Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Do You Know How to Enchant Your Customers?

Wednesday, August 31st, 2016

customer’s expectations

You have acquired a customer. Now you need to know how to cast the magic of your excellent customer service to gain a higher customer satisfaction so that you could hold said customer for a long time.

Let’s have a little chat about the most important steps you need to take to meet customer’s expectations:

To know about your customer’s expectations, you must have an idea who your customer is and what he wants. Gathering the exact needs or requirements of the customer give you a strong sense about their expectations from you. One of my favorite quotes is by the great Sam Walton:

“There is only one boss:  the customer.  And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”  Sam Walton

Costumer’s expectations set a standard, when satisfied, will generate repurchase decisions from the customer. Let’s have look about some hard realities about the customer’s expectations:

“I pay more I expect more.”

“My order must be ready on time.”

“I demand for quality.”

It’s an expected point that when customer is paying for your product and services he built a hope that he has utilized his money in a right place. So it is necessary to fulfill that hope with better understanding of his needs along with full commitment.

Another thing you must keep in mind is: A customer wants a relationship. Customers look for an ongoing personalized relationship with the representative of your company; they want to establish friendly terms rather than typical boring to-the-point conversation about the purchasing matters.

What do customer’s expectations tell you??

Your customer’s expectations are illuminating of some basic facts

  • What Service levels they are expecting from you.
  • Which exact measure you should take to fulfilling the expectations.
  • How you can surprise a customer by exceeding his expectations.
  • How to quickly resolve their future complaints.

What you should realize is that customers actually measure the service you provide relatively to what the customer expected to receive.

A great example of this is Amazon, an American internet based retailer known for its exceptional customer services. Not only do they have quick response and fast delivery services, but they also give a full-refund in case you are unable to receive their product for any reason. That is one reason their customers so loyal.

So your aim here should not just to increase the number of customers but to satisfy them on such levels that whenever they hear the name of your company, it corresponds to a positive experience. Once you are able to exceed customer’s expectations you will give them an experience they will always remember. This experience will then be passed down to their friends and family, becoming a word of mouth referral and will help to generate a pleasant impression of your company.

Use the information we have discussed today to achieve high customer satisfaction. Stay tuned to read more helpful articles at ERP Gold

6 Actionable Tips to Making Your Small Business Look Like a Billion-Dollar Corporation

Thursday, August 25th, 2016

6 Actionable Tips to Making Your Small Business Look Like a Billion-Dollar Corporation

Crowdsourced Design, Social Media, and SaaS can help your business appear to be much larger than it really is

Small business tips

Looking professional is important in the business world, super important. After all, would you trust a guy to fix your roof if he showed up without a ladder and a tool-belt? Would you trust a dentist who is using a barber chair and plastic, toy drill? There are certain signals we pick up on as consumers of goods and services that mark a product as quality. Basically, we judge things at the surface-level as to whether they are worth investing our valuable time and money in.

“Confidence breeds trust, and trust is the very first step to converting an on-the-fence buyer.”

For your own business, the more professional you look, the more confidence a potential customer will have in you and your products. Confidence breeds trust, and trust is the very first step to converting an on-the-fence buyer. Unfortunately for the old-school business owner, professionalism can no longer be proven simply by having a business card or storefront. Today’s entrepreneurs must be adept at juggling many marketing and business activities — the proverbial “many hats” — in order to take advantage of the landscape. Fortunately for the new-school business owner (ie. you, you clever person you), being a polymath is easier and more-accessible than ever.

Small business apereance

Branding

I love what my parents’ native language is, because there are many words in its lexicon that can convey entire concepts, emotions, or philosophies in a single expression. “Brand” is one of those words that exist in English, it resists concrete and empirical definition and yet you can say, without a doubt, that Coca-Cola is an extremely effective world brand.

But don’t let language barriers limit your creative intelligence. A strong brand should illustrate your business’ culture and story in an effective, consistent way. For Coca-Cola, their strong message of happiness and celebration created a colloquial and made their brand synonymous with the experience they created, “Drinking a Coke”. Here are two extremely feasible changes you can make to enhance the quality of your brand.

