Manage My Employees

Adapt your business to the changes for 2010. Mainly I’m referring to:

• Uncertain economies (we ‘hope’ the recession is giving way to better times… but we don’t know yet).
• Cautious consumers + cautious business owners and executives means more hesitancy to spend or invest.
• Customer power. Customers, have more suppliers pursuing their business than ever before and consequently enjoy more leverage.

To me, this establishes the need for revamped customer care strategies in 2010. Here are three pertinent strategies that have immediate merit:

Reassess the steps your customers must customarily take to purchase from your business. Honestly assess whether those steps are designed to make it easier or more efficient for your operation, versus make it more pleasant and time efficient for your customer. There’s a delicate balance between the two—make sure you’ve taken this into account in 2010.

Improve the purchase experience in 2010. Be more adaptive to your customer’s wishes. Change anything you feasibly can to align more effectively with how customers ideally prefer to make purchases, as well as their expectations for support after the sale.  

Work harder on your employee’s relational skills. While operations and processes are critical to increasing customer loyalty, so is old-fashioned, courteous service. If customers aren’t attracted to doing business with your company because of your people… something’s wrong. Unless you plan to compete on cheapest price or do faceless web-based fulfillment, your strategy for competing in 2010 must focus on strengthening employee-to-customer relational skills.