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Extensive Research On How To Build Wealth From The Comfort Of Your Own Home.
Are You Making Customer Retention a Top Priority?
Jul 28th
Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of consumers say they have “stomped out” of stores and 67 percent say they have hung up on hold because of poor customer service, according to a new Consumer Reports survey.
I was astounded at the lack of priority and vision those statistics reveal when it comes to businesses not only attracting new customers but also retaining the ones we already have. In today’s marketplace, except for a few standout brands that have done an amazing job at being “indispensable,” competiting for consumers’ loyalty doesn’t seem to be a major priority for businesses. Big mistake.
Check out the diagram below about the cycle of customer acquisition, retention and referrals from inside Flip the Funnel by Joseph Jaffe. Getting new customers, retaining them and then getting more customers from the ones you already have is the perfect business ecosystem — but it is only possible if retention is a priority.
This week I had another run-in with my now big, fat, out-of-touch cable provider. What shocked me was:
- The package I had signed onto was not the package they had me on.
- My service had to get interrupted so that I could call and ask what was up.
- The service people I reached on the phone ranged from clueless and disinterested to flat-out rude and inconvenienced.
I also went to a very popular, usually consistent restaurant this week that was a service and quality disaster that night. They got hit with a big party of people that had their kitchen and servers scrambling. I don’t care. Schedule more people that night to handle it. We waited 45 minutes for our main dish, and when it came, it was bad. I called over the manager, who was polite, accommodating and took the dish off the bill. They will see me another time for that.
I am a consumer who pays dearly for my credit card, media, phone and communications services. If a company is not treating me like gold, a diva, special, appreciated, respectfully, I am going to dump them immediately. Loyalty and longevity are built on the highest commitment to customer service and retention.
There are far too few companies I could list here that “get it” and are doing it, but here are the customer service elite according to a Bloomberg Business survey. What are they doing that got them on this list?
Indispensable, standout, unexpected service today is as essential and important as air, water and food are for the survival of human beings. Make this a priority, and you and your company have a chance for success and longevity. Ignore this and you and your company are headed for Jurassic Park!
If a company is not:
- consistent
- responsive
- knowledgeable
- relevant
- pleasant
. . . they will be gone from my world pronto!
Whew, I feel better now. What’s your take? Who is treating you right out there? What can you learn from them?
Are You Making Customer Retention a Top Priority?
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Teamly Review Is a New Way to Focus on Priority Tasks
Jun 29th
Focus. We can talk about it all day, but it’s hard to do with the many things you face as a small business owner wearing too many hats. You can create a grand plan and fancy to-do list, but if you don’t focus on the important stuff and do it–well, then, it’s just a list. Teamly is a new type of task management tool–one that forces you to stay focused on priorities.
Teamly is an individual productivity tool, but it also serves as team performance management software. It has sharing and reporting aspects that make it useful for individuals, managers and directors (meaning those who manage multiple companies as an active angel or venture capitalist).
What I really like:
- I like that I can quickly enter a bunch of tasks, in traditional to-do list fashion, and later prioritize them for myself or my team.
- The ability to drag and drop priorities into next week or next month is sweet. Plans change.
- It’s elegantly simple. Enter a task. Mark it started or complete.
- I can set reminders for each day’s priorities and for whenever a team member suggests a task.
What I would have liked to see:
- Since I have managed many to-do lists in a spreadsheet, I’d like to be able to mass upload them in a batch and then edit and organize them within the Teamly dashboard.
- Downloadable help documents instead of just video and posts. Many of the small, distributed teams I know would share these documents on a collaborative file system.
All in all, Teamly gives you a great ability to keep yourself focused. You don’t have to go any further than the basic dashboard to see what you’ve committed to do that day. They offer a free starter plan (ad-supported), but also have a special 3-month discount offer (good until June 30) that is only $2/user per month instead of the usual $8/user/month. It is so simple, elegant and useful that I had to make this a super-short post, so you could get right into it yourself and start focusing on priority one!
Learn more about Teamly.
Teamly Review Is a New Way to Focus on Priority Tasks
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Small Business News: Small Businesses Are Top Priority
Dec 22nd
Small businesses are top priority and enthusiasm runs high for their prospects in an economy still reeling from downturns. But what small businesses need to grow is another matter and, while we here at Small Business Trends feel strongly small business owners and entrepreneurs must take responsibility for their own success, there certainly are things that improve the environment for small businesses to thrive. Here is a look at that environment with all of its good and bad at a time we believe small business is poised for growth. Get ready. Success is just around the corner!
