As a business, it’s important to remember that you rely op0n customers to be able to run. Without them; you wouldn’t have anyone to sell products or services to. So, you wouldn’t be able to make any money. This makes customers your most important tool in business. And, you need to make sure that they’re happy. Doing this can be a great challenge, though. With so much to think about and change, it can be hard to know where to start. So, to help you out, this post will be going through some of the things that can change and what you can do to make the changes.
The biggest consideration you need to make throughout this process is what your customers want. You need to make sure that they will be happy with what you provide. And, that everything is tailored to their needs. If you already have customers; this is easy. Just ask them what they think you could change about your business. If you don’t have any, though; this can be harder. In this case, you’ll need to do some market research. Usually, this will involve loads of research online. But, there are plenty of resources to help you. You can always think about the products you use and buy, to think about the changes you’d want.
Areas
There are loads of different areas within a business that can be improved and changed to meet the needs of customers. You just need to think about them and do some Googling. To help you out, below you’ll find some of the different parts of your business that could be due some change.
If you run a business that’s mainly online, you’ll find that most of your customers will use your website. In this case, you need to make sure that your website is easy to use and looks attractive. Over the last few years, HTML5 has made it possible for website design to be much more complicated and attractive. Unfortunately, websites without it look very out of data. So, you’ll need to do some work if your is in this position. Usually, it’s best to hire a professional web developer to do this for you. They will be able to give you much better results than you would find doing the work yourself.
Customers will only buy products that they want or like. This means that you have to make sure that all of the products you sell will appeal to customers. Otherwise, you won’t be able to make many sales. People will refuse to make compromises on their online purchases. There are so many options out there; people will always be able to find another option. So, you need to make sure that you’re working to improve your business’ range wherever you can. A great example of a product that surged in popularity is custom items. These enable customers to have a unique touch to their items. And, people love it.
If you have a physical store, you need to be thinking of the experience customers have there. A lot of people are getting used to companies treating them like a friend. So, it’s important to remain friendly and always ready to serve your customers. Ignoring this area will make customers feel unhappy when they visit your business. And, this can have a very negative impact on the amount of customers that you get. People talk about businesses. And, they will talk about the ones that they don’t like, most of all.
As an extension of this, you also need to be thinking about the customer service you provide after a customer has bought your products. If you take a long time to reply to emails or don’t offer solutions; people will get upset. And, with this new bad-blood between you and them, word will get around about your poor service. This has had a huge impact on several large businesses. And, only with improvements to their services have some been able to keep running.
As more and more people are becoming aware of the impact of things like pollution, they’re becoming more passionate about it. People will refuse to buy products from companies that aren’t responsible for their carbon footprint. And, likewise, other social areas can have a negative effect on your business. It’s bad to pander to people too much. But, you do need to make sure that you’re running a company that people feel proud of buying things from. These selling points can be great for a business that’s just starting out.
Once you know what to change, you need to figure out exactly how you’re going to change it. Thankfully, there are loads of resources online that can help you to predict what will be popular in the future. For example, you can check out ponbee.com’s article about e-commerce trends to make sure that your website is up to scratch. Using resources like this is a good way to scope out new ideas. But, you also need to be considering that they could be wrong. Use more than one point of reference to make these decisions, to lower the likelihood that it will be for nothing.
Of course, there are loads of benefits to changing your company to meet the needs of your customers. You will find that you’re able to impress them much more; when you’re doing things designed to make their lives easier. This means that it can be wise to spend some money on this area. You can see this as an investment. And, it will give you access to way more resources than you would have before. Ultimately, in this case, spending money will make it much easier to make some.
This should give you the information you need to start making changes to your business in the favor of your customers. This sort of work will always prove to be useful. And, your customers will always notice the difference. Keeping up with the changing needs of customers can be hard. But, it’s worth putting the work in.
You probably use the web at least once every day. But we bet there are still parts of it that you never knew existed. If you explore these parts of the web, you won’t believe some of the possibilities they hold. For instance, have you ever thought about the other side of blogging? We know you probably think that blogging is just a way to share your thoughts. But if you’re on the other side of it, it can also be an incredible money making venture. Some bloggers earn thousands every month, and it’s ridiculously easy to set up your own blog. Here are a few other sections of the web that you don’t know about.
In Deep
You may be completely unaware that the section of the web discoverable through search engines is a mere fraction of the actual size. If you explore the deep web, you’ll find the full scope of the internet. But you may not want to. The deep web contains illegal sites, and it can be dangerous to even venture onto it. It is regularly monitored by government specialist teams. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Fast Money
If you go on some websites online, you can get money directly into your account in a matter of minutes. You can borrow thousands, and we bet that will make paying for your holiday a lot easier. You do, however, need to make sure that you are using a trusted source. Check out the information in this infographic to find out how to identify a safe lender.
