How to make your company successful
I’ve worked for bad companies and good companies. Even had my own. What makes one company more successful than another? Well, here’s a few tips:
- Answer the phone. Sounds silly doesn’t it. Well regardless of how some might spin it or try to convince you otherwise with fancy graphs or stats or ROI statements, your customers want to speak to a human. They want to speak to a human who can help them. Your customers do not want to be put on hold, they do not want to be transferred to someone else. They want one number to call, and they want to be able to reach someone on their schedule, not yours.
- Put it online. Your customers are generally not stupid. So if you sell a product or service, put it online. Make it clear what it is, why one would want to buy it, what you need to use it, and the price. If there are support issues that can come up after purchase, put the resolutions online in the form of support faqs or troubleshooting tips or a knowledgebase. You’ll empower your customers to help themselves and save money and resources by not needing as many folks manning the phones. This is no way detracts from the first item above.
- Automate everything you can. If you have online ordering, automate provisioning. Automate shipping. Automate billing. Give quotes? Automate it. Take bookings? Automate it. Wonder why ebay and amazon.com are so successful? Take a guess…
- Design your site to be as user-friendly and as easily navicable as humanly possible. Don’t try to do it yourself. Hire a pro, and don’t be cheap. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right, and worth doing right the first time.
- Integrate your contact management, support ticketing and sales into a single interface. When your customer calls in you should be able to see what they bought in the past, what issues he had, who he spoke to, who makes the buying decisions - everything. It’s not hard if you have the right systems in place.
- Under-promise and over-deliver. Think ‘Scotty’ on Star Trek.
- Be up-front and forth-right with everything in all your dealings.
More later. And oh, price is NOT an objection. Price is irrelevant.