Taking Your Company to Another Level

How to do improve your business and make it stand out these days? Well, the best thing to do is try to elevate it to another level. And the only way to do this is to make sure you understand what the business entails, and how to run it perfectly. Take a look at these ideas for how you can take your company to another level. Try to make sure you action these as soon as you possibly can.

Learn the Ropes

We could all stand to learn a bit more about the process of running a business. And that’s why it’s sometimes a good idea to go back and learn the ropes. It’s not that we forget the basics; it’s more that we forget their value. The simple stuff is often overlooked in favour of focusing on the more complicated parts of running a company. But, sometimes the basics are just as important, if not more so. So make sure you take the time to learn or relearn what is required to run a company.

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Go Digital

If you haven’t already made your business digital then God knows what you’ve been doing! The digital landscape is the future of not just business, but the world! So, you have to get your business up and running on a digital platform as much as possible. Make sure you have plenty of computers in your offices. Get social media training and do as much digital marketing as you can. In fact, try to make your business into a fully digital entity as much as possible. You will certainly reap the benefits of doing this.

Working From Home

As the world changes and becomes more digital you need to make your business more flexible. You need to be able to run it at any time of day or night no matter where you are. And the best way to achieve this is to make sure you work from home. That’s not to say that you have to start a home business. You can still have offices, but you should allow working from home. This can turn you into a 24/7 business if necessary, and gives you more time to connect with your clients and customers.

Image By Pixabay

Look After Staff and Clients

The best businesses out there are the ones who look after their own. That means you’ve got to look after your clients, but also, your staff as well. Turn yourself into a company that people are excited to be associated with. Develop a reputation as a great organisation to work for and do business with. The corporate world is so full of companies that are just concerned with chasing money. So think about how much positive attention you can draw by being thoughtful and considerate. People like to be well treated by companies, and they will reward you with loyalty.

All of these approaches will help you to take your company to another level. You want to separate yourself from other businesses and stand out. And all of these tips will help you to make improvements to your brand as much as possible. You always need to look for ways you can elevate and improve the brand in all that you do.

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Leading with the score – how great leaders keep focusing on the goal by Toby Beresford

As a leader, one of your jobs is to keep those you lead focused on the goals you are trying to reach.

One approach in every leader’s toolkit is to own and share “the score”.

“The score” means how you have decided everyone will measure success, whether as individuals or as a group.

Whether we realise it or not, we all take account of the score. Indeed, if you don’t share the score, people will invent their own.

This can have hideous consequences, as people chase after the wrong activities – look at people who stay late at the office because they think “total amount of time at work” is the score that matters.

Instead of leaving their team or group guessing, great leaders take control of the score by choosing which KPIs matter and communicating them relevantly and regularly.

Leaders identify the scores that matter and communicate them in a relevant way

STEP 1
Identify the important digital signals for your goals. These are the metrics that go into making your score.

STEP 2
Next you need to share the score in a relevant way. Your options are:

personal scores – a score for each individual. This approach works best in a ‘group’ setting where everyone is fairly independent – e.g. a conference or a very large business
team scores – a collective score. This works best for internal teams – e.g. focus on a KPI such as number of visitors to our website each month
market comparison – in more mature markets it may be more relevant to focus on the comparison with peers – e.g. we are the number 1 supplier of milk in our region.
STEP 3
Finally, it’s not enough to communicate relevantly, you must also communicate regularly.

Whether a weekly email to a big screen TV leaderboard in the office, you need to remember that facts don’t speak for themselves. You must tell people the score, and keep telling them.

The medium you choose is important – people will take more notice of a great looking leaderboard emailed around once a week with their photo next to their name, than one hastily scrawled on a piece of paper and stapled on a busy noticeboard.

Why add scorekeeping to your leadership skills?

The score is an essential part of leadership. We all take account of the score whether we realise it or not. By communicating the score in a relevant and regular way, you go beyond mere measurement into providing actionable scorekeeping. As a leader you can use the score to achieve the goals you’ve set for your team.

So, how do you use scores in your leadership today? What scores are your team really focusing on right now? Have you communicated the right ones? What challenges have you faced when leading with the score?

Toby Beresford can be found on LinkedIn and is the CEO/Founder of Rise

Category: Gamification, Smarter Business, Strategy | No Comments »

Best Practices for Customer Service on Twitter

Twitter has become the go-to medium for customers looking to provide feedback or solve problems, brands must adapt their Twitter strategy to better serve their customers. Below you will find a check list that best-in-class brands have adopted to better handle customer service requests and maintain positive sentiment about their brand.

