The new year is fast upon us and it is time for that ritual known as resolution-time! I am not talking about a new resolve to eat lighter and get to the gym 4 days a week. I am talking about business resolutions – specific actions and efforts you should take over the course of the next few months to strengthen your business, improve your customer’s experience, and strengthen your team in the year ahead.
Some of these suggestions are specific things to do to help increase business activity, other undertakings are meant to help you learn more about the current state of your business. Not all of these are for every company, but I hope that you find a few on the list that make sense for you. Here then are 10 new-year-business-resolutions for 2012!
1. Review your strategic plan. It is a good idea to dust off your strategic plan at east once a year, and what better time then now? Business strategy needs to be ever changing and ever evolving if you hope to compete effectively, and an audit of your strategy is definitely in order. Schedule a brainstorming session, look hard at what your competition is doing, consider your marketing tactics and come away with a fresh approach to your business for the upcoming year.
2. Audit your social media strategy. A SM assessment is an easy resolution to start the year, and Facebook is a natural starting point. Simple to use and critically important, FB is a key portal to your business, a point of entry for many of your potential customers. If you haven’t been attentive to this in 2011, start in 2012. Twitter is another channel that you should appraise and consider whether your efforts there are adequate or if they can stand improvement.
3. Attack your budget. We do this at the end of each year, and it is critical that you look closely at your budget as soon as possible. Track last year’s expenses and compare actual expenditures with budgeted amounts. Do a reality check and see where there is fat to be cut or where you are underestimating the true costs. An focused look at your costs will help you to keep them under control in the new year.
4. Try some experimentation. Resolve in the new year to set specific goals for your business, define strategies to achieve those, and then develop a short list of experimental tactics to execute. Perhaps you haven’t tried email marketing, social media, public relations, special events, or other marketing methods and some or all of these may prove effective if you try. Be sure that you are able to effectively measure the results of any new tactic you engage in and be ready to quickly kill those that are not working and increase your efforts with those that are.
5. Gather your data. The new year is the perfect time to reconsider the business data you gather and whether you are measuring what is truly important. Resolve to measure effectively, develop useful reporting, just be careful that you don’t waste your time or the team’s on measurements which will not move your company forward.
I have written several times about customer service and how important it is for small businesses and startups to deliver it effectively. Great customer service is about several things: accuracy, honesty, fairness, efficiency, and – perhaps most important of all – speed of delivery. How many times have you sat on the phone listening to bad music and marketing messages while you wait for an agent to answer your question? How many times have you sent an email request and waited… and waited… and waited… sometimes for days just to get an answer to a simple query?
Two key indicators of customer service speed are what we refer to as “assign-time,” or the number of hours or minutes it takes for an agent to receive a request, and “solve-time,” which is the length of time it takes to resolve a support request. It took us several months in the beginning to figure it out, but at crowdSPRING we are proud of the fact that we have been able to successfully reduce the time it takes to respond to a request, and the time it takes us to both assign a support request and find a resolution for the customer. The chart at the left show how we have been able to reduce these key times, in the face of significant growth is user requests.
Your customer service structure should be built to deliver that speed and this means designing support systems with three things in mind: contact methods, support cycles, and capacity planning.
1. Contact methods
Contact methods should be designed so that your customers can contact you the way they want to. Email, phone, social media, and chat are the most common methods of contact; our surveys show that the vast majority of our users prefer to contact us by email, but many still like the phone and more and more contact us via Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ to request help. Make the contact methods as easy to access as possible – every page on your site should have a ‘contact us’ link, your phone number should be as visible as possible and should clearly indicate what the phone support hours are, your social media accounts should also be displayed prominently so users can easily click through to Facebook or Twitter. Of critical importance is how you route these touchpoints; I recommend that you have a central repository for support contacts and many of the leading support and help desk software packages allow you to do this. Keep a log of calls, organize email or tickets by groups or agent, funnel your SM requests into your help software to create tickets there and forward miscellaneous email contacts into your help desk where you can track time and performance data.
2. Support cycles
Support cycles are simply the days of the week and the times of day that customers are likely to want help. Look closely at your own data to understand when customers want support. For instance if you find that 50% of all requests come into your customer service team between the hours of 10am and 3pm, then make sure you have enough agents working during those hours to handle the additional volume. The same goes for days of the week: if you know that Monday-Wednesday are your busiest days for support requests, then be sure that your agent’s schedules reflect the volume.
