Congratulations! Your business development is growing your business rapidly. Maintaining original excellent customer service skills can become a real challenge. Here are eight ways you can grow with continued business development:
Write a Personal Mission Statement
Often, when you are just getting started on business development, spelling out the importance of quality and service in a mission statement isn't necessary. However, as your customer list grows, so does the need to highlight your commitment to customer service skills.
Develop a Long-Term Strategy
As your business grows, you may notice that you get so wrapped up in day-to-day activities that you stop planning. If you keep reacting to what's in front of you, customer service skills get degraded by continually having to patch up the symptoms of service problems rather than fixing the real causes of the problem. To get yourself out of this trap, create and implement a one-year strategy that covers six key areas:
• Marketing and sales
• Technology
• Company culture (or your place in the company culture)
• Quality service
• Finance
• Human resources for assistants you need
Hold an Off-Site Retreat at Least Once a Year
It will become necessary, as your business development succeeds, to surround yourself with key assistants. Take your key assistants and advisors on a one-to-three-day off-site retreat for big picture strategic planning and to key customer service skills sharp.
Write and Implement a Marketing Plan
A continual challenge to many business people is striking a balance between delivering quality customer service skills to current customers while, at the same time, active business development to find new ones. Writing and implementing a formal marketing plan can help you to organize your activities by planning:
• How you will allocate your sales and marketing resources
• How to further develop the markets you already have
• Which new markets are worth going after
Update Your Technology for New Business Development
Technology, being a capital investment is often the last area of business development investment. However, in order to maintain excellent customer service skills as you grow, telephone systems, hardware, software and other related technology must be able to adequately handle the increased workload.
Invest in Developing Your Staff for Business Development
Don't take the sink-or-swim approach by hiring staff, throwing assistants into the job without any customer service skills training, and hoping that, by some process of osmosis, they will learn what they need to. This approach always results in poor quality, bad service and frustrated assistants. As you grow, continue to develop your assistants' customer service skills by training them in the specifics of their jobs so that they are empowered to help customers to the best of their ability.
Create an Orientation Program for Business Development
Communicate your personal customer service skills philosophy to your assistants right from the start is essential. Once upon a time, when your customer list was smaller and your customers were considered family, service values were probably easier to communicate. As you grow, these guiding principles of customer service skills can get lost in the daily workload and an assistant orientation helps introduce and formalize the priorities you place on customer service.
Create a Customer Survey to Maintain Business Development Momentum
Business people building a growing company sometimes say, "We don't need to survey our customers, we know who they are and what they want." While this may be true when you are just starting out, it's easy to get out of touch with your customers as you grow bigger. Get into the habit of conducting a formal survey at least once a year so that you have a dependable and up-to-date method of collecting information necessary for future developments within your business.
Again, congratulations! Consider these eight business development thoughts as a roadmap to improve your company's customer service skills.
Mike McCann
Mike-at-GlobalBusinessCafe.com
