Where do you think most American small businesses find the money to start up and keep themselves going till the profits start flowing in? You may be surprised to hear this – U.S. Census Bureau findings reveal that the majority of small businesses are financed by the owner or with some help from friends and family.

Few have any kind of access to any sort of institutional funding.

Financial Challenges and the price of growth

Maintaining finances professionally and obtaining credit from financial institutions at short notice are huge challenges for small business owners. Many small business owners hesitate to scale up their businesses for fear of being unable to manage production or cash-flow on a significantly larger scale. Small businesses without access to bank overdrafts are particularly worried about cash flow.

How does it impact the customer?

When it comes to the customer service function, many small business owners are reluctant to assign a larger team to it, since staff costs are among the highest costs for a small business. As the business grows, they find it more and more difficult to meet customer needs when it comes to instant service.

This is where smart query technology ensures that owners do not have to constantly add on more staff as the volume of queries grows.

Technology has made it easier than ever for small businesses to operate on a really small scale – in the case of freelancers or e-bay entrepreneurs, this can sometimes mean just a single person team. This person is literally a one-man (or woman) army!

When multi-tasking leads to chaos

Most small businesses tend to operate with a minimum number of people. The small business often does not have the luxury of separate teams handling marketing, finance, customer support and logistics. There is much more multi-tasking and cross-functionality than there would be in a larger organization.

While this means that the small business team is often more clued in to customer needs and does not need to depend on third-party data, it also leads to a severe resource crunch.

Growth, a double-edged sword

As the business grows however, entrepreneurs find that they do not have the time to answer the volume of e-mails from customers. Business suffers as the owners try to do everything themselves, in the process failing to deliver on most areas.

The time has come to realize that no one person can handle everything. This is when owners realize the value of an efficient customer support system; one that copes with the workload and helps them answer customers quickly and effectively.

Certain basic rules of engagement apply to all businesses. All businesses operate in a competitive environment where they aim to acquire and retain customers. This is against a backdrop of rising costs, tighter regulations and a globalizing environment. Yet, small businesses often find the challenge tougher due to the smaller scale on which they operate and the fewer resources they command.

5 Challenges that can make or break a business

Broadly, the 5 challenges that small businesses face when it comes to customer service are:

1. Stretched Resources: fewer people to attend to customers
2. Limited access to funding: difficulty in expanding the support team
3. Reliance on informal processes: ad-hoc and inefficient customer service
4. Media and technology explosion: Inability to make the right choices when faced with too many options
5. Training and upgrading the skills of support staff

What can small businesses do?

With the understanding that customer satisfaction is critical, small businesses can indeed look for systems that help them make the best of fewer resources. The fact is that small businesses will always have constraints of money, time and people. But, an efficient customer support system should enable the business to get the most done using minimal staff effort and automating the rest.

The 2009 Microsoft Small and Mid-sized Business (SMB) Insight Report reveals that 43% of the 620 small business owners surveyed listed customer acquisition and retention as the key challenge they faced, irrespective of the current economic climate.

Customer Satisfaction is Key

It is significant that rather than cost control, most businesses see customer satisfaction and managing it as the biggest challenge they face. This is not to say that other challenges are unimportant. The Microsoft Insight Report, for instance, found a number of other issues such as competition from retail, direct customer engagement by vendors and shortage of skilled IT staff on business owners’ minds.

However, most business owners are coming around to the realization that without customer engagement and satisfaction, solving the other issues is unlikely to help.

The Implications for Small Businesses

Having come to this realization, small businesses are likely to look for the best possible ways in which they can maximize customer delight. And do it effectively, in terms of cost and time. Here begins the search for cutting-edge technology that can help the team manage its resources well and support customers when they need it.

The U.S Small Business Administration (SBA) Advocacy office calls small businesses the “heart of the American economy”. Small businesses in the U.S provide employment to a large number of people and in many sectors where services would not otherwise be available.

A Challenging Game

Even as big corporations make the news headlines, small businesses contribute to the economy in many ways. In a recessionary economy, while many employees will find themselves losing jobs, there will also be many who look at it as an opportunity to start a business. However, the failure rate for most new businesses is high, and SBA data shows that half of all small businesses with employees go down within 4 years of starting up.

Winning over Customers is half the game!

No doubt, small businesses face many different challenges including regulatory pressures and intense competition from larger players. Yet, businesses with a very strong base of loyal customers find it easier to weather adverse conditions. Regardless of size, delighted customers hold the key to sustainability.

Smart Query Technology helps business with three key objectives:

1. Delight customers with the quality and immediacy of responses
2. Eliminate redundancy and save time for the business team
3. Make the process cost competitive and prevent cost escalation

Down to the Details

Let’s see how it compares to traditional alternatives on all these parameters.

1. With traditional technology, routine questions are repeated again and again. With smart query technology, routine questions are answered automatically.
2. Conventional technology means that databases are static and need to be updated manually. With SQT, the database is constantly automatically updated.
3. Conventionally, the company needs to keep adding customer service representives as the business grows. With smart query technology, a small pool of well-trained CSRs will suffice.
4. Conventional technologies take time to escalate customer queries. SQT simply directs the question right away to the expert.

And the Bottomline Impact?

Smart Query Technology helps shore up the bottomline in a number of ways. Businesses save on maintaining larger CSR teams. They also have fewer customer interactions that cost money. This is also of course apart from the largest pay-off – delighted customers who buy again and tell others!