Infographic Produced By Cashfloat online
There’s no denying the many ways that technology has propelled small businesses forward over the past two decades, but even by the lofty gifts it’s brought businesses, we’re in something of a special age. It has never been easier to implement technology into your workforce, and it’s making us work better than ever before. If your business is suffering from a productivity issue, then there’s almost certainly a technological solution to your problem. Here’s how to get back on track.
Your workforce is bursting with creative individuals who have bags of ideas, but the process of actually getting things done is too difficult to become a reality. Finding the time and space to work together is an issue, and as such most great ideas remain just that – ideas. However, things like cloud storage can enable workers to collaborate on projects regardless of whether they’re able to actually get together – and can let them do it at all hours of the day and wherever they are. Similarly, setting up software like Skype and other communicative software tools makes it much easier for workers to talk to one another and get things done.
Get Your Time Back
All too often, it’s not procrastination that keeps us from achieving what we want to achieve: it’s our busy schedules. While we’re taking care of the logistics of running a company, the important stuff that would allow the company grow is left behind, unattended. There are software tools that streamline the niggling tasks, such as accounting and taxes, while implementing IT support into your company means you’ll no longer be spending hours making sure everything is performing as it should, or worry that everything’s fine when you’re away from the office. It’ll be taken care of, and you can get back to spending your time on the tasks that really matter.
Focusing On What Works
A large part of being productive is being well prepared. If you have enough information available to you, then you’ll have a clearer idea of where you should be doing. Before planning your next big move, whatever it is, you should be making use the vast amounts of data that technology can deliver. If you implement the tools that tell you, say, how people are interacting with your website and what they’re positively and negatively responding to, you’ll be able to use that data as you move forward.
Tracking Employee Performance
With productivity software tools available, you don’t have to just set a task and wait for it to be finished. You can track the progress every step of the way. If certain areas are being held up, you’ll be able to identify what’s going wrong in ways that have never been available before. It’s not about finding out which workers are pulling their weight and which aren’t: it’s about seeing which areas of your company need to be improved. It could be anything, from infrastructure issues to workers not being able to get in touch with people when they need to. And you can bet there’s a technological solution for that, too!
It’s clear that something isn’t quite right in the world of business training. Despite the fact that training has become increasingly more important as the demand for new skills rises, employers haven’t managed to keep pace.
The main problem seems to be the fact that employers haven’t updated their training methods for a long time. The problems that employees have to solve have gotten a lot more complex, and yet training styles haven’t risen to the challenge. Employers are still relying on the same tired techniques that were appropriate for yesterday’s economy, not the future.
The amount of training offered by employers has been in long term decline. Back in the 1990s, companies were spending more than an hour and a half every week training their staff. But fast forward just a couple of decades, and that’s down to less than 30 minutes. In other words, as the demands in the economy have risen for better skills, employers themselves are taking on less of the burden while complaining that there’s a talent shortage.
It used to be the case that businesses were skill generators. Young, inexperienced people would join firms, get trained up and slowly but surely become productive members of society. But over time, that’s changed. Now businesses are skill-takers: they take people who have been trained elsewhere and use their skills in their business.
Whether or not this is sustainable remains to be seen. Businesses seem to be relying more and more on calling on people outside of the company itself to fulfill vital functions, functions that would ordinarily have been carried out by people within the firm in times gone by. The business has become a sort of leach, searching for skills in the economy to suck up without actually generating any by itself.
Perhaps even more worrying is that the training that businesses are deploying is ineffective. A study by InterCall in 2015 of more than 200 workers found that over a third thought that their training time was time wasted. Another third said that what they were doing we neither productive nor engaging.
This should be worrying for employers. If people are going to be valuable in the highly technological economy of the 2020s and 2030s where artificial intelligence, smart robots, and big data rule the day, then they’re going to need the right skills. The economy isn’t just going to wait for businesses to catch up. Companies need people now who are able to adjust to radically different business models: models that are based on virtual environments, the cloud and in artificial intelligence.
The good news is that technology itself is making the process of training more effective. We experienced a lull in the last couple of decades in training, thanks to the hollowing out of middle-class jobs. But it’s likely that this process will come to an end, as the remaining jobs will be hard to completely automate. Instead, employers will need to train their staff using a mixture of different methods, all made possible by the new technology-based tools available to us.
Combine In-Person Training With Online Training
According to the InterCall study, both online training and in-person training have significant benefits. The study revealed that in-person training was highly effective at helping colleagues retain information. Thus, if your business is one that relies on employees remembering a list of facts and figures, rather than applying knowledge, then in-person training might be right for you. Trainers, in this setting, have been shown to help workers collect their thoughts, as employees themselves are able to ask questions to get clarification.
