Silent Company Killers

In the first article of this series we looked at the importance of staff training and how a lack of it could be very costly, to say the least, and ultimately silently kill your business. Before we get into the next silent killer I want to tell you a short story of something that happened to me recently. Less than a week ago, I was looking for another CRM (Customer Relations Management) software solution. When I embarked on this journey, I was thinking it would take me about 30 min, or 1 hour at the most.

3 hours later after I had read through tons of webpages and spoken to a dozen support teams, I found what I had thought to be a clear winner. A bit more expensive than our current solution, but it seemed like it could do everything we needed.

I spent another 2 hours, checking out the software to learn how it works so that I could easily transition our staff over to this new platform. Then I realized that there was one very crucial thing that this software needed to do for us, which it cannot. On top of that there was another feature that we need, but it’s only available if you paid for a much higher tier.

I was super frustrated! My whole day had been a complete waste and I had to start searching again!

I am sure you’ve had a similar experience to this in the past. The thing is this company did provide a lot of information about their product and they have a very good product overall. How many people are having a similar experience to mine?

What are people experiencing when they first interact with your company?

So, how do you ensure that a client or prospect has a pleasant and efficient experience when working with your company? In this article am going to go over some basic and very effective things you can do.

The first thing to do is to look at your business and identify all the touch points. Those are all the parts that are in contact with clients or prospects. Examples are the sales department, customer support, your website etc.

The next thing would be to look at these touch points and make a list of things that clients or prospects would want or need to know or what they would be wanting to have happen at these points.

It would also be very helpful to get a list of commonly asked questions or common requests from the staff who directly deal with the public at these points. Now that you have this information at hand you should be able to get a very good idea of where you are lacking. Whether it is with your website, sales, customer service or anything else, you will be able to do something effective to improve the operation of your company and the interactions with your clients and prospects. This is a two-edged sword. You will not only increase the perception people have about your company but will also boost your staff efficiency and morale. I have given this example before but am going to give it again. When doing this exercise ourselves, we found that salespeople had a recurring question about our video production process and had to answer it over and over and over. So we made a short video that explains it. You can view it by following the link here Video is an invaluable tool in this regard. Your clients can quickly get the information they require and as a bonus it saves your staff a ton of time. If you had to get a few videos on your website, as an example, you’ll increase your conversions as people would now understand easily what you offer and be able to differentiate your company from all you competitors. If you would like to chat to us to see how we can help you, feel free to schedule and obligation-free call by clicking on the menu button above. One of our business growth experts will get on a call and work out a solution tailored to your needs. In part 3 of this series we will be looking at something that a very common company killer and delve into solutions.