7 Steps to a Great Customer Service

May 22, 2011


A business cannot sustain competitive advantage for long time based on product and price alone. Competition eventually will find a way to beat you on that game. Competitive advantage built on customer service, however, cannot easily be copied. For proof look no further than Zappos.com. Here is an E-commerce company that sells shoes, of all the items, on the Internet. However, with a laser like focus on customer service it is selling a billion dollar worth of them annually!
After consulting with number of small business owners over past several years we have come up with a 7-step process that companies need to adopt to achieve the success enjoyed by Zappos. It will not be easy to follow these principles all the time and success will not come overnight. However, when you do master them you will have a lasting success that your competitors will find difficult to beat.
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Filed Under: Customers, Employees, Management, Sales Tagged With: , , ,

How do you overcome Buyer FUDs when selling your business

May 12, 2011

In the previous post we discussed two biggest fears your potential buyers have when they are considering purchase of your business. We showed how you can help buyers overcome these fears and make the sale of your small business go through quickly and smoothly.
In addition to the two fears related to business finances, there are other operational FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) factors that buyers, particularly those who have not owned small business before, are likely to have. With proper planning you can help alleviate these FUDs and make the selling process go faster. After all, it is in your best interest to shorten the sale process as much as possible. The longer it takes for sale to complete the more chances of something going wrong and the sales falling through.
Based on our experience with both buying and selling business, we have come up with several questions that are likely to surface in buyer’s head when he is going through due diligence. The sections below document those questions along with our advice on how you can deal with them.
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How Can your Employees Help Improve Sales

March 16, 2011


It is our belief that your employees can help improve sales at your business by more than 20% if you help them help you. Most business owners don’t really think of their employees as ones who can help them improve sales; however the front line employees – the ones that interact with customers – can make a big difference in improving your business. These employees are talking to and interacting with your customers all the time. They are responsible for making your customers come back by providing great customer service. In short, they are representing your brand and your business.
So what are the specific ways in which your employees can help improve sales? In our experience of running business for 5 years we have come across multiple opportunities.

  1. They can make your existing customers come back by providing excellence customer service.
  2. They can also help bring new customers by word-of-mouth from existing ones.
  3. They can help you up-sell and cross-sell at the point of order taking and payment.
  4. They are aware of where opportunities exist for improvement in customer service and operations.

It is your responsibility as business owner to make this happen. You have to provide them with the necessary resources and incentives that will motivate them to give their best in front of customers. We have identified below several areas that you need to address.
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How to succeed in running absentee business

March 13, 2011


Small business owners run their business absentee for variety of reasons. Some owners are still holding full-time job while starting a business. Others have more locations than they can handle themselves. While still others just don’t want to spend their entire time on the business. Our estimate is that while majority of small businesses are owner operated, there are number of businesses that are run absentee for the reasons mentioned above.
While it is possible to run and succeed in absentee owner business you need to be aware of the problems that arise when you are doing so. Ignoring these problems can lead to deterioration and even disaster for your business. The most common issue in running the business absentee is that you may not be aware of what’s going on with your business or at least not to the same degree as when you are present 24×7. Even if you come to know about the issues it may be too late to act on. The issues can surface in all areas of the business ranging from operations, quality, purchasing and customer service.
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How to plan for employees leaving without warning

February 28, 2011


For small business owners employee attrition is a fact of life. It is estimated that the annual attrition runs as high as 100% for some types of small businesses; particularly the ones that employ hourly workers! This means that you will not have the same set of employees at the end of the year as the ones you started with. This kind of turnover not only increases your cost in the form of hiring and training; but it may also reduce sales by affecting the quality and customer service.
While you can try to keep your employees motivated and use these techniques reduce turnover; the fact remains that the employee turnover will remain high if you are in type of business that employs hourly workers. My brother, who owns a coffee shop, complains that he always fears a call from an employee who will call him to say he is not going to show up for work because he has found another job. It always happens when he is not able to find any replacement on a short notice forcing him to rush to the business from wherever he is.
While you will not be able to prevent your employees from leaving on a short notice; the next step is to try to mitigate the impact on your business as a result by taking certain steps beforehand. Below we have outlined some steps you can undertake that will help you take care of business even when your employees leave suddenly.
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Effective Ways to Minimize Employee Turnover

