Four Simple Customer Service Steps

Customer service is always important in your business, but becomes critical when the economy is down--when standing out from your competition could be the key to keeping your business afloat.

What steps are you taking to encourage repeat customers when companies everywhere are slashing prices in order to generate a sale? What have you implemented for your customers who have been loyal to you to show your appreciation of their support over the years?

Start off by listening to your customers. What do they want/need and how do your products or services help them with this? Be sure to listen to their complaints as well and more importantly, take action to address the complaint. By not turning your head and ignoring the situation, taking action toward fixing the problem, even if not immediate, will earn a customer's respect and repeat business.

Stick to the basics. Have a friendly, approachable, outgoing, "can-do" attitude staff who is educated about the products/services you're selling. If a customer walks into your store and does not receive the help they need, or feel as though the employee does not want to help them, they will take their business elsewhere.

Go the extra mile. Taking the time to fix something that takes only a few minutes of your time and not charging the customer for your service not only keeps them happy, but will also help earn the business of their friends, family and co-workers after they rave about your business going above and beyond the call of duty.

Offer customer reward or loyalty programs. These programs not only guarantee repeat business, but helps customers who have been coming to you for years feel appreciated. Handing out coupons for future purchases or small freebies may not seem like a big deal to you, but in the customer's eyes makes them feel appreciated and gets them back in your store.

Applying these simple, yet crucial components to your business not only enhances your reputation within your community and makes you stand out from your competitors, but will also increase your sales and may give you the edge over your competitors in any economy.

Creating a Company Vision Statement

As a business owner, you do not have the option of being a poor leader. Your family and employees depend on your strong leadership skills to help guide and motivate them to come together and make your company a success.

The biggest test to see whether you are a good leader within your company is to take a look directly into the success of your company. Hint: The success of your company is a direct reflection upon your leadership skills—good or bad.

The first step to ensure you are an effective leader within your company is to make sure your company vision statement is clearly written and understood by all employees. A vision statement is critical to being able to effectively lead an organization. Without a vision statement, it is impossible to give clear direction to accomplish what your company needs in order to be successful.

While you sit down to write this company vision, make sure you write your company vision so it is in line with your personal vision (i.e, what you want personally out of life). If you can, have your employees participate in the writing of the company vision statement. This gives them a real sense of contribution to the company and the knowledge that they play a key role in the success in the company.

A few questions to keep in the back of your mind while writing your company vision statement would be:

• Is this vision statement reasonable?
• Is there a geographic aspect (how big do I want this company to be)?
• Is this attainable?
• Is this inspiring to all audiences or stakeholders?
• What is the level of quality I want to provide?
  

Your next step—and one many business owners overlook—is communication. Your vision statement is your way of communicating where your goals for the company are for both the short- and long-term to all employees. Plus, this enables them to see how their hard work and your leadership plays a vital role within that vision statement. Also, inspire your employees to live this vision. One of the goals of this company vision should be to have the company
vision be part of your company culture.

One way I make sure my staff members know the vision statement is by walking around when I have a free minute and asking staff members at random what the vision statement is. If they know it, they will be rewarded.

A strong vision statement is your first step towards strengthening your ability to effectively lead your company.

Identifying and Overcoming Telecommuting Challenges for Your Business

In the last blog posting, we discussed the many benefits to employers and employees of telecommuting. It's important to remember there are a number of cons associated with telecommuting that need to be evaluated prior to making any company decisions or policies.

Perhaps the biggest is to truly understand all costs to the company with allowing telecommuting. For example, will you be chipping in for employees home equipment to some extent? Who is responsible for maintenance of essential equipment like computers, internet, phone or printer?

Additionally, you need to consider how taking some employees out of the physical office will affect your company culture. In some cases, it may improve. In others, you may have removed a key personality from the office. This affects the on-site and off-site workers both. Plus, it can be difficult for the telecommuters to communicate effectively with those on-site. Not only does this risk missing key elements of projects that may just need to happen face-to-face, but the lack of social interaction on the part of the telecommuter can be detrimental.

So, here are a few things you need to consider:

• Define legal and insurance issues. Make sure you discuss liability insurance for the home office, business-equipment insurance, workers comp, health insurance, vacation schedules, sick days, reimbursement for specific expenses, etc.

• Identify special business equipment or supply needs. Discuss what is needed and who supplies and maintains this equipment, the employee or the company. Plus, ensure you have a plan for maintenence of equipment. For example, if your telecommuters lose his/her internet connection, you lose productivity. Address it upfront to prevent major work outages.

• Institute a policy as to when telecommuters must be in the office. Are there important meetings that require face-to-face interaction? Does your company thrive off teamwork that may be hard to accomplish with team members spread out? You'll need to determine when it is or isn't okay to telecommute. Plus, consider creative team building exersizes to counteract any perceived morale issues amongst your team.

