7 Customer Service Best Practices Tips for Retaining Great Customers

Let’s face it: Getting customers is easy most times compared to actually keeping them. There’s so much competition to contend with these days, it’s near impossible to keep running with the best prices in your industry, your city; your little cozy niche that nobody knows about… Yet!

Then one day Joe Bigtime, who’s been watching your every move and figuring out how to do it even better than you, strolls into town and upsets everything you’ve been working toward. While you’ve been focusing on customer acquisition, your retention efforts have been left on the back-burner.

Suddenly, your customer’s lack of loyalty toward your business, and your obvious lack of loyalty toward getting their business again and again becomes of significant importance to your bottom line.…

Continue reading →

Smart Business Approaches To Handling Different Types of Loans

If you plan on starting a business, or perhaps plan on keeping a business going, by taking into consideration different types of loans, then it’s important to understand the ramifications of each possibility.

Business loan

Five types of transactions that can have an effect on your business financial possibilities include dealing with student loans, small business loans, loans from family and friends, private loans, and then the choice to take on credit card debt as a form of self-loan. Each movement of money with respect to these categories has its own pros and cons, especially if you have business matters sitting in the background of the decision.…

Continue reading →

7 Employee Retention Strategies You Should Start Using

Ever noticed how every smart entrepreneur refers to their employees as a team? That’s because they know the value the right people bring to their companies. A business cannot be successful without the right people.

That might sound obvious, but many small businesses ignore the importance of their human resources. According to a recent survey, more than 50% of companies said that they don’t have a strategy for retaining employees.

The problem is that most managers see retention as a compensation issue – incentives, salaries, benefits, etc. In reality, what drives employees goes deeper than merely physical possessions.

With that in mind, let’s look at seven employee retention strategies every business should use.…

Continue reading →

How Can SMEs Thrive During and After Brexit?

Brexit has been one of the most important news items of the past 12 months, and whether you were for or against leaving the EU when the vote was held, chances are that as a business owner you have some concerns about how it will affect you.

Brexit

There has always been a saying in business however that every crisis brings with it its own opportunities – so can you really stand to benefit from the current volatility caused by the Brexit situation?

1. Leaving the Single Market

It remains to be seen how leaving the single market will affect different industries, but since Theresa May announced that that was the intention Britain would be going with – rather than trying to negotiate a deal where Britain left the EU but remained in the market – the pound has rallied somewhat.…

Continue reading →

Expanding your Business: 3 Things to Consider

Many business owners hear the term expansion and assume that we are talking overseas, and yet expanding even within the same town carries many different duties with it. For a start, there is finding the right property and deciding what makes it a good space to expand to.

New office space

There are different factors which will affect what kind of property you might want to go into, such as its location and proximity to conveniences for staff. This makes the building seem more attractive to staff and can help with longevity.

Buy or rent

When it comes to finding industrial property, you will need to think hard about whether to buy or rent.…

Continue reading →

5 Tips for a Successful Product Launch

A successful product launch is what every business wishes for, but which a few achieve in real life. Having a revolutionary new product or service is no guarantee of success. After spending millions in product development, you can watch your brainchild fail to gain traction from day one. While it may look easy when Apple sells over a million new iPhones in the first few days, successful launches require strategy.

Product launch

Here are six strategies they use to ensure a successful product launch.

1. Focus on the Needs of Your Target Market

A good product solves a real and acute problem that buyers are facing and are frustrated about.…

Continue reading →

Top Tips for Gathering Actionable Data for Your Business

Understanding your customer base is one of the key elements of running a successful business; but that can be a much more difficult prospect than it sounds at first brush. How do you gather quantitative data about potential customers? How can you analyze it for actionable information? How do you deploy those suggestions in your business framework?

Actionable data analytics

All of these questions are big ones for businesses which are trying to be more data forward. But fortunately, there are plenty of systematic ways to answer these questions. For our purposes, we’ll be elaborating on some of the best ways to collect actionable data for your business.…

Continue reading →

7 Steps to Being a Better Client (or, How to Make Sure The Job’s Done Well)

As the client, you’re paying for a service (in our case PR, video or integrated comms) because you either don’t have the time or the expertise to carry it out internally. And since you’re the one footing the bill, it’s understandable that you might think your job is simply to sign the contract and then wait for the agency to deliver.

Business relationship

They’re the experts after all, so there’s no reason to expect that they wouldn’t just get on with it. There’s a caveat to that approach, however. Because while you may well be paying for services rendered, it’s still a relationship.…

Continue reading →

The Lost Art Of Customer Service Within The Tech Industry

Reinvigorating Customer Service in the Tech Industry

Tech industry

The tech industry is often highly impersonal — especially among companies that sell digital goods. A company can sell a digital service entirely over the Internet. The buyer pays online, and the service activates itself automatically. During the buyer’s entire time as a customer, he may never interact with an actual person.

Throughout the tech industry, customer service has become something of a lost art. Too often, companies rely on support forums, automated chat programs and online FAQ pages to answer customers’ questions. Customers who are unable find the answers they need through forums and automated solutions can end up feeling lost in the shuffle.…

Continue reading →

Learning to Scale: How to Grow a Home-based Food Business

Many home-food businesses, particularly artisanal producers, fear that there is no way to sustain or scale their food business without investing in their own premises and resources. Thankfully it’s just not true thanks to rental commercial kitchens.

Coffee shop owner pouring coffee

If you’re one of the UK’s 2.9 million homepreneurs, don’t be afraid to grow your food business. Its intimidating at first but perfectly possible, with planning. There are plenty of opportunities to enable your business to grow at the rate you wish it to, even as you make the transition from home food business to stores.

Commercial kitchens are the first step

Graduating to premises is the biggest initial leap a home business will take.…

Continue reading →