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Make your customers feel valued – this is anything from newsletters to let them know what your business is doing at the moment to incentives such as discounts for regular customers.
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Get your facts right – nothing turns customers off more than the wrong information when communicating with them. Get the basics like this right and your customer will notice it.
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Provide information quickly – if you are giving a customer a quote do it as a priority, don’t leave it as the last task on your ‘to do’ list.
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Listen to customer feedback and problems – by doing this you can change any aspect of your business that customers are not happy with, they will come back to you time and time again.
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Offer rates based on loyalty – this could be anything from a 5% discount to 25%
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Ask a friend or relative to pretend to be a customer and get them to obtain a quote from you - Get them to be brutally honest even if it seems like nitpicking, they might uncover something you didn’t know about your business.
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Make sure you deliver what you promise – don’t tell customers that a project that would normally take 2 weeks can be completed in 1 week to secure a sale.
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Be professional – make sure the phone is answered properly, send quotes when asked for.
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Allow customers to have their say if they are disputing something – take notice and you might realise there could be improvements in working practises.
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Be contactable!
November 26, 2008 | Filed Under
BTBizBox Updates |
Leave a Comment How does blogging help your business, we have 6 pointers to help you.
1. Blogging is free – the only thing you have to spend on a blog is your time.
2. Blogging is easy – there are an abundance of blogging sites on the Internet all of which are straightforward to use, the majority even have mini tutorials about how you go about setting up and running a blog.
3. You can reach a much wider audience then before – there is nothing wrong with having a great deal of presence online and the more people that read your blog the better.
4. Blogging is instant – you can write your blog in the morning and have it online almost instantly.
5. Blogging can help you to build links with other websites and blogs – this means that your network can grow as you place more links on your blog all pointing back to your businesses website.
6. Blogs are one of the most popular forms of communication on the web and any business that has a blog is seen to be keeping up to date with technology and this is a good thing 
November 19, 2008 | Filed Under
BTBizBox Updates |
Leave a Comment Hi,
I appreciate that we have been publishing a number of articles over the last few weeks. We hope these have been useful to you, but we would like to understand from you what else you would to hear about.
Let us know your thoughts either via the blog or forums.
Thanks
Sarah
November 12, 2008 | Filed Under
BTBizBox Updates |
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When owning a small business it is important that you have the right tools to help you manage all aspects of the business.
Many owners of a small business try different ways of control their business and often turn to CRM solutions such as Salesforce and Sugar CRM. These are good applications but can be too complicated. Small businesses need a CRM solution that is easy to use. They need a fully integrated central system that can be acessed from anywhere in the world. BT BizBox is a web based application that takes the hassles and stress out of running a small to medium sized business.
How can BT BizBox help you control your business??
1. Increased productivity – use the project feature to track projects from creation to completion and see who is responsible for it. No more missed deadlines due to deadline alerts.
2. Centralise your business – run your business from BT BizBox and be in total control where ever you are in the world with an internet connection.
3. Improve contact relationships – with BT BizBox’s address book you can store details of last customer contact through email, telephone or letter and attach a picture of customers so you never forget a face again.
4. Share the workload – as all calendars are fully integrated you can see at a glance which projects your workforce is working on and move resources if there is an approaching deadline that needs more work.
5. Increase cash flow – using BT BizBox’s quoting and invoicing tools you can create invoices and attach them to customer records. Invoices are created automatically and saved for ease of retrieval. Invoices that remain unpaid after a set deadline will appear on your unpaid invoices list for the appropriate action.
6. Never lose an important document again – BT BizBox’s document storage facility allows you to save documents either to their own file or attach them to a customer, meeting or project record so that the information you need is a just a click away.
November 10, 2008 | Filed Under
BTBizBox Updates,
ERP |
Leave a Comment How do you identify you good and bad customers - we are here to help you!
Every business will have their share of good and bad customers, but how do you go about finding out which are good and bad customers? Obviously there are some methods that are quite straightforward such as taking a look at your customer statistics and see how much money each customer has paid your business, and how many orders they have made. This will give you quite an accurate indication of how is a good customer, it is also worthwhile checking outstanding invoices too to see how much money is outstanding for each customer. Here is what to look for when using your software tools to determine who is a good customer and who is a bad customer.
Good customers
1. Will always pay their invoices on time, if there is a problem with a payment a good customer will contact you prior to it becoming due and make you aware that the payment will be slightly late.
2. Place repeat orders with your business and choose you over your competitors when choosing products or services.
3. Give you their contact details when you ask for them – i.e. telephone numbers and mobile numbers, should you ever need to contact them. 4. Respond to letters that you send them if they need to. Obviously there is no need to respond to mail shots and other such communications, but if you need to send them a reminder letter if an invoice is overdue they respond straight away and settle the matter. Often this is just an oversight and the matter can be cleared up.
Bad customers
1. Will not pay invoices on time
2. Will not respond to letters or phone calls if you are chasing up unpaid invoices.
3. Will often complain for no reason in order to try to get money off services and products.
4. Will place orders and then change them at the last minute, this can sometimes happen as a one off but a bad customer will do this many times and fail to see that they are causing problems by doing so. If you find that after looking at these lists that you do have some bad customers you need to do something about them.
Bad customers can cause you and your business days of headaches . If you find that they are wasting your time and you are constantly having to chase them for payment, then you need to do something about them as you don’t need their kind of custom.
BT BizBox can help you sort the good from the bad through its financial tools.
November 3, 2008 | Filed Under
BTBizBox Updates |
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