The problem is, however, that once the trainer leaves your office, it’s all too easy for people to forget what they’ve learned. According to elliswhittam.com, a better approach is to use a variety of methods to get the best training outcomes. The InterCall study backed this up. It found that learning was more effective when in-person training was followed by online training. It turned out that more than 48 percent of employees wanted some sort of mechanism whereby they could review what they had learned at a later time. Combining both old and new methods of training, therefore, could be a good practice for the future.
It makes sense that this sort of approach would work. Thanks to the way our brains are wired up, a single exposure to an idea or piece of information is rarely enough to make it stick. But the more times we go over something, the stronger the connection in our brains representing that idea get, and the more likely we are to remember it and be able to use it to solve problems.
Give Hands-On Training
Not all workers learn well just by sitting in a room, listening to somebody talk. They learn best when they’re actually doing something. They are the so-called kinesthetic learners. A study by Skillsoft in 2013 of more than 1,000 office workers reported by entrepreneur.com found that over a third actually preferred learning by feeling their way to the truth, rather than having it communicated orally. In other words, they preferred the hands-on approach to learning: learning by doing. When employees were able to apply what they’d learned to everyday tasks at work, they were able to perform those tasks better than when they had just been told how to do it by an instructor.
This is good news for companies who operate at the lower end of the job skill spectrum, especially anybody involved in hospitality, manufacturing or logistics. On-the-job training in these environments is most effective when training involves actually doing something, rather than playing around with abstract ideas. Companies in these sectors need to jump on the opportunities of hands-on learning wherever possible, as this is likely how their employees will learn best and also the most appropriate form of training for their particular business.
Hands-on training also has some benefits that go beyond just regular training. It’s able to give employees more confidence which in itself is a massive productivity booster.
Use Mobile Training Apps
With the rise of the gig/sharing economy and mobile working, workers require more and more location flexibility. It’s simply not convenient to get them to travel to a central office on a regular basis for training if they have to be out in the field. According to a survey by Global Workplace Analytics, more than 25 percent of workers in the US now work remotely to a greater or lesser degree.
This is where mobile training apps can be helpful. According to a study by Brandon Hall of more than 500 businesses, only 10 percent offered their employees the opportunity to learn modules remotely, a figure that is too small given the number of people who work away from the office. Experts are starting to recommend, therefore, that companies branch out and start using mobile apps to train their workers. Mobile apps are helpful for a number of reasons. For starters, it’s really easy to centrally track an employee’s progress on the training program, thanks to sophisticated data mechanisms. But perhaps more importantly, mobile apps allow employees to engage with the training material at their own pace. Training can occur anywhere, far away from the distractions of the office. And it can be good from the perspective of employers because not all training has to take place in the office. Employees can be encouraged to work during the day and then catch up on training when they get home in the evening, saving their bosses time and money.
Spring is just around the corner, and pretty soon the sun will be shining, people will be walking hand in hand late into the evening, and your business will be booming with all the passing foot traffic that occurs when the weather is fine and the days are long. We’re sure that you’re naturally acquiring the boost in energy that always invigorates people after the end of a long, cold winter, so why not put that extra spring in your step to some good use and give your business a much needed spring clean?
Whether you own a shop or a factory, you’ll know that first impressions matter. If people walk into your business and see that it’s in a chaotic, disordered state then they’re all too likely to form an unfavorable view of your operation – and then walk right back out again. Approach your business as if you were a first time visiting the premises. What looks disorganised, what looks dirty? Don’t ignore your parking spaces, either. If they’re dirty, industrial pressure washers can get rid of the accumulated oil dirt and grime and have the entranceway to your business looking like new. If there’s several feet of snow on the ground outside, people might give you a pass and accept a little grime: if the sun is shining – shining on all the dirty spots, too – then there’s not much excuse. Take care of it.
The Nooks and Crannies
Inside your premises, it’s often not the bulk of the area that’s the problem. They’re most likely swept and cleaned every night after closing. It’s the places that don’t quite catch the eye immediately that is the problem. The nooks and crannies can accumulate dirt, dust, and who knows what else if they’re not routinely given a deep clean; and they’re very seldom given a deep clean. You might walk past these spots each day and not notice, but a customer who’s paying attention to their surroundings will.
What’s in the Back?
Behind every business is an utterly chaotic behind the scenes, where things are piled on top of each other. If it’s not front of house, you probably don’t mind so much. But it really is important to keep each part of your building in check. For one thing, having too much clutter can be a fire hazard, and that’s one thing you most definitely want to have. For everything else, it just slows down work and makes it harder to work effectively. Dedicate a day to really going through what’s back there and sort out the keeps from the throw outs.
A Fresh Look
A spring clean doesn’t just have to mean pressure washes, mops, and clear outs. You can also use this opportunity to really give you a business a makeover. It’s going to have the sun shining on it all through spring and summer, so you may as well make it look as presentable as possible. A new paint of coat or a new carpet can be simple but effective ways to make a place look like new.
Recent Comments