by Fronetics | Dec 9, 2014 | Blog, Supply Chain
By spending time and money on unnecessary bells, whistles, and gimmicks in an effort to delight your customers, you may be cheating yourself out of creating real value for your customers. If your current focus isn’t on your internal customer workflows, it should be. Your customers will appreciate it and you’ll benefit from building more meaningful customer relationships.
Here’s how to delight your customers and start them on the path to becoming evangelists:
1. Make it easy for your customer to do business with you.
Focus all customer-related, post sale activity on making life easier for your customer to do business — more specifically, to do business with YOU. Start by identifying any bottlenecks or delays and then find a way to eliminate them. Talk with the customer. Ask about any challenges they experienced on their end – and respond accordingly. Be the provider that makes it easier for the customer to do business; making a customer’s business run smoother will trump bells and whistles anytime.
2. Empower your employees to respond to customer queries and requests.
Your customer-facing employees are critical to customer retention and satisfaction. Make certain your employees understand the importance of their roles and work to create a culture where employees are comfortable responding to customers. Ensuring employees have the necessary support and resources to confidently interact with your customers will build value that’s likely to boost customer satisfaction rates.
3. Invest in training.
Put your time and money into training with the objective of increasing No. 1 and No. 2 above. Smart, effective employees trump all other investments on the customer satisfaction and retention scale. Looking for proof? When was the last time you were upset with a company because they were smart and efficient?
4. Delight customers to increase revenue.
Keeping existing customers satisfied is the most economical way to grow sales revenue and profits because there are no customer acquisition or startup costs. Keeping existing customers satisfied should be the mantra of your frontline employees.
5. Listen to and learn from your customers.
Query customers about their experience, their current challenges, forecasted industry trends – anything that knowing the answer to might help you serve them better. Your questions might just lead to the discovery of a new pain point that could be the catalyst for the development of a new service offering. New service offerings create opportunities to delight current customers and attract new ones.
Remember, satisfied customers tell three friends about their experience, and angry customers tell their unhappy tale to dozens. These are the interactions that can make or break an organization.
We’d love to hear your stories of excellent or subpar experiences with your vendors. Let us know what happened.
by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 11, 2014 | Blog, Strategy, Supply Chain
Strategy is not execution
Strategy and execution are fundamentally different. Strategy is about making choices. Execution is about getting down and dirty so that the choices made can produce results. Here’s how you can get from excellent strategy to strong execution.
Strategy is the pursuit of excellence. It is more than white boards, spreadsheets, taglines, slogans, and vanity metrics. Strategy is about making choices on where to play, how to play, and how to maximize value — for your company and for your customers.
Execution is about doing the work needed to produce results within the context of the aforementioned strategy.
Here is how to move from strategy to execution.
Keep it simple.
When it comes to strategy simplicity is key. Develop a few simple but big ideas or themes that will drive your organization. Live or die by these ideas. If you develop too many or they are too complicated, you will lose focus and internal buy-in. When you lose focus and internal buy-in, execution is doomed to failure.
Involve your team.
When you pick your few big ideas (see above), make sure you involve your “front line” team. These are the people who turn action into daily routines. Their insight and knowledge are invaluable.
Be obsessed with your strategy.
If you cannot articulate the “why” of your strategy in everything your organization does, it is probably the wrong strategy. Being obsessed with your strategy means that your strategy can be demonstrated in every action, every day.
Focus on the customer.
If it is not about the customer, it is not strategic. Everything you do needs to link back to the people who are paying you… your customers. If it does not help them, it does not help you and therefore cannot be strategic.
By staying focused on these business execution strategies, you’ll be able to successfully move your supply chains from idea to reality.
by Fronetics | Feb 25, 2014 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Twitter is one of the more powerful platforms to influence consumers and grow a business. Is your business on Twitter? If not, here are three reasons why your business should be on Twitter:
1. Be Found
When business consumers are searching for products and services, they typically start online. According to a recent study by Pardot, 72 percent of B2B buyers begin their research with Google. Other starting points for research: personal networks (15.58%), Yahoo (5.53%), Bing (2.76%), LinkedIn (2.51%) and social networks (2.01%).