3. Capacity planning
Capacity management is crucial to providing high-quality and speedy support to your customers. Look closely at trends and plan for increases and growth. The time to hire and train a new customer service agent is not after you are swamped but rather when your data indicates that you will need the extra capacity in the future. For instance, if it will take you 3 months to fully train a new agent, means that you want to hire that person three months before the next crunch. The same goes for day-to-day planning – if your data tells you that weekends do not see the same volume of requests as on a weekday, plan for lighter coverage on those days. If on the other hand weekends are a busy time for you and your customers demand support on Saturday and Sunday, then the answer is simple – staff up!
What is a freelancer if not a small business? Just like small businesses, freelancers must engage in marketing, manage payables and receivables and other accounting tasks, perform HR functions, direct production, and plan strategy.
1. Planning and strategy. There are lots of great tools and apps out there that will help you to plan and execute great strategy for your freelance career or business, but the greatest tool you can use is knowledge. The Harvard Business Review is probably the leading publication for business and their an online journal contains thousands of articles nonbusiness theory, practice, and technique. The current issue of HBR includes articles which can provide great value to freelancers, such as “Stop Procrastinating…Now,” “Customer Loyalty in the Twitter Era,” and “he Secret to Dealing With Difficult People: It’s About You.”
2. Marketing. The single greatest marketing tool that a freelancers can use is standing directly in front of you: your clients. Happy customers talk, and when they talk about you or your business, the people they speak to listen. The typical freelancer will receive well over half of their new clients through word of mouth, and strong WOM builds business. Wikipedia defines it thus, “Customer relationship management (CRM) is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. Two great resources are Salesforce and Zoho.com. These two online resources allow you to plan and manage marketing campaigns, manage lead generation, automate sales management, perform inventory and customer support functions, and analyze and visualize customer data.
3. Managing HR. The human resources manager is typically one of the most important (and feared) members of the corporate management team. They typically manage processes that touch every employee every day: payroll, health benefits, incentive programs, performance reviews, pension and retirement plans, and vacation policies. But freelancers do all of this on their own, and more. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is the world’s largest association devoted to human resource management. Their website has a ton of resources for small businesses and freelancers, including articles, forms and templates, and user groups and forums, as well as information on other resources such as health care benefits, employee assistance programs, and retirement plans.
Last week I was struck by a news story that was unusual in several respects. I turned on the news to see video of a small group of rock climbers rappelling down the exterior of the Washington Monument. The sported the typical gear one would expect to see on such folks: harnesses, helmets, ropes, and what-not. They were also carrying small hammers and tapping away at the stone as they slowly made their way down the 555-foot tall obelisk. But what caught my attention was the fact that each of them was also carrying an iPad and were stopping as they went to record notes or data directly into the devices. Turns out that this was a team of engineers inspecting the structure to assess the damage caused by last month’s earthquake and they were methodically inspecting each of the 36,491 marble blocks that makes up the exterior of the giant tower. The iPads contained engineering data from the 1999 restoration of the monument.
This is just one example of how businesses are embracing mobile technology. From data collection to forms management, from photos and videos to document creation and collaboration, mobile devices are finding their ways into many aspects of business operations. Yes, there are the basic functions: email, messaging, and entertainment, but here are five meaningful ways that small businesses are leveraging the iPad (and mobile tech in general) to increase productivity, service customers, improve communication, and improve workflows.
1. Accessing data.
Information mobility is critical and mobile devices give their users instant access to valuable data in the field. Repair technicians can access technical manuals while on client calls. Salespeople can view current product price lists and complete order forms on-site while visiting clients. Insurance adjustors can look up account information, create estimates, and upload photos of your dinged up bumper in seconds while they make you an appointment at an approved body shop in your town. There are many apps that allow you to access documents and data, but a couple of great value are Dropbox for access to any document stored on your office computer, Salesforce Mobile for instant CRM, Evernote for taking notes and collecting text, photos, and video.
2. Closing deals.
On my iPad I keep a crowdSPRING How-it-works video which I can pop up anytime someone asks me, “What exactly is your business?” The iPad has a beautiful large display and virtually screams out, “Use me! Touch me!” This comes in really handy when traveling and at conferences or trade shows when I find myself talking to lots and lots of people. The iPad can also be connected via a VGA adaptor to a projector and full-on presentations can be shared using Apple’s Keynote app, which is a full-featured presentation tool.
