Are You Investing For Success?
Right now cash is tight, but with the general falls in business activity, you may have the time for those projects, that you didn’t before.
What could you be doing?
Everyone else is waiting for the recovery, and then they’ll all be playing catch-up at the same time. You could be ahead of the rest.
Here’s what you could be doing:
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Examining what opportunities there are – real and “imagined”. What could you do to prepare to take advantage (luck = preparation + opportunity)? What opportunities could you “engineer” to happen?
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Training staff – doesn’t have to be expensive. You could identify a book on a useful skill, buy a copy for each member of staff (or your “senior team”), agree to read it by a certain date and then meet to discuss how the business could implement the skill or ideas in it.
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Keeping an eye on the talent in the market – if others are retrenching, could you be building your staff strength (yes, I know it increases your costs) so that you’re ready for the good times again?
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Talking to customers - to see what they value about your business and making sure that you keep doing it.
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Increase your business’ profile in the local community - offer some low-cost sponsorship, train people in a skill (if that is possible and safe), provide something that costs you little or nothing but that is needed (e.g. old, unused office furniture for a charity, a van or truck to shift heavier items). People will remember that you were there during the hard times.
We’re all working hard to keep our businesses going, but we also need to “work smart”.
I have spent more than half my life working in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in the world financial services industry running different service, operations and lending businesses, I started my own Performance Management Consultancy and work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.Labels: Crisis Management, Customer Care, Strategy
Keep your Promises - Effective Customer Management
A number of authors and speakers have referred me to the "Emotional Bank Account”. This is like a regular bank account, but deposits and withdrawals have disproportionate effects on it.
Your emotional bank account is opened by family, friends, colleagues and customers for you, but without your knowledge. You may not be aware of it, but it’s a part of your personal and corporate “brand”. According to Stephen Covey (author of
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People), keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit into the Emotional Bank Account; breaking one is a major withdrawal. Equally, our most constant relationships require our most constant deposits into the Emotional Bank Account.
Put this into a family or business context and you see what he means. Every day I read complaints on various blogs, websites and Facebook about people waiting for a delivery man, plumber, electrician or other to turn up, but that person never does turn up. It’s happened to me, and I’ve been guilty of it as well.
When you promise to do something, the person to whom you make that promise has an expectation that you will do it, and builds an emotional anticipation around that promise. If you keep it, what happens? Answer: you earn
trust,
respect and
credibility. These are major “deposits” into other people’s or customers’ emotional bank accounts. You create a positive feeling towards you or your business, and a “good brand”. You get more business – often without any advertising. If things go wrong, you are given more room to manoeuvre because you have huge “credit” balances in the emotional bank account.
Equally, if you don’t turn up when you say you will, or don’t carry out the action that you promised, what happens? Someone in a call centre once referred me to the “small print” as an excuse not to provide a service. I told them that I wasn’t interested in small print, but in the spirit of our agreement - they lost my trust.
There’s no excuse not to warn those waiting for you that you will be delayed or may not even arrive. Almost everyone has a mobile phone these days, and a quick call can be made in seconds.
The bond of trust takes a long time to build, but only moments to break and do irreparable damage to a company’s reputation. This then takes more management time to repair. One statistic says that for every example of great service, a customer will tell three others. For every example of bad service, they will tell nine others. In other words, sorting things out well could earn you three new customers, whilst sorting them out badly (or not at all) could lose you at least nine. It is cheaper to retain an existing customer than find a new one.
A friend who wanted to buy two new trucks recently complained on Facebook that a particular truck company had promised to call him back within 30 minutes with a price, but as at midday on the following, day they had not done so. That friend has 150 friends on Facebook. All 150 will have seen the same story (which named the company) and at least five commented…
Your business can stand out simply by understanding the “emotional bank account” and its importance.
I have spent more than half my life working in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in the world financial services industry running different service, operations and lending businesses, I started my own Performance Management Consultancy and work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.Labels: Customer Care, Selling, Strategy
Effective Risk Management - Back Up your Information
One of the most valuable assets that your business owns is information.
My clients have information on customers, products, prices, competitors, new markets and prospects, deals in process, cash owed, bank accounts, certificates and registrations and any other number of vital items needed to run the business. This is held on paper, or “on the computer”. However, when I ask them how they back these up, the answer’s often silence.
Anything can happen to your records, whether they’re in paper form or stored on a computer. Your ability to continue doing business hangs on being able to recover vital records at critical moments. Do you really want to be telling that valuable prospect that you need more time to put in the tender, or the tax man that you can’t respond immediately because “there’s been a problem with the computer”?
Equally, if you store all your vital information at the office and you can’t get there due to bad weather, other natural disasters or for other reasons, where does that leave you?
It’s easy to take a few simple steps to secure your most valuable information. Here are a few suggestions and questions:
• Identify what’s important (e.g. customer contact details, business registration documents, certificates of compliance, deal files, invoices, prospect files, and so on). What can your business really not do without?
• How do you currently store it (on paper, on computer) and where (with a lawyer, in a bank safe deposit box, etc)?
• How often do you need to get at it and what would happen if you couldn’t get at it for any reason (e.g. fire, computer crashes, etc)? Would it matter if you couldn’t get at it for (say) one day, two days, five days?
• Do you have an up to date list of all vital contacts – names, telephone numbers, email addresses - (e.g. customers, suppliers, bank, accountant, lawyer, local emergency services, business/industry group, regulating group)? Is this available wherever you are?
• Do you have secure fireproof storage on site sufficient to hold all sensitive and vital files or documents?
• Do you have access to secure, fire and flood-proof storage away from your business premises?
• What is your “contingency business site” if you can’t get to your business premises for any reason - can you access your vital information there?
• Can you obtain copies of all vital business documents? How easy would it be, how much would it cost you and how long would it take?
• Does your business have the ability to scan documents and store them electronically?
• Do you have the ability to back up what’s stored on your computer(s) to a secure offsite location and to access it from outside the office?
If you answered “Don’t know” or “No” to more than five of the above, your business could be at risk. The good news is, you can take some very simple action right now to improve the position.
The concept of the “paperless office” (which doesn’t exist, by the way) has resulted in “computer complacency”. As long as it’s “on the computer” or “online”, people think they’re secure. However, when you lose your computer due to a virus, “system crash” or to the office being inaccessible, you have a problem.
One answer is to back up vital computer files at the end of every day to a secure external storage device (I do this) which is kept overnight in a separate location. The separate secure device might simply be a memory stick or a portable external hard drive (I have a 1 TB drive which has more than enough space). Don’t forget that Data Protection laws may constrain you on what confidential information can be kept outside the office. Make sure that any data on external memory devices is encrypted or password-protected.
My appointments, contacts and ToDo list are on Apple’s iCloud service, allowing me to access all these wherever I am (as long as I have access to a computer). Equally, Microsoft and other providers offer “Cloud Storage” for a price to which you can back up documents. Your only issue then is whether you want to have your vital information in the hands of someone else. If you have one, speak to your IT service or outsourced provider and see what solutions they have.
Statistically, the longer things run smoothly, the more likely it is that one day, you’ll have a problem. Act now to make sure you can survive.
I have spent more than half my life working in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in the world financial services industry running different service, operations and lending businesses, I started my own Performance Management Consultancy and work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.Labels: Crisis Management, Customer Care, Financial, Productivity, Risk, Strategy