• Require your telecommuters to setup an actual workspace. As nice as it is to sit on the couch in your PJs with a laptop and the TV on as background noise, not everyone or every situation works well with this scenario. The most effective telecommuters setup a workspace and stick to a daily schedule of work. On the flip side, some telecommuters have trouble working only 40 hours and have reported issues with separating work and life. A schedule helps prevent this for your employees.

• Interact with telecommuters regularly. As the business owner, you need to ensure that you don't forget about your telecommuters...especially when it comes time for promotions. It's easy to overlook telecommuters when considering leadership roles in your organization simply because you don't see them every day. In this case, you can't let out of sight, out of mind interfere with what's best for the company.
  

Making the step to allowing telecommuting is a big one. We've discussed a few common pros and cons this week. In the end, telecommuting isn't for everyone or every company. Evaluate what may work for you, discuss it amongst your team, test it a couple days a week and go from there.

Getting Over the Fear of Telecommuting

If you could give your employees more freedom and flexibility, increase his/her happiness and achieve all the same company goals, why wouldn’t you?

With the world “going green” combined with high fuel prices and a looming recession in the U.S., every business owner must consider getting creative with employees’ work schedules. Telecommuting just a few hours a week has become a win-win for several large companies, so why isn’t the small business sector following suit? Simply put, it creates a number of fears in the minds of business owners. Losing control, not seeing the employee actually do the work, lowered productivity with more tempting distractions…just to name a few.

Employers need to understand the changing business environment and make adjustments to their business infrastructure to keep up. How many of you manage your employees by performance? Probably most of you. Do you base salaries, wages, commissions and bonuses on performance? Most likely. And, does their performance demand they be in the office for 8-hours or more every day? Probably not.

In fact, some studies show telecommuting offers increased productivity and significant cost savings to the company. Three key steps can get you on your way:

1. Investigate which positions may lend themselves well to telecommuting occasionally. On top of this, which employees can work independently with the discipline needed to work from home? Also, consider where some of your employees work—and the time wasted sitting in traffic when they could be working. Then, write a policy and educate all employees on who is eligible or not and why. You can’t let the morale, culture or productivity of employees who must be in the office get in the way of those who can.


2. Explore telecommuting technologies. Some fears can be overcome with technology. You can allow your employees to access all the same programs, software, servers and other resources no matter where they are located. Additionally, some software can help track the activity of employees for occasional checkups on employees.


3. Develop a plan to manage the employees virtually. Employees need to be able to make the right decisions and take actions no matter their location. Set goals, track progress and check-in regularly! If you are micromanaging in the office, you may not have the right employee in the position—or the processes in place to maximize efficiency. It can be a sign of a deeper issue than just telecommuting.

Time and time again we hear two of the reasons good employees leave…increased stress or no work/life balance. It’s up to us to focus on the work and the results of that work—not the space or time in which they were accomplished. After all, most of the best business ideas were developed outside the walls of the office.

Getting Started Developing a Sales Process

Do you have a sales process? Most of you probably said yes. Now, do you have that process documented? A few less probably said yes. And, do you have it documented to the point that someone could pick up the documentation, follow the process and be successful? I may have lost a few more of you there.

One common shortcoming of many sales process is in fact taking the steps to write it down. It doesn’t need to be sophisticated at this point—but it does need to be written. So, let’s get started with the basics you need to consider as you write your process.

First, you need to determine who is going to manage the process. Some companies may be small enough for the owner to do this. Others, may warrant hiring a sales manager. You should evaluate your needs based on the size of the company. Warning here—your top sales person is likely not the best choice for a sales manager. The skill sets needed to successfully perform in sales are much different for those managing the process.

Second, you’ll need to make a list of data you need to track. As your process goes on, you’ll want to be able to analyze different cross-sections of the information to determine what is or isn’t working.

• Number of leads- overall, by marketing tactic, by salesperson, in certain stages of the sales cycle

• How the leads were generated- this may fall more into your marketing team, but you’ll want to know which tactics are working the best. Did they come through an ad, find you in search engine results or hear about you word-of-mouth?

• Salesperson activity- what are your various salespeople doing with customers and leads? Is there a good balance of phone, email and face-to-face contact? Are their prospects moving through the sales funnel at the appropriate pace? Are there areas where the prospects are getting stuck?
  

This data is important for the sales manager to continually monitor for results—plus it will help you create your flow for the sales process.

Next step, input the data into a customer relationship management (CRM) system of some kind. There are inexpensive software packages available such as ACT or Outlook’s Business Contact Manager. You can get helpful training on either of those—and there are a number of more advanced options should you need those. The main function of the CRM system is to allow you to track sales activities and prospect/customer history. Of course, you’ll be able to develop more advanced processes and determine progress based on statistics after setting up the CRM tool. Plus, it allows you to hold your sales team accountable for the sales plan.