Trends
Small business optimism is on the rise. Who cares what the experts say? Small business owners themselves are stoked says a recent Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index, a widely accepted gauge for small business owners’ outlooks toward the current state of their own businesses. The index showed a surge of optimism for November, in particular. How do you feel about your business? Gallup
Giving employees incentives can help small businesses grow.It may seem like common sense. If small business success is made by your employees can clearly finding the best ways to motivate them is the key. This post looks at how incentives for employees can be the missing ingredient to a really successful business that is truly poised for growth. Gaebler.com
Policy
UK businesses poised to go global. Small businesses in the United Kingdom able to expand beyond a purely local reach, particularly using technology, could soon take over the world in their individual niches…and boost the nation’s economy considerably. But small businesses still need access to more affordable financing and the opportunity to bid on public contracts more easily. BBC News
Leaders find small business is a priority with everyone. Creating policy that improves the climate for small businesses and the job creation they bring is still a priority with voters. In fact, one future state governor found out just how important during a fact finding tour of her state when voters showed up at a town meeting armed with suggestions on how to make improvements. What do you think? GlobeGazette.com
Finance
Did you get your small business loans. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. says it offered more than $10 billion in small business loans in 2010 to more than 250,000 small businesses. This staggering figure increases the bank’s overall small business lending by 40 percent since the previous year. Let’s see if there will be more where this came from and whether it may shift the way lenders look at small businesses in the future. Forbes.com
Don’t take small biz grants for granted. You’ve probably seen the ads. Government grants could be available to help your small business get started ot grow. But are these things for real? This article seperates the fact from the fiction and looks at the realities of the funding available to small busineses. Could your business qualify? Entrepreneur
SBA
New SBA tool aids small businesses online. A new tool developed by the Small Business Administration as a feature of its new Website upgrade, is another resource available to small businesses on the Web. The Internet offers small business owners many great free resources to help educate on a variety of topics involving small business. When starting a small business, it’s a good idea to get all the information you can. San Diego Union Tribune
Small Business News: Small Businesses Are Top Priority
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
New Gmail feature: Priority inbox sorts important emails – Video – National Social Media
Aug 31st
| Which, for someone who is really social or extremely important, might come in handy. Or it might be one more place to look on a busy morning. |
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View full post on Home Wealth Project Riot!
Google’s Priority Inbox Makes Email Smarter
Aug 31st
Google, which has most recently been trying to divert users away from Skype by integrating Google Voice with Gmail, just added another innovation to its stable: Priority Inbox. TechCrunch has more:
Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in rough.
The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity — it’s nearly as easy as Gmail’s one click spam filter. There’s almost no setup: once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking you if you want to enable Priority Inbox. You can choose from a few options (the order of your various inboxes and if there are any contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’) but don’t have to setup any rules or ‘teach’ Gmail what you want it to mark important. It just works, at least most of the time.
The system uses a plethora of criteria to decide which messages are most important: things like how frequently you open and/or respond to messages from a given sender, how often you read messages that contain a certain keyword, and whether or not the message is addressed solely to you or looks like it was sent to a mailing list. If you come across a message that’s been marked important when it shouldn’t have been, you can hit an arrow to tell Gmail it’s messed up. Likewise, if a message that should have been flagged gets sent to the ‘everything else’ area, you can promote it. Through these actions Gmail gets progressively smarter, so the system should work better over time.
TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid also says that now that a computer is prioritizing your email, intros will becoming even more important. Perhaps someone will develop a kind of SEO strategy for getting a prospect’s attention via email, based on the kinds of keywords Gmail tends to prioritize. That said, not doing annoying things in an email, like starting it with “Dear Sean” (not my name) or “Hey there,” both intros that I discovered in my inbox this morning, will always help your case.
View full post on Business Pundit
This Tweet is Priority 1: SalesForce.com’s Chatter is Transactional Social Media – ReadWriteCloud
Apr 8th
| The company has shown its ability to leverage the disruption of social media – rather than be disrupted by it. We had a chance to review the new… |
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View full post on Home Wealth Project Riot!
Game developers warn FCC of "balkanized" Internet
Jan 20th
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Meeting with the FCC on the last day for comments on its… the whole idea of priority Internet access deals with the big ISPs gives them the jitters. |
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