 1. Review your color scheme

Color influences the way we perceive the world and the way we feel about life. Color conveys emotions implicitly before any words are spoken. Use this to your advantage in sending your core message. Choose colors that match the personality of your business and the product you sell. Your goal is to effectively communicate your brand. Not an artist? No worries, try http://coolors.co for countless crowdsourced color palettes. A good rule-of-thumb is to have 1–3 complementing colors that go well with white and black. Consistently use these colors in your marketing and company representation so people clearly identify your brand with your unique color palette.

small business color theme

2. Redesign your logo

Picture someone you love, what is the first thing you see? Chances are it is a mental picture of their face. Faces are what we identify people by. In the same way your logo is the face of your business, probably the first thing people think of when they hear your company name. Like colors, you want to make something evocative. A good starting point would be considering flat design. Flat design is a popular trend that tends toward simple, representational imagery. This is in contrast to skeuomorphism, which tries to emulate real-world textures, often at the cost of readability. Having a professional re-do your logo may be cheaper than you think. Check out freelance and crowdsourced design websites like Designcrowd, Fiverr, and Upwork.

3. Go Wide

There are countless platforms on which people work, interact, and entertain themselves. Your job as a company is to position yourself on the platforms your most likely customers will be using. This approach of “going to the customer” on their terms is a fundamental paradigm shift in economics, and the quick adopters will be sure to profit. Show up where your audience is hanging out, in a way that is valuable to them. For example, a florist might post beautiful arrangements to Instagram with notes in the description on the flowers’ background and bouquet design choices. Said social media-savvy florist would hashtag his/her images with tags commonly used in-industry to effectively reach those who would be most interested.

small business go wide

4. Go Deep

The social media-savvy florist in our story made great choices in his/her marketing strategy. Besides platform selection, one of the best decisions was posting native, quality, relevant content. Being native to a platform means utilizing it in a effective way according to its attributes. For instance, Medium is better for long-form posts while Twitter is better for quick, real-time communication due to the way their respective UX’s are built. Do your research on what constitutes good content, and tailor a content strategy based on the unique qualities of your business and the platform you are using.

5. Go Back to Thine Web Admin

While your social media profiles will adapt to each platform, your website is where you get to express yourself on your own terms. Having a professional looking website means paying special attention to UI design, loading speed, mobile responsiveness, and SEO. A good web designer will do more than just pack a bunch of JavaScript animations as “eye catchers”, they will build a great experience with lots of backlinks and strong calls-to-action to convert visitors.

small busienss portablitiy


Customer Experience

Your business is nothing without customers who purchase your product. As a business owner, you can minimize churn and maximize the chance that people spread the word about you by building a customer experience. That is, creating a experience of finding, purchasing, and owning/using your product that is as responsive, transparent, and enjoyable as possible. This means finding and focusing on positive experiences and eliminating pain points.

6. Get Feedback, Act on It

In order to know what your customer wants or likes, you have to talk to them. Great companies share a love for customer feedback, they use the feedback constructively to build better experiences. There are many online services that easily let you send out feedback surveys and automatically track results. My personal recommendation is Typeform, although you can use whatever service you like. Once you have results, study and look for similarities and differences in your customer experiences. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes: where can you make life easier for them? Instate company-wide procedures to address the good and bad points, and resurvey after a period of time. Consider fully outsourcing your results to a specialists or SaaS to further optimize your purchase funnel. The best companies are constantly learning and evolving, don’t be one of the one’s left behind.

small business learing

Having Trouble Getting Your Startup off the Ground?

Thursday, August 25th, 2016

Having Trouble Getting Your Startup off the Ground?

So, you have an idea. You’ve even developed your idea through flowcharts or by writing it out or by talking it out. It’s ready to go, all you need to do is actually go. I’ve been there, most startups have been. But that doesn’t stop you from wondering what’s stopping your product from getting out there. So,what is the bottleneck keeping you from your well deserved millions? Well, I can tell you from personal experience that…

You are.

