When does pruning stop and growth begin?

Some wise person once said that a business is a bit like a tree. If you are not growing, then you are dying.

When you think about it, it’s true. It is difficult to stand still in the one spot and keep holding on to what you’ve got. Before long, we will begin to notice competitors passing us by and we may then wonder what we could have done better.
 

For many businesses their life-blood is their customer base. It makes sense to look after your existing customers as there is no substitute for bad customer service. Providing great customer service results in happy customers who in turn are more likely to refer your business to other potential customers. Happy customers also buy more products and services.


In a recent survey by IDC commissioned by Vodafone, “80% of SME’s stated that improving customer relationships was one of the key challenges, with 81% of workers stating that customer service is a top priority”. Now more than ever, SME’s are looking to differentiate their businesses on customer service.


I would highly recommend reading Raving Fans if this topic is of interest to you.

Providing excellent customer service is one great way of growing your business. But the key to providing excellent customer service is having the right systems in-house to manage it.

Let me explain using a simple example:

Let’s just say that you sell food products to supermarkets……

You receive a call from your biggest customer to complain about a problem with a delivery, which never arrived but which was nevertheless invoiced to them. What’s more, the prices on the invoice were all incorrect and not as agreed. This customer has only been with us a few months and this is the second time that there has been a problem with the delivery.



Where do we start? We have a problem with despatch, accounts and sales (pricing). Here are a few quick suggestions…


1. Record the details of the issue so that you can acknowledge receipt of the query back to the customer.


2. Ensure that the call is allocated to the appropriate person/team/people within the company to deal with the customer query.


3. Record and track all communications around this call, so that at any stage, you can see what’s been happening with the query and you can re-assure the customer that their query is being addressed.


4. Have easy access the Sales Order, Despatch, Invoice and Pricing details to see where the problems lie.




In this scenario, there was a lack of “joined up thinking”.
Accounts, Sales & Despatch were not aware of what each other was doing. They may also not have been aware of the issue with a previous delivery.


Using software such as Sage 200 with a fully integrated Customer Care module will help you to log, track and monitor customer service queries, response times, type of queries etc. You will know which accounts are on-hold, what the despatch status is, what prices were quoted, what the balance on the account is and what the query/issue history is for a particular customer. You can also see a full communications history against the customer’s record.


If we find out that our quest to achieve excellence in customer service is being hindered by internal processes, specific departments or people, or communications not being shared throughout the company, then we can address the problem and monitor the results as we continue to strive for excellent customer service and ultimately business growth…..