain new ones. Whilst some natural turnover of customers is normal within any business, customer retention is still crucial as it means repeat orders. Many business owners and managers would like their employees to provide customer service that is second to none, but without the right tools this can sometimes be difficult.

Small businesses that use small business management software find that improving customer service is a breeze. By using the one application to perform all aspects of their role, employees using small business management software have all information relevant to customers within easy reach. This cuts down on the time that a customer has to spend on the telephone talking to a business to place an order, and it is this kind of prompt service they will appreciate.

Often vital customers are lost when businesses are unable to retrieve quotes which have been previously provided by them. It is this lack of information that can be the downfall of any business, large or small as it makes customers and potential customers feel that they are not important. To tackle this it is essential that all customer information is recorded accurately and stored safely. Whilst this might seem like a straightforward solution to improve customer service it can be hard to achieve when a business runs several software applications.

Small businesses that only have a limited number of staff handling phone calls for instance, recognise the importance of answering every call as each one can lead to a new order. However if an employee is updating a customer record on one system and then moves to another when answering a call they run the risk of losing this information. When a business has small business management software this should not happen.

When an employee is using small business management software they can complete a full telephone call from a customer, update their records, provide a quote and save it to their account all on one software application. By not having to swap applications to complete one task customer service is improved as information should never go missing.

As a result each time a customer calls a business that is using small business management software they should be able to speak to anyone – as all employees have access to the same information. A customer who calls and speaks to an employee who is using small business management software will notice how smoothly their contact goes. There is no waiting for files to be searched for previous order details or having to call back when the member of staff who previously dealt with them gets into work. Instead all customers will receive excellent customer service from employees who know what they are talking about during every conversation.

So if you are a small business owner or a manager who wants to improve customer service, small business management software is exactly what you have been looking for.

What does customer focussed or customer-centric business mean?

Firstly, let’s take a look at how customers attribute profit to a business; research has shown that many businesses operate according the 20: 80 rule (Angel customers and Demon customers by Larry Selden & Geoffrey Colvin). 20% of a business’s customer base generates 80% of its profits. What’s even more interesting is the 80% of less profitable customers also contains a big percentage of loss makers, which are costing businesses money by being on their books.

The 20:80 rule is only a rule and all runes can be broken, and this is where customer focus comes in. By building a business around its’ most valuable customers, a business can change the ratio of 20:80 to a greater percentage of profitable customers; this is what’s known as being customer centric or customer focussed. Valuable customers are part  every aspect of customer-centric business from its core strategy to its day to day operations

Why bother thinking about being customer focussed?

99.9% of successful businesses have one thing in common, they’re all customer focussed and customer-centricity forms a key part of their business strategy.  They also have the following advantages over their less customer focussed competitors:

A profitable customer base Clear understanding of how to grow your business and profits, based on a deep knowledge of your customers An ability to respond quickly to your customer needs and changes in your business environment A faster, more efficient organization, as everyone beats to the same drum Better protection in downturns, due to more loyal customers

In the next few pages, we’ll show you how you can evaluate your business for customer centricity and take steps to become customer centric.

What’s under the hood of a customer focussed business?

They know their customers: they understand their value, needs and they listen to them Customer centric business strategy: the business is built around their core customers Customer culture: employees live and breathe their customers Customer metrics: the business tracks its customers as part of key business performance tracking

How can I check if my business is customer centric?

Take a look at the questions below and answer them Yes or No for your business:

Do you have a clear idea of  who your customers are and what are their needs? Do you know which of your customers are most valuable to you? Does your business strategy / mission mention anything about your customers? Do you hire / develop your staff with your customers in mind? Do you have a process by which customers and employees can give feedback and review / act on this within your business? Do you have a customer complaints process which enables quick resolution of customer problems? Are all your employees empowered to deal with customer complaints? Do you know how satisfied or loyal your customers actually are? Do you provide specific services or incentives for your most valued / loyal customers? Do you deliver what you promise in your advertising / marketing to your customers?