October 18, 2010


Post from Guest Contributor Chris Blanton, editor of Ingenious Business Guide.
One unfortunate aspect of management is employee turnover. Many of your hires simply won’t work out. A new worker may develop personality clashes with coworkers, turn out to be incompatible in temperament or values, or may not fit in with the rest of the staff. Or they may not develop the required skill set rapidly enough.
You want to counsel out any employee who is a poor fit culturally to achieve a smooth running organization. Even the geniuses must go if they aren’t team players. Like Netflix asserts: No brilliant jerks! But what do you do if an otherwise acculturated employee doesn’t ramp up quickly enough? Do you show them the door or continue to try and train them?
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How to Lower Fixed Cost to Achieve Financial Flexibility

October 13, 2010


We mentioned in the previous post that in this times of economic uncertainty your business needs to have flexibility to respond to changing market conditions. One of the ways you can do this is by converting as much of your fixed costs to variable as possible.
The reason for converting fixed cost to variable is simple – fixed costs don’t change with sales or production; while you can control variable costs in response to change in sales. Monthly rent you pay for the building is an example of fixed cost; whereas the amount you pay to buy raw material to make final product (commonly known as Cost of Goods Sold) is an example of a variable cost.
High fixed cost can hurt you in difficult economic times, such as now, and can even drive you out of business. This is what happened to many of the businesses that simply could not cover fixed cost with the sales plummeting. There are several ways in which you can convert fixed costs to variable. Below we have highlighted them.
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Hire Employees for Attitudes; Train for Skills

July 29, 2010


Mary Ellen Slayter at SmartBrief has an interesting article on how she successfully hired 10,000 people in her recruiting career and did a pretty good job of choosing the right candidates. Although, she did this at a large, public companies, we think it applies equally well to small businesses. We would argue that it is even more important to hire the right people in small businesses because it doesn’t take long for your businesses to go down when one or two employees fail to do a good job.
For any small business that is hiring employees for customer facing roles the need to hire people who are enthusiastic and outgoing is critical. Mary Ellen describes a simple test – “handshake” test – she used to do when hiring employees. She would walk up to the job candidate unexpectedly, smile and introduce herself to him/her. If they reacted with enthusiastic smile and greeted with cheer, it was safe to assume that they would behave the same way with customers.
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5 Effective Techniques for On-boarding New Hires

June 11, 2010

Onboarding
Many business owners miss an opportunity to get the most out of new hires because they do not have well-thought plans to acclimatize new hires quickly. First few days of new hire play a large role in determining whether the person will contribute effectively to your business or will be dud.
In the previous posts we have identified several insights for hiring best employees and reducing staff turnover. Our goal here is to get the best use of your employees once they are hired.
I know several managers and owners who would give a written training manual to the new hire and let him figure out how things are done. In our experience nothing is more effective than on-the-job training by letting the new hire dive right into operations from day 1. In addition, there are several other techniques you can use to get the most out of your new hires. Below we show 5 most effective ones:
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10 Questions You must Ask before Hiring an Employee

June 10, 2010


In our previous post we mentioned that hiring best employees makes a big impact on how your business performs. We also showed how to go about hiring best employees for your business. However, we have felt that many employers are at a loss when they think about what questions to ask in the job interview. They end up talking about different things before wrapping up the job interview and making hiring decision based on their gut.
In this post we give you ideas on how you can to go in the interview well-prepared plan; so that you can get a clear picture of the job candidate and make informed hiring decision. We also mention what type of personal quality of the job applicant they aim to find out (in parentheses). By understanding personal qualities you can get a pretty good idea of what drives the person and whether he will be motivated and successful after you hire him. Here are the questions:
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