Always Moving Forward
Whether you are the owner or a trusted manager of your company, how are your business plans looking for the coming year? Do you continue to do what you always have done or are you keeping it fresh and exciting? And why is this even a topic of a blog post?
For your business, who is this person and how do they do at making a great first impression. Maybe more importantly, and as important – how do you know how they are doing? This may be the first person greeting you when you walk in a store and for other businesses, it may be the person answering the phone.
I’m sure you have called on a business as a customer and had to wait for minutes after trying to get through the dreaded phone tree, and then to only be disconnected somehow. How about walking into a business and looking for someone to help you? Both are experiences which are far below customer service levels of what you see as a great first impression.
As a passionate business owner or manager who expects nothing but the best, you can see the frustration as a customer in both of the scenario’s above. How do you make sure this isn’t your business? Here are some quick tips on how to check (and if it isn’t you doing the checking, follow up with the person who should be accountable for this.)
- Set standards, both for people visiting your business and calling your business. What type of experience do you want your customer to have with their first impression?
- If you are a retail business (customers come to you,) observe, from either the inside of the building or on the outside. How are they measuring up to your standards?
- If you are a service business or a retail business, how is the phone etiquette? Call your business as a customer or listen to incoming calls if you have some type of call recording system in place.
- Secret Shoppers – enlist some family or friends to shop your business. Ask them for a written report. Ask them to be as detailed in the report as possible. After reviewing the report, ask for clarification on any details and see how this matches up to your standards.
We know how this effects your business, but can you quantify this a bit more. Of course, and let’s look at the numbers. The numbers here is an example from the service industry and could be looked at for any industry really.
Real life example – We work with many clients who have great tracking systems in place. One of them measures conversions of calls coming in from new customers. Often new potential customers, typically the best schedule and service seven of the ten (some are price shoppers or are looking for service now and that may not be possible.) If a team schedules only 3.5 of ten calls, which is half of the best, then the cost to acquire a new customer doubled. Which means we have to spend twice as much in getting calls or we get half as many calls for the same amount of money – either way, it is costing us more to acquire a new customer if we are not doing the best job in scheduling the calls we have coming in.
If you need help in evaluating your cost per lead or how to make improvements to your first impression experience, the best place to start is to see how you are doing today and to work to make improvements to this in the coming months. A little time here will pay off big time in the long run.