So let’s take a look at how your business did:

Customer Nirvana: if you scored 10, you’re all good and just need to keep doing what you’re doing. Doing well: if you scored 5-10, you’re in pretty good shape and just need to refine your customer focus within your business Must do better: if you scored less than 5, its time to hit the drawing board, and look at what you need to do to make your business more customer-centric.

In part 2, I’ll be giving you an insight into how to build a customer focussed business. If you want to find out more before the next article is published, go to my site where I have provided a free guide on buiding a customer focussed business

Phillip Hunt
Founder of Ysatisfy customer satisfaction consultancy
www.ysatisfy.com

Info at hand is the “Business Portal” and central application in our CRBM Platform. Depending on your perspective or roles played in your business processes, you will find a benefit and perhaps many that apply to you. If you are a manager or book keeper there are several features that can help you track assets, inventory and help you gather solid business intelligence. If you are a production manager or talent resource there are many tools for managing project and improving efficiency or collaboration of your team. If you are a system administrator there are many tools for managing roles, teams and other system wide configuration and customizations.

There are really 5 clear value propositions that make the CRBM platform a perfect choice for virtually any small to mid-sized business:

1. Consolidated business management with reporting, automations, HR, Project Management with project profit loss tracking, Timesheet, and more.

2. Seamless integration with the Joomla CMS for virtually unlimited expandability for front end customer portal, partner portal or social networking community.

3. e-Commerce synchronization for a full transaction life cycle management and ERP inventory management capabilities with Shipping and Receiving.

4. One time licensing fee on premise model and low cost of entry.

5. Close integration and two way synchronizations with QuickBooks and Microsoft Outlook.

Our Info at hand based CRBM (Customer Relationship Business Management) has helped large number of organizations to manage their various functions including:

Marketing Management
Document Management
Inventory Management
Receiving
Shipping

1). Marketing Management:

1. A).Sales force automation:

Sales force automation includes lead capture, and the promotion of leads to Opportunities;
Opportunity tracking with sales stage and percentage likelihood;
Sales pipeline tracking, with graphical charts that offer drill-down from the bar or segment of the chart to the data that underlies it;
Definition of sales teams and territories, to manage information sharing and track sales performance by territory;
Sales forecasting and comparison of forecasts to quotas and actuals, by team or by individual;
Lead source analysis of sales and opportunities;
Flexible reporting, to extract precisely the information you want to see;
Corporate calendar management, for arranging calls and meetings; and
Integrated Inbound and outbound Email, which is automatically added to account and contact history.
B).Email & Letter Mail Marketing Campaigns:
Marketing campaigns may be conducted with email templates for automatically customized emails, management of prospect lists, and tracking of campaign click-through rates.
A target list for an email campaign may be assembled from a mixture of prospects plus pre-existing contacts and leads. You may create a target list as the output of a report, facilitating the targeting of prospects or existing clients with specific characteristics. A special Quick Campaign feature makes it quick and easy to perform spur of the moment email campaigns.
You can also import lists of prospects (in either Comma Separated Values (CSV) or Tab Separated Values (TSV) formats).
A mail merge feature enables the execution of letter mail campaigns, and target lists may also be exported to MS Word for a variety of purposes.

2). Document Management:

Info at hand enables the sharing of business documents – from HR claim forms and Marketing collateral to Engineering designs.

Multiple revisions may be stored ensuring only approved documents are used.
Documents in any format can be filed, and may be searched by title, description, file type, status, department, keywords and owner.
Documents may be associated with Projects, Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, or Service Cases.
A project can have all of the project’s documentation attached to it. An account, lead or contact can have all related documents attached. And supporting documents for a service case can be attached to it.