3. Staying connected and collaborating.
Apple’s iWorks suite of apps, includes Pages (a full-featured word processor) and Numbers (Apple’s spreadsheet program) both of which allow you to create, edit, and share documents. These powerful programs allow you to create graphically rich reports, record and manipulate data, and collaborate with your colleagues on the go. There are also apps like Skype and Webex which allow users to participate in online conferencing and meetings. The iPad is a way for your workers in the field to get rid of those binders, clipboards, and accordion folders – all of that paper-based workflow can be replaced with document sharing, custom forms, web access.
For years, hobbyists, police enthusiasts, ambulance-chasers, and thrill seekers have spent hours with their ears cocked listening to police scanner radios. Sometimes these folks do it just for the vicarious thrill that can be found; sometimes they do it because they are fascinated by police procedure; and sometimes they do it as a way of scraping their market for new business opportunities and to acquire new customers.
Whatever the reason a person has, listening in on the PD frequency can be a fun, interesting, or incredibly banal experience. I mean, how many times can you hear the same old, same old “10-14” or that ubiquitous “Suspicious person possible armed with sword” crackling over the tinny speakers in your scanner? Well perhaps no more. Last week the Seattle PD (apparently the most SM-savvy department in the nation) starting tweeting out hundreds of fragments – the type of information usually only heard by scanner-geeks and groupies, but now available to anyone with a Twitter account who was willing to follow the @SeattlePD as they shared with us the details of their busy day.
Just like our larger brethren in the Fortune 100, lots of small businesses have training programs for their workers: lectures, classes, role-playing exercises, and motivational speaker sessions. However, most small businesses and startups ignore training programs altogether, or cobble together ad hoc strategies when on-boarding new hires. These differing approaches are sometimes stylistic, sometimes strategic, often driven by economics, and sometimes prompted by the company’s own culture.
Training new employees takes time, detracts from mission critical work, costs real money in salaries and benefits during the training period (not to mention the training materials, people, venues, etc), and often return results that are not relevant for many businesses. Frankly, many companies simply don’t have the time or resources to send their new hires away for days or weeks of formal training before expecting them to start producing a real work-product.
The question is, “What is right for my business?” And like so many choices that businesses large and small make on a daily basis, there is a simple answer: “It depends.” Businesses that hire workers involved in complex technical tasks, or the operation of dangerous equipment, or the preparation of food, medicine or other highly-regulated products obviously need to take the time (and spend the money) to properly prepare their new employees to perform their specific jobs. But many other businesses that are not involved in dangerous processes, nor serving food to the public, nor dealing with hazardous materials do not necessarily need to develop or execute complex training programs; in many cases new workers at these types of companies can hit the ground running after an hour or two of instruction from an experienced colleague.
I would argue, however, that there is one functional area where new employees for ALL companies do require specific, sometimes extensive, training: customer service. As we have written many times before, great customer service is something that no business can go without. And, in order to provide great customer service, employees need to be well-trained not just in the mechanics of running whatever software or other tools they use in their jobs, but in the culture of the company, the products or services offered by the company, and (most importantly) in understanding the customers. This doesn’t mean that a small business necessarily needs to take days or weeks to train a new customer support person, but it does mean that a careful and thoughtful mix of formal training, on-the-job training, and periodic reflection and review can greatly increase that worker’s effectiveness and productivity.
Formal training.
For most small businesses the “formal” training of customer service workers consists of teaching them to use the tools they will leverage to deliver support: help desk software, telephone protocol, email templates and the like. These operation of these tools can typically be taught very quickly, usually on day 1 of training. If you are hiring people who need more than a day to learn their way around customer service software, you are probably hiring the wrong people. Similarly, if you need to teach someone how to be respectful and polite with customers on the phone or in person, you also need to take a look at your hiring decisions. It is important that your new employees understand the right way to operate their tools, but much of the skill will be acquired after the initial, remedial instruction. Let them get their hands dirty quickly and let them learn from their experience.
Of the many things businesses can do well (or fail at) none is more important than customer service. Although the marketing textbooks, don’t consider it to be one aspect of a solid marketing plan, this key function should be considered as a part of your marketing and approached the same way you would approach any of your other marketing tactics. I say this because the word of mouth that great customer service can engender is among the most powerful forces that can impact your business in a profound way – improving revenues, strengthening margins, and increasing customer lifetime value all while reducing marketing expense in other areas, decreasing employee turnover, and leading to expanded visibility and awareness for your brand.
Great customer service does not have to be expensive, complicated, or slow. There are some wonderful tools available that can help you increase your customer service capacity, build an efficient infrastructure, and scale your ability to be responsive as your business grows. Here are some tips and tools which you can put to use as you learn to market through service!
