What are the promises you make to your stakeholders in business today? Stakeholders both internal and external to your business are the key to your business success.
Key groups internally are your customers, while externally they are your clients.
In business days gone by it was enough to simply turn up, do your thing and everything would be fine. Stakeholders today already expect value and in most cases get value, whilst we aim to promise even more tomorrow. The problem is, tomorrow is already here.
All businesses engaged in delivering value used to use the mantra "under-promise and over-deliver". Today we must do what we say and add even more value. Remarkable business owners recognise this and focus on the five fulfilment strategies.
- Strategy
- Structure
- Staffing
- Systems
- Service experience
Strategy
Do you have a strategy to retain and engage your best employees? What about your best customers? Note I used the word best. Focussing on the best in both categories will guarantee outstanding results for your business.
If customer satisfaction equals high profits, all customers can't be treated the same. It is much cheaper to retain an existing customer than to attract a new one, and trying to regain a lost customer is even more expensive. Simply, the best process is once you have a customer, initiate customer management systems to keep them for life.
Customer differentiation at this point makes all the difference in building business profits. If you focus your resources on your high value, high potential customers you will reap the greatest rewards. This does not mean that you ignore your lower value customers, rather treat them in a manner which is appropriate for the level of support they give you in your business. If you follow the Pareto Principle, you will find that roughly 20% of your customers provide 80% of your business. The key is to focus in on this 20%.
A ranking system to establish a customer hierarchy will assist you to identifty this 20%. This Customer Ranking Matrix is a simple tool to rank your customers.
Structure
Once you have identified your "A" list customers, ensure that you delight them throughout the service experience to ensure a firm relationship.
Key elements to do this include:
- Encouraging and rewarding customer loyalty: Encourage the ongoing loyalty of targeted customers. Aim to have these customers re-purchase, encourage bigger and better purchases and recognise these people by providing added value.
- Build and manage special customer relationships: Make sure the commitment is a two-way thing. There has to be something in it for both of you. You will cement the relationship by learning more about the customer and creating a value exchange. This could take the form of "key account management".
- Business wide focus on relationship development: Moving from a sales focus to a long-term relationship focus has exciting implications for you and your whole business. It's important though that everyone involved in your business understands and embraces the relationship development strategy. The development of long-term relationships must be put ahead of short-term revenue or profits.
Staffing
In order to retain the best employees, remarkable business owners and managers recognise that improving the conditions within their teams will improve performance and in turn the companies profit.
Engaging team members to be part of the team, creating an environment where people are appreciated for their efforts, given recognition and a work environment which is pleasant and efficient, all contributes to giving people a reason to keep coming back to work for more.
People need to wake up on Monday morning and say "Woo hoo, it's Monday, I'm going to work today!". If that sounds ridiculous, I want to ask you what are you doing to become an employer of choice and engage the members of your team? If people are engaged at work they work harder, produce more, have less sick days and have good old fashioned FUN!
Research by The Gallup Organisation in Australia shows that 20% of employees are engaged, 62% are not engaged and the remaining 18% are totally disengaged from their organisation. These figures reflect a worldwide waste; in teams, most people are not engaged.
This research further reveals that engaged team members are more likely to be loyal to their team, be more productive, and have less stress and higher safety statistics than team members who are not engaged. Not only that, customer loyalty is directly linked and rises along with the team member's loyalty.
Team members feel engaged if their team leader or manager takes the time to develop their strengths, understand their areas which will improve with development and recognise that each member of the team is a different person.
Systems
Engaging the people in your team is not a complicated formula and can be as simple as implementing simple systems to underpin your workforce. Ask yourself these questions on behalf of your workforce:
- What is your vision for the team?
- What do you expect from your people at work?
- Do your staff look forward to coming to work to do their best in the team?
- Do they have the resources they need to do their job properly?
- Do you give praise when you notice someone doing a great job?
- Do you have performance possibility agreements in place for every single staff member?
- Do you sit down and talk with your staff about their work and progress in the team?
If you don't know the answers to these questions, I recommend you review your staff systems. Communication underpins these initiatives and is the essential ingredient to engage your staff.
Remember that as individuals, people have different preferences and some like the opportunity to read about what's coming for the team, whilst others want a chance to talk it through with the team leader or manager. A healthy mix of all options - covering email, written memos, team meetings and a good old fashioned chat over a cup of coffee - will take employee engagement a long way in your team.
Service experience
Most business owners acknowledge the importance of their customers. Providing an outstanding customer service experience will set you apart from your competitors. The key elements to an outstanding service experience are:
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Understand the priorities and preferences of customers: Identify your customers preferred service level for current and potential future experiences. Be clear about what is most important and what is least important to the customers.
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Compare customer's perceptions to reality: Understand why customers' perceptions may fall short and others go beyond actual performance. Identify your businesses perceived and actual performance, especially in priority areas for your customer.
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Compare perceptions of you and your competitors: Undertake a ‘gap analysis' to understand your weaknesses and your advantage, and get clear on what action you will have to take to gain the advantage.
Customer focussed business owners know that the loyalty of their best customers is only achieved by delivering outstanding value to them and by delighting them at every interaction. Creating loyal and profitable customers is the foundation for value creation within the business. This can provide you with a strong and sustainable opportunity to increase the profits in your business.
Fulfilling your promise
Understanding that each of our internal and external stakeholders are different is the final key to fulfilling your promise. Once you have the systems in place, you must begin to tailor the delivery approach to suit the preferences of the individual stakeholder. Understanding how others feel, think, and do differently, to how we are, is critical to defining and delivering value today.
Read the article "The First Key To A Remarkable Workplace - Purpose"
Read the article "The Second Key To A Remarkable Workplace - Principles"
Read the article "The Third Key To A Remarkable Workplace - Passion"
Read the article "The Fifth Key To A Remarkable Workplace - Parables"