The Service That Makes You Famous
Often when I go out shopping or otherwise browsing in stores I find myself surrounded with people who really don’t care. They don’t care about the customer, they certainly don’t care about their employer, obviously they aren’t really all that concerned with keeping their jobs. Poor customer service and commonly a huge lack of my money being spent is the result.
As a small business you cannot afford to loose a valuable customer because of an indifferent employee. I personally have received poor service at almost every single type of business that could exist. Small stores, large enterprises, the standard bad McDonald’s service… the one thing in common between all of these places is I don’t come back.
The interesting thing with bad service is that it often doesn’t directly emanate from the teenager taking my money. Actually I would say that the majority of instances where I was particularly upset with the service was when it came from someone who should have known better.
One example of a service failure occurred a few years ago for myself. At the time I was in love and religiously purchased flowers for my then girlfriend. I loved to purchase the flowers and quite simply my girl loved receiving them. After some searching I found a wonderful little flower shop that provided me with excellent service and a great price. Since I was quite organized and often short of time on the day I required my flowers I made sure to preorder and even prepay my orders. This worked quite well for me since they managed to create amazing arrangements of flowers that wowed. Unfortunately for this flower shop, a few months in they decided not to put together my preorder and just waited until I arrived. This not only meant I ended up with a half quality arrangement but I was also late for my appointment (I had expected not to have to wait). This disappointment caused me to find a new flower shop that was willing to deliver the quality I required.
You may read this story and think, wow high standards. Or you may think what an ass of me to quit on this small business because of one failure. I believe there is one thing a small business can do that a larger business just cannot deliver upon and that is the customer relationship. When I build a relationship with a business it causes me to rely upon that business to deliver the same quality they have always delivered. I default and select this business even if others may be better priced or easier to access (within reason). A business deciding to throw that relationship away is the number 1 failure in my books.
The true moral of this story is anyone can sell me flowers. Its the one who decides to provide consistent and quality service that will win my money in the end. Do not allow your employee’s or even yourself to through away valuable customers by not providing the service that made you the go-to.
Website Design Tips
I do technology consulting for my clients. I collect lists of customer requirements and provide ways to get the solutions the customer wants. This type of work usually includes providing advice and quite often includes actually building products for the customer. One of the services I often get called upon to provide is advice for a website.
Unfortunately working with websites and providing design assistance or actually creating the website myself means I get to experience a huge quantity of really crappy website designs. This can be anything from a website that is totally unusable to just simple graphical issues and wording problems. Since I experience bad and good websites so often I have actually built a quick checklist in my head for what needs to happen at a bare minimum before you have a website worth having.
Since I just love providing extra value to people here is just a small part of an extensive website assessment. These assessments can range in cost from a few hundred to many many thousands of dollars. Enjoy these totally free tips.
Purpose
Every website must have a purpose. It could be to inform, to sell, to share information with friends and family. You must have a purpose for your website, make sure that the number of purposes are kept to a minimum, ideally one. When the number of jobs you are trying to do increases the chances that you do each of them poorly also increases.
Plan
How are you intending to get from your purpose statement to your goal. Write a new blog post every day, introduce new products? If you don’t have a plan you may get somewhere but that place may not be where you wanted to go.
Direction
Your site must be designed so that people can find there way from here to there. If it takes twelve clicks to go from one place to the next logical place then you have a problem. When a customer sees a product they should be able to buy that product without difficulty, same with every other part of the website. A customer who is jumping through hoops is a customer who is going somewhere else.
Simplicity
Keep it simple stupid. Sure you could use every piece of new technology to make your website the coolest place on the planet. Chances are you don’t have enough money and it will decrease rather than increase your chances of success. What is the simplest way to do what you want to do. Do that, then over time expand upon it. Take a quick look at Google’s homepage, then take a look at the one Yahoo! provides. Sometimes the reason for success is actually much simpler than you think.
Information
Do your customers have to ask you questions when buying your products? If so then you are not providing enough information about your products. Gather information and place it in one easy to find location so that a customer can find what they are looking for without wasting their time. People find that going somewhere else is easier than asking a question. If you don’t have enough information for a buying decision available then you are likely to loose more customers than you will gain.
Fancy Graphics
Yup, of course you need these. NOT. Graphics are not required to make a website work. Actually the graphics that make up a website are some of the least important parts. If your website doesn’t work, then graphics just makes it slow and crappy. Good graphics make a good website into a great one, but it also makes a crappy website into a seriously frustrating experience. Take another look at some of the most successful websites on the Internet, where are the fancy graphics? Graphics accentuate a good design. A design can also be killed by bad graphics, so worry more about the design of the website first, then worry about how you are going to make it look pretty.
Conclusion
You have just experienced a brief glimpse into my life. You would be suprised how many companies forget to apply these basic principals that they would normally apply to any number of other ventures. The basic principals that work are always going to remain the same, first build something worth having then put the finishing touches on to make it amazing.
