Why businesses need a good tidy up this September

Whether you’ve been around for five years or 50, it’s important to constantly reevaluate processes, systems & services by regularly reviewing, updating and sometimes, retiring them altogether.

Hana Dickinson, MD of The Bridge – strategic marketing & PR specialists – and creator of SuffolkWire offers a guide to strengthening your business efficiency.

Brand & positioning

A tidy up can be as simple as revisiting the mission statement, business objectives and taking a good look at what’s working and what’s superfluous, or worse, damaging. The entire team knowing what you’re doing and why, it helps to make your brand and positioning clear to the market and makes it easier for potential customers to see how you can help them.

Does the name of your business reflect what you do? Does your website clearly represent your flagship products and services? Is it easy to see how to get in touch? Are your sales and marketing materials on message? Are your campaigns focused on the right areas? All worth thinking about and reviewing regularly.

Profitability

Do all your staff know what a great customer looks like? Does everyone understand why people buy from you – or what problem you fix in the customers world?? Once they understand this you can take them through the buying journey. Are there entry level products or services that can lead to various cross sell and upsell opportunities? What are the circumstances, issues and niggles that the team can look out for as a cue to present the next product or service, ensuring your customer service is tailored to the customer, but also underpins the overall goals of the business.

Customer experience

It’s important to understand when and why your clients engage with and buy from you – or what more you can do to make it an easy decision and enjoyable experience for them. Monitoring and reporting on online engagement and a decent CRM can really help. Tools like Google Analytics, your email service, Hotjar, sales data, and customer feedback all offer valuable insight into your customers’ motivations and buying habits.

What does that mean for your customers? More focus on their needs, a commitment to delivering a great customer experience and a pro-active team that can move with the times, make informed decisions and stay ahead of competitors.

It also enables you to effectively monitor and report so you can spot opportunities to expand a product range, retire obsolete services and improve technology or training in areas that aren’t performing.

Technology, training & processes

Efficiency is fundamental to success. Cross training your teams can provide a real opportunity to prevent ‘key person dependencies’ and also identifies areas where processes can be improved in order to make the team more productive and motivated. You can combine process updates with this exercise. Whilst different areas train each other on their processes, the process documents can be updated – but most importantly the team members should be urged to raise anything that can be described as ‘really annoying’, ‘takes ages’, ‘really old system’, ‘overly complicated’ and so on. You would be surprised what easily-fixable obstacles crawl out of the woodwork for the management team to remedy. This results in more efficient and effective processes, a happier and more engaged team and better customer outcomes.

At the end of the day, trends and tastes change, and so do economic conditions. Which is why it’s important, from time to time, to look at what’s working best, and trim the fat.

According to research, too much choice can also impact on customer satisfaction. So, there you have it, keep your business tidy, strengthen the elements your clients like best, and free up your resources to focus more on your customers and your top products and services.

If you would like further advice, contact The Bridge Marketing team on 01394 802053 or visit the website.