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
Streamlining your processes is crucial for enhancing efficiency and optimizing the use of resources within an organization. This approach involves cutting out unnecessary steps in your workflows, leading to a more concise and effective operation. When you remove these excess parts, you not only save time and resources but also minimize the potential for errors. It’s about maintaining the essence of what makes your product or service valuable, without the added bulk that slows things down.
One aspect that often remains indispensable, yet ripe for optimization, is the quoting process in field services. Incorporating field service quoting software into your streamlined processes can significantly enhance this area. This type of software, designed to automate and simplify the creation of quotes, can be a game-changer. For instance, solutions like those provide a seamless way to generate accurate and professional quotes quickly. This not only reduces the workload on your team, allowing them to allocate their energy to other critical tasks but also improves the customer experience by speeding up response times.
In essence, a streamlined process with integrated smart solutions like field service quoting software leads to a more efficient operation. Fewer steps and fewer required resources result in cost savings, while the expedited processes lead to heightened customer satisfaction. The goal is to make every element of your operation as lean and efficient as possible, ensuring that quality remains high while overheads are reduced. This strategic approach not only benefits your team but also enhances the overall experience for your customers, making it a win-win situation.
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.