3). Inventory Management:

Info at hand includes a full inventory management capability. Two key modules perform the bulk of inventory management – Shipping and Receiving. In addition, the Sales Orders and Purchase Orders modules, as well as the Invoices module, evolved to support the tracking of partially received Purchase Orders, and partially shipped Sales Orders or Invoices

4) Receiving:

The Receiving module lets users in shipping/receiving document the receipt of a shipment, list the items and quantities received, and link to the related Purchase Order (and Sales Order if any). It documents the inbound shipping provider, number of packages and weight, the supplier’s packing slip number,

5) Shipping:

The Shipping module lets users in shipping/receiving record the shipments they send out. As well, it links to the FedEx and UPS shipping and tracking web services to automate those activities when using these shipping providers. It documents the outbound shipping provider, number of packages and weight, the packing slip number (it can also produce PDFs of packing slips), and the date shipped.

Customer Service Agents are the frontline staff of the company they are who customers speak with first. Essentially, they are the voice of the company.

If a Customer Service agent is professional, friendly, and can solve a customers needs, that customer will have a positive impression of the company. This pleasant experience can lead to repeat business and even referrals increasing profitability.

On the other hand, if a Customer Service Agent is unprofessional, uniformed, and unable to solve a customers needs, the customer will hang up the phone in frustration resulting in a negative impression. Consequently, the customer will indeed talk about your company, but with a very pessimistic tone which can discourage customers away from you and to your competitor decreasing productivity!

As a leader, it is your responsibility to train the staff with proper telephone skills and company and product knowledge as well as the requisite customer service skills necessary to excel customer expectations. With this education, you are arming the Customer Service Agent with the power to better assist customers and increase productivity creating many positive first impressions along the way!

The Customer Service Representative

As the leader of customer service agents, you will engage with a wide variety of personnel, different backgrounds, different ages, and different skill sets including:

* The young employee who is starting his first job.
* The single mother who needs a second job for additional income.
* The recent college graduate who has not yet found his dream job, but needs a job to pay the bills.
* The middle-age mother who has gone back to work now that her children are grown just to give herself something to do.
* The business professional that has just been laid off from his real job due to downsizing.

These are just a few examples. Every Customer service agent has a different story and a different reason for working.

Your staff may or may not be excited to work at the company. For example, a recent high school graduate may be quite excited about his first job. Whereas, a single mother would much rather be at home with her children. It is your job as the leader to motivate everyone even the most disgruntled Customer Service Agent!

Every Customer Service Agent within your staff will have different skill sets. For example, the business professional may be quite computer-savvy, whereas the middle-age mother who has gone back to work may have very little knowledge of computers. It is your job as the leader to train everyone even the Customer Service Agent who thinks he knows it all!

A major component of your responsibility as a leader is motivating and training the Customer Service Agents so they are comfortable with the technological and people skills that are needed for the job. You also need to know what motivates each employee to keep them excited about being at work.

Call Center Challenges

As a call center leader, you face many challenges a day. Here is just a sample:

* A competitive workforce for qualified Customer Service Agents
* Lack of time to properly train Customer Service Agents
* High turnover rate among Customer Service Agents
* Technological challenges for Customer Service Agents
* Unmotivated Customer Service Agents
* Different skill levels of Customer Service Agents

What is customer service? Have you ever stopped to really think about this question? We have trained literally thousands of people and hundreds of organisations in customer service. No matter who the person or what the organisation, the answer to this question is always generic. They will say: “Customer service is about giving customers what they want” or perhaps “it’s about satisfying customers” some times they will say that it is about “making customers happy.”

While at first glance these answers may sound correct, nothing could be further from the truth. Say for example that you ran a restaurant. If a customer were to enter your restaurant and ask for some office supplies would you be able to give the customer what they want? Would you be able to satisfy a customer who was looking for some jewellery if you worked in a hardware store? No, it would be impossible. The best that you could do would be to politely tell the customer where they can go and get Jewry. Obviously, customer service is not about giving customers what they want, or even satisfying customers.

The same is true for the way we give customer service. When we ask the question: what is the most important thing for good customer service, almost everyone we ask will answer: smile. While this may be good in some cases it is not appropriate in all cases. Just imagine if a distressed mother came up to you and told you that she had lost her 2 year old child in your store. Imagine how she would respond if you were to smile at her? Or imagine if a customer told you that he/she slipped while climbing the stairs or escalator in your store and as they explained their excruciating injuries you smiled back at them.