Be sure you add your current customer data in the tool also. You’ll want to categorize current customers and prospects separately. Plus, add the ability to subdivide those two audiences by other variables. For example, you may want to see customer information such as needs, length of customer, volume of orders or income generated.

After you have a CRM up and running for a few weeks, you can begin to see trends—and therefore develop a more thorough sales plan, goals and budget.

Once you’ve taken the first steps of analyzing your current activities, you can begin to improve the entire sales process.

Strike a Balance Between Work and Life

Entrepreneurs typically have strong emotional attachments to their businesses; often to the point of becoming all consumed by them. Of course, it is important to have passion for your work. When you do not take regular time to personally recharge, you risk holding back the success of the business.

No doubt one of the reasons you chose to become a business owner was to control how much you work—and how much you don’t. Of course, the number of hours you want and need to put in to your business depends strongly on the level of success you wish reach, but you are not being honest with yourself if you do not also address your desired “balance of life” factor.

Most business owners are working at least 50 to 60 hours a week. Do they truly need to be working this many hours to be successful, and does success have to come as rapidly as they seem to want it? If your company could reach $10 million in five years verses three years, but in turn would give you an extra 10 hours a week to enjoy life, would you choose the three- or five-year option?

One way you create a balance between work and life is by structuring your businesses to become less dependent on you. This can be done by establishing results-oriented methods of communication that inspire employees to work towards your dreams of success. Let your employees know that their thoughts and ideas are of value and live up to your words by really listening and acting on truly good ideas.

Tell those employees who are crucial to making your plans as much as possible about what you are trying to accomplish and why. If your employees don’t understand the details of your plans and the desired outcome, they are not likely to exert maximum effort to help you succeed.

Don’t let your business own you. Remember that no amount of professional success will ever make up for the loss of valuable personal time.

Delegating Important Tasks

Many business owners have a hard time delegating enough tasks to employees. Common reason? “It is easier and faster for me to do it.” But, there are many tasks you need to delegate so you can focus your time on the future of the business. In order to dedicate the time necessary to truly work on the business, you need to develop employees who are capable of adequately handling assignments.

Sure, the employees may or may not do it as well as you would. But, do you need them to? The goals and standards of your employees, for a specific task, normally do not require perfection. Yes, there may be certain assignments that no one other than you is capable of adequately performing. On the other hand, there is always work employees can be trained to handle if they are properly delegated.

• Identify the responsibilities that employees are capable of handling and take the risk of delegating. You will need to be patient because there will ve a learning curve on any new tasks they take on. The learning curve will be greatly accelerated if you provide detailed instructions for each task.

• Give authority and freedom to make decisions. They will grow in their ability to make decisions to adequately complete the tasks only if you empower them to be decision makers. The authority must be enough to permit your employees to use their initiative.
  

• Accountability. Your employees must understand that they are accountable for results within a clearly defined scope. It is best if this scope of accountability is in writing and includes such things as the objectives of the task and how and when results from the activities will be reported to you.

• Written expectations, priorities and other relevant information. The more you are able to write down such as potential problems, expectations and priorities, the more likely misunderstandings will be avoided.

• Clear deadlines with progress reports or checkpoints will enable you to determine whether sufficient actions are taking place in achieving the objectives of the delegated task.

It will take some time both for you and your employees to become comfortable with delegation and specific tasks. By following a process, you can ensure responsibility and knowledge transfer happen quickly and effectively.

Consider Your Happiness When Choosing an Exit Plan

One of the most important things to plan for as a business owner is retirement or ongoing involvement in the company. You almost don’t even want to think about it, but as you age, you’ll find that retirement may or may not be the best process for you. Simple things like pride and prestige may make retirement problematic. Many of us, as business owners, value ourselves based on our company, company relationships, as well as the outside relationships that involve the business.

If there were a way for you to be working only a few days a week, five to ten years from now, making more money than you are making now and doing only what you enjoy in the business, would you want to retire?

I know many business owners who have retired to beautiful locations after selling very successful companies for millions of dollars, but are unhappy. They have a lot of money, but they no longer have a purpose in their daily life. One reason they feel emotionally lost is that they have severed their business relationships of many years. They also miss the pride and prestige of their position in the community as owner of a major company.

So, one of the things you want to look at when you are creating your vision is—do you want to retire or do you want to live a certain lifestyle and still be the CEO of a company, under the right circumstances?

Before making a drastic decision about retirement, you need to consider what makes you happy and what you really want to be doing with your time. There may be a number of creative options for you to be partially involved in a business--while enjoying the perks of retirement.