Mostly, businesses find that as they grow, the number of queries increases exponentially. This means that they have to keep adding customer service representatives. That obviously costs money! Soon enough, the business realizes that there is no end to this. Or, is there?

Limiting Direct Employee Numbers

Since only unique queries get passed on to customer service representatives, businesses can grow without a corresponding rise in customer interactions. With smart query technology, there is no need to have a direct increase in the number of CSRs. Instead, as the Q&A database is automatically enriched over time, it takes the load off CSRs and allows the company to manage its expansion smoothly.

The Implications for Training and Motivation

Currently, the truth is that despite large investments in training, most companies face constant problems with their customer support team, in terms of skills as well as attitude. With smart query technology, CSRs can be a smaller but highly trained and well paid team who are able to offer service of the highest order.

This is the most exciting step in the setup process, not just because you are almost done but this is the when you finally get to add customer support easily to your pages.

Get Your Widget Code…

Ok the first thing to do is to go to the Settings page and copy out the code snippet by selecting it, clicking your right mouse click and selecting Copy option.

Spread Your Help…

Now all you need to do paste your copied code snippet into the source code of your site. Where ever you paste this code in your site source files the help widget will appear.

If you are unsure how to paste this into your source code, have your webmaster, or site developer add this for  you.

Training The Software…

• Red Messages
  When someone enters a unique message into the help widget on your site, the question will be sent to the queue (the ResponseQue Tab).

• Yellow Messages
  Yellow queue messages are messages that you have answered however the customer did not understand your response and need further clarification. Yellow questions, when answered, become children of the original question and answer record.

Click the Accept Question button to answer the question. If you do not accept the question within the countdown sequence the busy message will automatically display to the widget.

On the answer screen you will notice the question, the time it was asked, and the page that the question was asked from this all gives you valuable points of reference to assist you in answering the question quickly.

Enter your answer in the blank text box in the middle of the screen.

Now here’s the fun part. Below the answer text box you have the choice of answering the question five different ways. Each answer type has it’s own unique purpose and is how you can train your application to answer questions automatically.

Here is a quick overview of the answer types (learn more under your user manual)

Let’s go from left to right.

1. The default answer type is the Public answer. Public answers are cached in the system for future reference. So if someone asks the same question again in the future the application will automatically return your answer to them without sending the question to the queue.
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2. The next answer type is the Private answer this is for questions like “What is my password?” you don’t what these answers cached for future reference because it is not a generic question.
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3. The smiley face answer type is called the Greeting. This is for messages that are not true questions. For example if someone sends you the message ” Hi is anyone there?” you will want to click the greeting answer type and let them know you are there and ready to help them.  By the way this answer type also allows your customer to re-send you their question.
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4. The question mark answer type is called a Query Back and this allows you to send a question back to the widget. Essentially this option opens up a dialog between you and your customer. (like a chat)
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5. Last but not least, we have an answer that expires. Say you have an event coming up and someone ask for directions to the event. Well after the event if someone asks for directions this answer should not be valid right? So make your answer expire when your event is over and all will be well.

So there you have it, you’re done with your ResponseQue setup. Now go get them tigers!

]]> http://www.responseque.com/step-3-integrate/feed/ 0 http://www.responseque.com/effectively-measuring-customer-service-2/ http://www.responseque.com/effectively-measuring-customer-service-2/#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2010 04:12:10 +0000 admin http://www.responseque.com/?p=391 The need for measurement

As more and more customer service moves online, it is important to be able to measure the quality of service well and reward good performers accordingly. With clear performance measures, exceptional staff can be rewarded, average performers trained to improve, and the poorest performers reconsidered.

A Case for accurate measurement

John Fisher, the Director of Oxford Motivation Ltd., a firm of performance improvement specialists, reports the case of Autoglass, a European car window replacement company*. Autoglass introduced a performance improvement scheme for many of its employees, including call centre workers, for whom the performance measures included taking calls efficiently, finishing insurance documentation properly and a good Customer Satisfaction Index rating.

When employees were given clear goals and commensurate incentives for meeting each goal, the results within a few months were startling.

• The average number of clerical errors in customer documentation fell from 20% to 5%.

• The number of customers who hung up due to long waiting times fell from 3.5% to 1%.

• Customer complaints fell by 50%.

Using technology for measurement

Most systems that measure performance after the interaction is long over fail. This is because customers often don’t recall specifics unless the interaction was exceptionally poor or good.

A good smart query technology based solution helps to measure an agent’s performance immediately without taking up too much of the customer’s time.
*More details at http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/the-thinking-ceo/incentive-schemes

Small business is everywhere!

Did you know that small businesses employing a few people start up at the rate of over 500,000 a year? That’s a half million new businesses coming up every year. Half a Million! That is approximately 1369 new businesses being started up every day!

Vitalizing the Economy

It is not just that small businesses create value for the business owners who are bold enough to experiment with their own start-ups. Small businesses are invaluable to the American economy for the employment that they provide in every sector.

Here are some interesting statistics from the Small Business Administration that will surprise you:

1. Small businesses employ about 50% of all private sector workers
2. Small businesses create more than 50% of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP)

Not everything is rosy!

There is a tremendous amount of optimism that leads so many individuals to set up their own businesses. Yet, we cannot deny that more businesses than not, meet with failure. SBA statistics reveal that 4 years after starting up, only 50% of businesses that have employees, have stayed open.

Let’s find out what small businesses should be doing, to delight their customers and maximize their chances of success, stay tune!