Start up is no easy

Yes, you are. Sorry, was that too honest? Maybe, but you need to hear this.

“But I’m pouring my heart and soul into my idea! It’s consuming my life!”

Yeah, well that isn’t everything. Sure, you’re perfecting your product. You’re making sure whatever you release is perfect to your standards before you start selling it and pitching it. Sounds like a good idea, right? Seems reasonable, smart even, to wait until you’re comfortable with your product.

Well, you’d be wrong. If there is one single self evident truth in life that translates to industry, especially in the tech and internet industry, it’s that perfection is simply unattainable. You’re never going to get there. Even if you think you’re almost there. Someone, somewhere, somehow is going to have a problem with something you did or is going to have a better way of doing some aspect that you didn’t even think of. It’s the way of life.

It’s not your fault.

That being said, don’t sweat it. I’m not saying this so you have a panic attack of never being able to accomplish anything. In fact, please don’t. Instead, be confident in your idea and once it can be used, let it be used. Release it, show it off. Get your product and your name our there. You’re not going to get that next round of seed money unless you show results. And the fact of the matter is, the best way to get results is to have people who use your product.

(more…)

Investing in Wrong Channels to Find Right Customers?

Thursday, August 25th, 2016

Am I investing in wrong channels to find the right customers?

customerrelationshipmanagement

If after investing a large budget in your marketing operations you are still unable to generate leads, you should ask this question: Am I investing in the wrong market?  and how can I find the right market?

The customer acquisition is not a linear or predictive streamlined process, but it still needs a proper and thoughtful planning.

For a growing business, there are a couple of tips and tricks you need to know to make new customers and to engage them with you for a long term without running over your budget or investing in wrong channels.  Here I share my ideas how to plan a scale able and dependable strategy for customer acquisition.

Having a generic plan to on board new customers is essential, which include:

  • Accounting of the platforms
  • Success metrics
  • Timeline
  • Manpower

Always Be Prepared ….. It matters!!

In startups irrespective of the size of the team, resources, and the budget each employee should understand your acquisition process and their short and long terms roles in on-boarding. You will be able to respond quickly to the glitches; for example if the user encounter an unexpected error in registration or sign up process. The development team is needed to resolve the issue on immediate basis. Also your customer representative team along with communication and marketing people are supposed to give a quick response to the complaint of customers on chat portals and social media and engage them in a proactive manner about the services and efforts to fix the problem. (more…)

Dashboard Data Helps Making Decisions: But HOW?

Thursday, August 25th, 2016

 

Dashboard

How dashboard data helps making decisions:

In any enterprise, most managerial decisions are based on data. But it’s hard to conclude results, look for trends, and spot changes when data is in its raw form.

When data is presented in an organized format with references it is normally called a report. Most of these reports are generated on request and are not instantly available. A Dashboard is a collection of one or multiple reports quickly available in a user defined format that exactly gives user what he wants to know.

Analytical strategies require a clear understanding of operational performances. To run business operations on high level performance and to respond rapidly to the changes and updates many organizations are turning to custom software utilities to collect, manage and use information in a meaningful way that is according to their business missions including dashboards.

Startups and medium size organizations are looking for systems those provide off-the-shelf dashboards, https://erp.gold has been a choice for lot of small and medium size companies as it offers dashboard reports from all aspects of the business including CRM, ERP, Accounting and marketing in one spot as compare to Salesforce.com or QuickBooks dashboard reporting which are limited to their area of operation.

Business Intelligence tools are more than simple graphical display of statistical data

Taking dashboard to a next level, Business Intelligence Solutions provide predictive analysis on the basis of trends and are capable of making decisions to immediately respond to the changes, which helps to grow your insights into your business goals . If you have a strong and determined strategy for the evaluation and monitoring of your programs but you are struggling to make a best use of your data and to analyze it in a productive manner, one of such tool might be a best fit for your organization. (more…)