Having a strong presence on Twitter- which has nearly a billion users – will significantly increase your business’ search engine rank and increase visibility. Why is this important? If you don’t rank well you won’t be found – 75 percent of users don’t scroll past the first page of search results.
2. Provide Customer Service – In Real Time
Twitter is an increasingly effective way to provide customer service – and a channel to which many consumers are turning. Your customers may run into issues with your product or service and not have the opportunity to simply make a phone call to a call center or customer service center to take care of this issue. Furthermore, in this day and age, people are using mobile devices more often for their business needs, and Twitter – being a primarily mobile social media network – provides an excellent outlet for customer service representatives to help customers in need. Customer service representatives can communicate more effectively and execute troubleshooting techniques with Twitter than with most other platforms due to the ease of accessibility.
The number of companies handling more than 25 percent customer service inquires via social media has increased from nine percent (2012) to 18 percent (18 percent). Even as more consumers are turning to social media for customer service, many companies are falling flat with respect to providing quality customer service. Only 36 percent of consumers report that their customer service inquiry was dealt with efficiently and effectively. This an opportunity for companies who can/do provide excellent and timely customer service via social media – a J.D. Power and Associates study found that 87 percent of consumers reported that their online social interaction with the company positively impacted the likelihood that they’d purchase from the brand, and that the responsiveness of the service representatives were a key of that satisfaction.
3. Keep an Eye Your Competitors
Since Twitter is a public platform, it enables you to see what your competitors are doing. When performing an industry or business related search, Twitter can provide valuable insights into what kind of information and services your competitors are providing for their customers as well as help you keep an eye on significant achievements – and sometimes, failures – that your competitors will experience, helping you to make important decisions.
This post previously appeared on DC Velocity.
by Fronetics | Feb 25, 2014 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Twitter is one of the more powerful platforms to influence consumers and grow a business. Is your business on Twitter? If not, here are three reasons why your business should be on Twitter:
1. Be Found
When business consumers are searching for products and services, they typically start online. According to a recent study by Pardot, 72 percent of B2B buyers begin their research with Google. Other starting points for research: personal networks (15.58%), Yahoo (5.53%), Bing (2.76%), LinkedIn (2.51%) and social networks (2.01%).
Having a strong presence on Twitter- which has nearly a billion users – will significantly increase your business’ search engine rank and increase visibility. Why is this important? If you don’t rank well you won’t be found – 75 percent of users don’t scroll past the first page of search results.
2. Provide Customer Service – In Real Time
Twitter is an increasingly effective way to provide customer service – and a channel to which many consumers are turning. Your customers may run into issues with your product or service and not have the opportunity to simply make a phone call to a call center or customer service center to take care of this issue. Furthermore, in this day and age, people are using mobile devices more often for their business needs, and Twitter – being a primarily mobile social media network – provides an excellent outlet for customer service representatives to help customers in need. Customer service representatives can communicate more effectively and execute troubleshooting techniques with Twitter than with most other platforms due to the ease of accessibility.
The number of companies handling more than 25 percent customer service inquires via social media has increased from nine percent (2012) to 18 percent (18 percent). Even as more consumers are turning to social media for customer service, many companies are falling flat with respect to providing quality customer service. Only 36 percent of consumers report that their customer service inquiry was dealt with efficiently and effectively. This an opportunity for companies who can/do provide excellent and timely customer service via social media – a J.D. Power and Associates study found that 87 percent of consumers reported that their online social interaction with the company positively impacted the likelihood that they’d purchase from the brand, and that the responsiveness of the service representatives were a key of that satisfaction.
3. Keep an Eye Your Competitors
Since Twitter is a public platform, it enables you to see what your competitors are doing. When performing an industry or business related search, Twitter can provide valuable insights into what kind of information and services your competitors are providing for their customers as well as help you keep an eye on significant achievements – and sometimes, failures – that your competitors will experience, helping you to make important decisions.
This post previously appeared on DC Velocity.