1. Be available.
Make yourself reachable by your customers in the ways they want to reach you. The best approach is to make yourself available to your customers in multiple ways: email support, phone support, instant chat are all tools that you can use. Of course this depends on your business and the resources you have available. For instance, many small companies simply do not have the capacity to offer full-time phone support, so many will offer it during certain specific hours. Chat is also a great way for customers to reach you, but this too may stretch your internal capacity. If you do offer these during limited hours, make sure to message this and be clear about exactly when you are available and by what means.
2. Be fast.
Don’t keep people waiting, whether it is for an answer to their email request or by simply limiting the hold time on your phone support. We are proud of the fact that 96% of all customer support requests that come in are answered in under one hour! But the flip to this is that you have to communicate how long it will take you to respond and to calibrate your customer’s expectations to what you can realistically deliver; in other words, don’t promise a response within 25 hours if you know it may take more than that.
3. Be honest.
People appreciate transparency and your answer to their questions, comments, or suggestions are each an opportunity for you to establish an honest, open tone. This goes for everything from your message when they first contact you all the way through your answers to them when you are actually communicating. If your site is experiencing issues, tell them so; if you think a solution may take a long time, tell them that, too; and if you think their suggestion is one that is just not appropriate thank them and move on. They will appreciate the candor and will tell their colleagues how refreshing it is to deal with a company that tells the truth.
Many entrepreneurs and small business owners argue that you should always listen to your customers. In fact, the popular lean startup principles advocate listening to your customers and iterating early and often.
But listening to customers – and responding to your customers’ suggestions by implementing all or many of them – are not the same thing. As Steve Jobs wisely said:
Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.
Unfortunately, many businesses fail because their leaders lose focus while trying to incorporate all (or many) of their customers’ suggestions. It’s easy to fall prey to the “yes’ mentality. Saying yes makes us happy. We believe that saying yes is more likely to cause the customer to buy our product or service. Saying yes makes our customers happy.
Ultimately, don’t we want happy customers?
Of course we do. But making customers temporarily happy while destroying your company is, in my opinion, an unacceptable cost. No company has unlimited resources and when you say yes to customers – you’re committing – and often, over-committing – those resources.
If you’re creating software, you end up with bloated software and a terrible user experience. If you’re creating products, you end up with a complex and expensive product.
Henry Ford famously said:
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
Many people reading Henry Ford’s quote conclude that innovation is driven by your own ideas – and not by ideas suggested by your customers. After all, how could people who use horses and buggies come up with the idea for a horseless “car”?
The reality is that listening and innovation go hand in hand. Steve Jobs was only partially right. You shouldn’t say yes to everything. But you also shouldn’t ignore what your customers say. The key is in how you listen – and what you do after you understand what your customers are saying.
Part of the answer lies in asking good questions. The quality of answers to your questions depend on the quality of your questions. Ask stupid questions and you’ll get stupid answers. Ask broad questions and you’ll get broad answers.
Moreover, how well you listen is measured not merely by your ability to hear WHAT the customer is suggesting – but also by your ability to understand your customer’s point of view. If enough customers tell you that there’s something wrong with your product, then there probably is something wrong. That doesn’t mean you should change the product at the whim of your customers – but it does mean that you should understand WHY your customers are having trouble with your product and deal with the underlying issues causing problems for customers.
More often than not, you’ll end up saying no to dozens, hundreds, and often thousands of suggestions from your customers. If you don’t – you’ll go out of business.
But how can you say “no” to a customer without discouraging them?
Ross wrote a short post the other day about a funny customer service request we received and mentioned that we have handled well over 100,000 customer service contacts since we launched less than 3 year ago. I looked at that number and my jaw dropped; I know intellectually that we handle a huge volume of support requests, but as we answer our users questions, respond to their problems, thank them for their suggestions, and fix the bugs they report, we don’t think much about how many of these we actually answer, solve, implement and fix. It’s kind of like aging, one day you turn around and your kids are in college and you’re another decade older. How does that happen without you even being aware that it is happening? Same with customer service: the requests come in, you deal with them one-by-one and the next thing you know you’ve done 100,000. Wow.
We are (of course) huge proponents of great customer service and we strive every day to provide a world-class level of support to our users. We make ourselves available 7 days a week, we celebrate the quick response, and we endeavor to solve all requests within 24 hours. And we’ve gotten pretty good at it: we are proud that our average response time is under an hour, and we solve over 80% of requests in under a day. To us great customer service is part of a great user experience, and more than that, we view it as a marketing strategy: great support engenders great word of mouth, and W.O.M. leads to more customers. A virtuous cycle if ever there was.