The truth is that customer service is not about practicalities, it’s about principles. The practicalities may change but the principles stay the same. Staff are not meant to smile all the time, to give customers everything they want, or to satisfy all their needs. Staff are meant to promote the organisation and its values. If you want to increase the impact of your customer service teach staff to represent your organisation and its unique traits.

When we teach customer service training modules we first focus on what the organisation values, what it’s all about and what does it want customers to see. Once we have done this, we move on to how to serve in light of these values. This is a very easy way of getting staff to change the way they serve, it produces better results and is a lot more fun to teach.

Here is something you can do to help your staff engage in effective customer service. Take a black/white board and draw a very basic house. Ask staff to take a piece of chalk or the white board marker and to take turns to turn this basic house into your organisation/company. They may add pictures or words to the basic drawing. Some will add words like: quality, professionalism, friendliness, service, money, speed, or simplicity while others may draw things like customers and staff.

Now ask staff this simple question: in light of this picture, what does a good customer service representative do? The participants will now find it easy to see what customer service is really about in your organisation. They may say for example, in light of us being a friendly company we should smile. Or perhaps they will highlight the organisation’s professionalism and explain that it’s professional to stand up straight and to dress appropriately.

Instead of teaching staff practicalities teach them principles and the practicalities will follow naturally.

1.Be professional and polite: We all know that First Impression is Best Impression, so make it as best as possible. Lot of times we make some conclusions about people or the organisations within sometime after doing some interactions with them. Make your employees to be professional in handling customers and also polite. Provide them with adequate training and support in this area. This will not only boost their confidence but also helps make you more business efficiently.  

2.Be Knowledgeable of products or services: I have seen many times that the front-desk employees do not have enough knowledge about the products and services and when a customer enquires about them, either you will get the wrong information or no information related to it. Keeping your employees knowledgeable of your products or services, especially those who are interacting with customers like sales people and customer service personnel is very important if you want to deliver good customer service.

3.Consistently following the procedures and policies: Ensure the employees who are constantly interacting with outside customers follow the procedures and policies of your organisation like refund policies, warranty and guarantee policies, etc. In failing to do so, will cause unnecessary misunderstandings, chaos and other problems leading to poor customer satisfaction. Provide the employees with right set of tools and train them how to use those tools. You will have little time to provide the requested information to the customer, so make sure you have all the right tools and right training.

 4.Immediate resolution of complaints: It is very critical that you provide the solution to the Customers complaints as soon as possible. A poor timeline for resolution of problems of customers will lead to significant damage to company’s reputation and image, which will cause serious trouble to your business. Also document the complaints and their solutions for future reference, so that you can resolve those problems, if they resurface in future, immediately rather than reinventing the wheel.

 5.Taking feedbacks and putting them into action: The best way to improve your customer service and keep a touch with customers is to ask for feedback about your company, products and services. This way you not only know where you are lacking but also gets new insights about the expectations of the customers. Many organisations follow this method to stay competitive and improve their processes and products.

 6.Keep it Simple:Simplicity is the way to go in today’s businesses. You can see this approach in every business today. Take for example ipod, it has become popular mainly due to its simplicity in use. People love simple and good design products. Make your procedures and processes simple so that customers do not go through the complex processes to contact a customer service personnel or order a product or enquire about a product.

 Use the principle KISS: Keep it Short and Simple. Or in a funny way: Keep it Simple, Stupid.:) 

At the end I would like to conclude that it is not easy to accomplish the above strategies without the use the technology in today businesses. Invest in the appropriate technologies with clear goals as much as you can and you reap the benefits many more times than your investment (High ROI, Return on Investment). Providing a great customer service is only first step and to have you business growing you need to have Loyal customers, and you can check out 7 Ways to increase your customer loyalty.

 Follow the above steps and you will be on the fore-front of the Customer Service with Happy and satisfied Customers.