1.Dedicated handle
Brands who have adopted dedicated customer service handles have an easier time managing customer service requests for both the dedicated handle and for the brand’s main handle. With a dedicated handle, brands can ensure that customer service requests are being taken care of in a manner consistent with the brand’s overall customer retention strategy. A dedicated customer service handle can help your brand separate a wide range of customer service requests from other types of mentions so you can effectively monitor your social customer service process. In addition, it can be a great way to naturally gain followers. Through proactive monitoring and engagement, you have the ability to build positive sentiment around your brand, which will help increase your audience size and encourage engagement.

2.Dedicate team and the right tools
When a customer service handle isn’t staffed the response time increases dramatically while the response rates decrease. Knowing when most of your customer service requests come in via twitter can help you determine the best time to staff your customer service accounts. There are several great tools that can monitor your most active Tweet times.

3. Canned answers + resources
Having responses on-hand can help reduce your response time and help increase response rate, as your customer service representatives have more sophisticated resources available to resolve issues. In addition, outline where you’ll direct different types of customer service requests, whether you ask for more information from your customers, direct them to email, direct them to a webpage, or solve the issue in a direct message.

4. Rules of engagement and primary handle guidelines
If you’re debating on whether or not to set up a dedicated customer service handle, you’ll want to determine how to handle customer service requests that are directed to the primary handle. You’ll also want to monitor mentions of your brand name in the event that Twitter users aren’t following, or aren’t aware of your brand handles. Effective monitoring can help resolve customer issues before they start – helping to keep sentiments positive around your brand handle. Not only that, let your followers know (daily) when your customer service handle is staffed. This will help to reduce posts when that handle is not staffed and or set expectations of response time

5. Promoting your handle
When you’re setting up a dedicated customer service handle, consider where you’ll promote the handle – for example, you may want to link your handle via your customer support page, so that users have a range of options to contact your customer service representatives. You may want to also find a way to link your main handle to your customer service handle (for example, in your brand bio) so that users who visit your profile are aware that you’ve got a dedicated customer service handle.

6. Reducing your response time
This is one way of letting your followers know that they are important to your business. In addition, it’s a proactive way to address negative word of mouth that may affect the sentiment generated around your brand.

7. Responding to as many mentions as possible
Responding to a majority of requests is a great way to keep your followers happy, and engaged. If your brand responds to as many mentions as possible, your users are more likely to mention your brand handle more often, which means your handle has the potential to reach followers who may be outside your reach.

CONCLUSION:
Understanding the rules of engagement for customer service on Twitter is a crucial step to managing your overall customer service strategy. As more and more users turn to Twitter to ask questions, give feedback, praise or complain about a brand, brands need to be proactive in managing their brand image – by showing customers that they’re listening, and that they care. Since Twitter is a word-of-mouth platform, these steps are essential for any company looking to increase their business in the digital world.

Category: Customer Service, Relationships, Smarter Business, Twitter | No Comments »

Profound Implications for The Individual Economy & [Infographic]

The individual-centered economy is already here. The newest digital technologies – among them social media, mobility, analytics and cloud – keep changing how people, businesses and governments interact. The transformation that is already underway will soon intensify, resulting in a paradigm shift from customer-centricity toward an everyone-to-everyone (E2E) economy. The implication for value creation and allocation will be profound.

New research shows that many organizations are still not ready to navigate the E2E environment. The Digital Reinvention Exec report can be read HERE

Here are some highlights from the report and infographic to share:

55 percent of 4,183 C-suite executives report that consumers have the most influence on business strategy <ClickToTweet>

58 percent of 1,100 executives surveyed in the Digital Reinvention Study expect new technologies to reduce barriers to entry <ClickToTweet>

There is a paradigm shift from customer-centricity toward an everyone-to-everyone (E2E) economy. Are you prepared? <ClickToTweet>

Digitization is rapidly changing the nature of how individuals and organizations interact <ClickToTweet>

“Social” has become revenue-generating, evolving from a dot-com trend to a sharing platform and business model <ClickToTweet>

Everyone-to-Everyone Economy

The Digital Reinvention Exec Report can be found on SlideShare and can also be seen below

Category: IBM, Retail, Sales, Smarter Business, Social Media, Technology | No Comments »

How C-suite executives see the landscape changing

IBM collect some amazing data, delivered in a series of C-Suite studies, from over 4,000 C-suite executives. Watch this space to be notified of releases as they happen.

In the mean time here are some early discovery snippits along with an Infographic.

How C-suite executives see the landscape changing:

55% of CHRO’s forsee increasing organisational openness “TweetThis”

77% of CFO’s support the development of new products and services “TweetThis”

19% of CSCO’s anticipate a reduction of their partner base “TweetThis”

71% of CIO’s see communication moving toward more social/digital collaboration. “TweetThis”

63% of CEO’s want to increase partnering for higher business value “TweetThis”

64% of CMO’s want to approach customers as individuals “TweetThis”

69% of C-suite executives report that creating a consistent experience across all customer touch points is one of their top initiatives. “TweetThis”

40% of C-suite executives are integrating internal and external data for insights “TweetThis”

Infographic courtesy of IBM Institute for Business Value

How does the above information resonate with your strategies? Would you like a copy of the full report when published? Pop your comments below, it would be great to meet you.