Poor E-mail Management
I have been busy the past week going through the effort of setting up and Exchange server to enable myself and a few others to have true access to all their e-mails while at home and on the road. This process has been quite eye opening as a small business.
It seems that companies such as Microsoft have conveniently forgotten that small businesses usually don’t have a homogeneous work environment anymore. Often these small companies are several people scattered over a geographically diverse terrain. I know several customer who essentially have almost as many offices as they have employees.
For most small businesses, especially ones that provide some type of electronic service, this actually works out better than the old way of having some huge head office and paying for massive amounts of travel. Rather than having your sales people operating out of one building and traveling all the time, small businesses have adapted and often have people scattered everywhere. Operating out of their homes and on their own laptops or sometimes company provided consumer electronics.
Unfortunately this situation creates a massive problem. You likely don’t have enough IT experience available to handle the intricate difficulties created by such a spread out organization. Actually most major enterprises have less locations than many of the small businesses I know of. This means that an IT force of [often] 1 cannot possibly manage the difficulties presented of so many locations. So instead of having a great system with everything backed up and properly managed you end up with a crazy mishmash of semi good systems and hopefully each one slightly better than the last.
That brings me back to Exchange. Microsoft has wonderfully set this server up to exist only in a fixed IP system with only 1 e-mail provider or ISP. Unfortunately this isn’t really the case for small businesses now. Often your e-mail provider is someone like Google for Domains and each user must log in independently for sending e-mails or else your e-mails get blocked as SPAM. This is one of those impossible situations where the tools just haven’t managed to keep up with the needs.
So what are you to do? Unfortunately not much, the best products out there just are too difficult to work with or simply cannot do what you want. The free or cheap products have so many holes that they might as well be Swiss cheese. This is a terrible situation we are in, e-mail management is so important and yet even major multi-national companies are having a terrible time doing this correctly. I am presently in the search for a quality solution to everyone’s problems but in the meantime please send your ideas if you should have some.
Business Websites
A common requirement for business is to ensure you are known by people. Businesses of all types need to be known by their customers otherwise they do not have customers. This can be as simple as having signage or mailing a flier. For other businesses the marketing can be rather complex with TV ads and all sorts of other attempts at gathering new customers.
I am finding that businesses lately are realizing that the Internet is one of the best ways of creating a presence. With a simple website a business can essentially compete with any other business out there. Unfortunately far too many businesses have been given incorrect information. Having a website is not all that matters, actually having a bad website can be far worse than not having a website at all.
I have been to my fair share of exceptionally crappy websites. Even major companies are not exempt from building unusable websites. This is hurting businesses reputations and often it can be killing sales.
Why would you spend any more time on a website than you have to when looking for a product? If you had two nearly identical stores next to each other would you go to the one with bad customer service or the one with good service? Would you wait in a long line to purchase your products when the next store over has the same products and no lineup? This is typical of the web, with just a few mouse clicks you are transported anywhere and staying at one store is pointless.
What I am saying is this. Do not provide junk on the Internet if you want to attract customers. If a website is designed to generate a profit then give it the time and effort that you would give to designing your storefront.
The Internet is a vast marketplace and having a website gives you the ability to tap into the billions of dollars that will be spent online this year alone. Capture a larger share of that money by providing an excellent website experience for your customers, or don’t and let others collect the money from your customers.
Planning For A Government Audit
If you run a small business you are likely in some type of constant fear of a government audit. I wanted to help lighten your mental burden. Here is the absolute truth:
If you run a business you will be audited at some point.
No matter what the government’s position on this is, businesses are just huge juicy targets when it comes to an audit. The reason for this is because the government has a few special rules tucked up their sleves when it comes to taxes.
You Are Wrong [Always]
Quite simply the tax court system is quite backwards. You are actually guilty until you prove yourself less guilty. You are never innocent when tax court gets involved, just shades of how much money they are going to soak from you.
Records Fail
Even if you kept every single record perfectly, you did something wrong. The government employs legions of tax pros to make sure they find that one mistake to hammer down on you. The rules change all the time and the government even has a special rule to declare you guilty even when you are provably not!
What can you do?
The truth is, you cannot prevent the government from auditing your records and finding something wrong. What you need to do is ensure you are not lying or making things up on your returns, as well as ensure you have a budget set aside for when the government decides to catch up with you. Since receipts fade and records can end up missing over time you are very likely to have expenses disqualified on you. Just make sure you are ready before hand so it isn’t such a shock.
Since you now know the government is out to get you, there is no reason to be afraid of them. Just be cool and detached because there is/was nothing you could do to prevent it.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – Franklin D. Roosevelt
Plan for the future
Planning and preparation is the most effective means of being ready for an audit. Don’t misplace your records. Keep paper copies of everything in case you have a computer failure. Copy your records and store the copy off-site to ensure you won’t loose them in a fire. Release yourself from fear by being prepared and embracing the pains that our government inflicts upon people.
