You may feel like your business needs something extra at the moment. It’s like you have a general direction of where your business should go, but it seems inefficient. Your staff is not trying hard enough; you’re not as efficient in spending your money, and many of your plans seem to fall short. You may feel like you need to revolutionize your business and do it on the shortest notice. Here are the top eight ways to get there as soon as today.
Table of Contents
Flexible working model
Source: ft.com
First, you should introduce a flexible working model for remote employees. You can monitor their working hours via remote monitoring platforms or set deadlines instead of insisting on work hours. Regarding the latter, you can even introduce a performance-based payment model or pay them on commission.
You need to stop looking at work hours as the ultimate measurement of one’s productivity. Working hours and hours of active work are two different things. This is why 40 minutes of intermittent working model are worth more than an hour of sitting behind a monitor.
You want to incentivize people to create their working conditions. This way, their work-life balance will be better, they’ll be better motivated, and the results will always be high. This is also great for employees in different time zones. One of the benefits of remote working is that you have a global talent pool to dip into.
Superior customer support
The next thing you need to do is strengthen your customer support. First, you want to add more channels for communication. You probably already have an option of writing a ticket via email and live chat but what about VoIP? This is a positive change that you could probably introduce today. Just go through several different VOIP solutions and pick the one that suits you the best.
Another thing you should consider is employing more chatbots. No, these bots are not like they were a few years ago. With modern AI language models, chatbots can generate amazing responses in seconds and almost always pass the Turing test. They also respond instantly, which is incredibly important for your customers and customer relations in general.
Overall, the problem-solvers at customer support are advocates of your professionalism and efficacy. The more you invest in them, the better you look in the eyes of your customers.
Streamline your processes
Source: hrmanagementapp.com
With every additional step in the process, more things can go wrong. So, the solution to this problem would be to eliminate unnecessary steps. However, there are some steps that you can’t skip or simplify. The concept of streamlining a business process lies in trimming all the unnecessary parts without affecting the quality of the product/service.
Fewer steps also require fewer work hours and fewer resources. This is why a streamlined process is usually cheaper than its counterpart. Making the process simpler, you’re also taking less energy from your team, allowing them to focus on other tasks with more vigor.
Because a streamlined process is always quicker, the customers will be more satisfied. After all, they’ll get what they need a lot sooner than expected. The delivery time is one of the most important components of a great customer experience.
Pay more attention to customer feedback
Customer feedback is the most important thing in the world. Customers vote with their wallets, but they won’t always tell you what affected their decision-making process. They won’t tell you why they chose you over your customers unless you monitor them, analyze your traffic, and ask them directly.
Even a negative piece of feedback can be valuable. This negative feedback can sometimes be more valuable than positive one. The thing is that people staying silent about your flaws and just gradually dropping you as a retailer is much worse than them being forthcoming about why they’re not buying.
Also, how you treat and respond to this feedback (especially negative feedback) may be detrimental to creating great long-term relationships.
Be more generous with your marketing budget
Source: forbes.com
The amount of money you spend on your marketing will determine your success. For most enterprises, the marketing budget is 10% of your average annual revenue. On the other hand, this doesn’t apply to every industry. In some industries, you may have to set aside as much as 50% for marketing to stay competitive.
You must also understand the necessity for sponsored content and paid ads. There’s a prejudice that you can make a free digital marketing campaign. After all, you can get free hosting for your blog and make Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts for free. Still, there’s only so much that free promotion and DIY marketing will get you. To stay competitive, you need to invest.
Outsource as much as you can
You must invest time, energy, and resources to start a new department. It’s not just about hiring more people and telling them they’re now your HR department. You need to structure it right, which means bringing an HR specialist (which won’t be cheap). Then, you need to hire the right people and provide them with the right tools (which isn’t cheap).
Then, even when you achieve all that, you need to scale your HR to your business, which isn’t always doable. If you already employ 12 people, you cannot hire four more HR representatives. Then, there’s the issue of experience and waiting for your team to become a real team and for them to become proficient enough.
We mostly talked about HR, but the truth is that this relates to every department. Simply keep your in-house team on core tasks and outsource everything else.
Track better KPIs
Source: brightgauge.com
Your tracking metrics are instrumental in figuring out how well you do as a business. You’re probably already tracking things like revenue and profit margin (everyone follows these), but there are other KPIs that you’re probably not tracking (but you should).
For instance, two incredibly important metrics are customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV). This way, you’ll learn much about your marketing USP and appeal to customers. If you’re in retail, you should track the shopping cart abandonment rate, and if you’re in the SaaS field, you need to keep track of the churn rate.
The last thing you must understand is the importance of recognizing vanity metrics. These metrics look good on paper but provide little to no value. The number of likes on your social media posts is one such metric.
Improve your online presence
To get more attention, you need to increase your online visibility. There are two things you need to do to get there quickly:
- Invest in SEO
- Invest in PPC
Remember that while SEO gives you amazing long-term results, PPC immediately boosts your online presence. If you’ve already set a generous digital marketing budget and have the right marketing strategy, neither should be a problem.
The radical difference starts with small changes
Source: entrepreneur.com
The key thing to remember is that there’s no such thing as improving the efficiency of your enterprise. This is to generalize and to achieve it, you need to identify factors and bottlenecks that are either leading to higher efficiency or preventing it. With the above-listed eight items on your map, you’ll be able to do just that.