Category: CEO, CMO, IBM, Smarter Business, Technology | No Comments »

Four focus areas for Customer Loyalty – “main ingredient is Experience”

From small businesses to huge corporations, everyone wants to know the secret to keeping customers. How do we earn repeat business for years and years to come?

If you take away anything from this fantastic Infographic, from the guys at CustomersThatStick, it is the experience that the customer receives that defines whether they remain loyal to you or if they take their business elsewhere.

A staggering 82 percent have said they stopped doing business with a company due to poor customer experience. To keep your customers happy what are the four elements you should focus on?

– Friendly employees or customer service representative – ensure your employees are engaged

– Personalise the client experience. Let’s start a conversation about the revolution in business that requires engaging customers as individuals, at every level and how we can get there.

– Ability to easily find information or help. Share what you know, now that’s power!

– Good reputation – In my opinion (as always) if you do the above you will gain the reputation

Take a look at the infographic below and open the conversation by dropping a note in the comments.

Sources for the Customer Retention Statistics Above

While the convention on most infographics seems to be generic, non-specific sourcing, we wanted to provide actual sources for the statistics used in the infographic. We attempted to find primary sourcing as much as possible. In cases when we relied on secondary sourcing that did not seem definitive, we notated that fact after the citation.

Why Customers Leave <<TweetThis>>

82% of consumers in the U.S. said they stopped doing business… > Citation
73% was a reaction to rude staff… > Citation
78% of consumers in the U.S. said they have bailed on a transaction… > Citation
68% of consumers leave because they were upset with treatment… > Citation (Note: Primary sourcing could not be found, though this statistic is widely quoted through secondary sources.)

Why Customers Stick <<TweetThis>>

What parts of the customer experience cause customers to stick… > Citation
92% of consumers said they would go back after a negative experience… > Citation
What happened when an organization responded to a customer’s negative comment… > Citation
85% of customers are willing to pay more… > Citation

Retained Customers Mean Money <<TweetThis>>

The cost of bringing a new customer to the same level of profitability is up to 16x more… > Citation
10x more expensive to acquire… > Citation
4-6x more expensive to acquire…* > Citation
5x more expensive to acquire… > Citation Alan E. Webber, “B2B Customer Experience Priorities In An Economic Downturn: Key Customer Usability Initiatives In A Soft Economy,” Forrester Research, February 19, 2008
89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor… > Citation
Increasing retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25%-95%… > Citation
2% increase in retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10%.. > Citation (From the book, Leading on the Edge of Chaos)
Loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much… > Citation (Note: Primary sourcing could not be found, though this statistic is widely quoted through secondary sources.)
Repeat customers spend 67% more… > Citation

Category: Sales, Smarter Business | No Comments »

Engaging customers on their terms with Exceptional Digital Experience

Guest Post: Larry Bowden,

Portals and Web Experience Software

In June during a Commerce Conference in Monaco, I had the pleasure of introducing our Exceptional Digital Experience software along with Amadori, a leading Italian Food Company, who showcased the exceptional digital experiences they are creating to delight their customers.

Amadori was on a quest to find ways they could communicate more effectively with their growing numbers of young consumers. They decided to harness the potential of online marketing to create a series of mini-sites for a line of similar products using “digital” communication. “We wanted to create fun, innovative sites with interactive features which would engage a group of consumers who are more likely to surf the Net,” Marco Magnaghi, Business Innovation Manager at Amadori explains.

Having passed through two eras — content is king and social/analytics — digital experience is now entering its ubiquitous stage. Putting customers first has long been the elixir to a business’ success. A few years back, providing an exceptional customer experience meant having a website strategy, but in today’s reality, to successfully deliver a tailored and consistent experience online that meets and exceeds audience expectations requires a broader approach — you must consider the entire customer journey. In other words, a somewhat straight-forward web strategy of years past has evolved into the need for a more comprehensive digital strategy.

A digital experience strategy takes into account the emerging trends around the use of web and social analytics, more advanced rich media management and delivery, deeper social engagement and robust responsive design for mobile delivery. In this age of digital, a business’ success relies heavily on their ability to create and deliver exceptional digital experiences for their customers, engaging them on their terms and on their time. In fact, a Forrester survey found that more than 90% of respondents said that customer experience is a top strategic priority for their firm*.

Do you want to make an exceptional customer experience a strategic priority? Join Larry on July 17 at 11 am EDT to hear how you can transform the way you reach, understand and relate to customers through a rich and robust digital experience across multiple channels and devices. Click here to register for the webcast: Reinvent Relationships with Exceptional Digital Experiences.

Category: IBM, Smarter Business | No Comments »

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