Not every customer who contacts us is an easy customer. For every whimsical contact that we receive about apples, we get ten more from folks who are upset, angry, vexed, annoyed, indignant, or irritated: the site isn’t performing to their standards; a problem is not being resolved fast enough; a credit card was overcharged; or another user has posted a rude comment. The true art of customer service is not in how you handle someone who gets in touch to have a little fun on the topic of fruit, but in how you handle a seriously upset customer with a real issue. The kind of issue that ties your stomach in knots and that leads to holding phone 10 inches away away to protect your eardrum, or (please Lord, no) an email written in ALL CAPS with crazy punctuation!!??
Here are a few tips for dealing with the these most difficult of customers; some of these are relevant to everyday run-of-the-mill contacts, but for the most exasperating support requests, these 9 tips may be particularly helpful:
1. Know a difficult customer when you see one. Then pounce.
Watch for the signs: profanity, sarcasm, and overt anger are pretty easy to spot but sometimes an upset customer might not be so immediately evident. Watch for keywords like “payment,” “issue,” “problem,” “bug,” or “slow” as these can be good signs that a support request has the potential to escalate. Once you know which they are, make sure that these appeals are not allowed to languish; you should be sure that the most difficult requests move straight to the top of the queue. A happy customer tends to be much more patient than an unhappy one, so deal with those unhappy folks first, ok?
2. Stay on the lookout. Everywhere.
Great customer service can happen anywhere, anytime, but only if you are aware that there is a customer who needs help. The trick is to keep your finger on the pulse and we do this monitoring in several important ways: 1) we make support easily accessible via an obvious “contact us” link at the top of every page, a crowdSPRING user account to which users can easily send us a message, and a chat feature available on certain key pages on the site; 2) We monitor social media for angry customers by using search terms in Twitter, carefully observing your Facebook feed, and making LinkedIn and other services available as contact methods for our users; 3) Watch the blogs and message boards for people expressing their dissatisfaction. Google alerts is a great tool for watching the web for random mentions and comments – set up search terms with your company name and be sure to watch the results closely for trouble.
3. In customer service, it is the hare who wins the race.
In the ancient fable, it is the slow, steady tortoise who wins the race, but in customer service it is the fast response that wins the hearts. People like to know that someone is paying attention and the faster your response, the stronger the message that you are doing just that. Difficult customers especially are time-sensitive and an immediate response will go far to reduce their angst.
Our customer service team has answered well over 100,000 questions from customers.
As our community has grown (crowdSPRING now has over 120,000 buyers and creatives on crowdSPRING, from nearly every country in the world), we sometimes receive unusual notes from customers. For example, last year, one customer wrote to us with the following opening line: “Hello whores.”
A few days ago, I found the following fun back-and-forth between Kevin, who heads our customer service team, and a customer. That’s a photo of Kevin on the left – it’s the only time in years he wore a dress shirt and a top hat!
The customer wrote for advice about inviting designers to her design project on crowdSPRING. Kevin promptly responded and the customer apparently was impressed:
The customer added:
Always ready for a challenge and perhaps thinking that he was working for ChaCha, Kevin called the customer’s bluff:
Those of you who know Kevin already know that he’s always up for having some fun. The fact that he didn’t quit when I challenged him to a Shakespearean Sonnet competition and questioned whether he really can play the banjo speaks volumes about his sense of humor.
crowdSPRING is the world's #1 marketplace for entrepreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits and agencies who need custom logo design, web design, a new company name or other writing and design services. Over 110,000 designers and writers work on crowdSPRING. We are trusted by more than 27,000 happy clients around the world.
The new year is fast upon us and it is time for that ritual known as resolution-time! I am not talking about a new resolve to eat lighter and get to the gym 4 days a week. I am talking about business resolutions – specific actions and efforts you should take over the course of the next few months to strengthen your business, improve your customer’s experience, and strengthen your team in the year ahead.
Of the many things businesses can do well (or fail at) none is more important than customer service. Although the marketing textbooks, don’t consider it to be one aspect of a solid marketing plan, this key function should be considered as a part of your marketing and approached the same way you would approach any of your other marketing tactics. I say this because the word of mouth that great customer service can engender is among the most powerful forces that can impact your business in a profound way – improving revenues, strengthening margins, and increasing customer lifetime value all while reducing marketing expense in other areas, decreasing employee turnover, and leading to expanded visibility and awareness for your brand.
Ross wrote a 
