The Great Business

The one thing that customers hate is to be put on hold when they call up a business house. On the other hand, business houses do not want disgruntled customers. They want to provide the best possible customer support. Today, telecom systems coupled with information technology are providing excellent and affordable business phone solutions.

One of the essential features that business phones must have is the auto-attend feature. When customers call they hear a list of options. These include pressing particular numbers to reach a department within the organization. This feature can be changed after office hours and on weekends and holidays and the calls get routed to a helpline. This feature means that the calls by customers will never go unanswered.

Another important feature to have is some music being played if the customer is put on hold. Hearing nothing from the other end makes a customer think his call has got disconnected. But the customer should never be put on hold for too long as this will irritate him. The system should have more extensions than the business requires and each employee should be able to record a message that is played when they are not at their desks. Message recording (voice mail) is also required as this allows the employee to listen to messages and call back customers. Caller identification is another feature that a business phone system must have. With this feature the employee recognizes who is calling and can start the conversation by greeting the caller by his or her name. This feature makes the caller/customer feel important and valued.

In days of yore, businesses conducted 100% of their marketing offline because, well, there was no such thing as online. Now, the internet has made it easy for companies to save money by conducting their business online and marketing to targeted audiences using paid search and social media campaigns. Both offline and online marketing can drive sales to a business, but the best way to engage customers and build interest in your brand is to combine online and offline marketing efforts.

Every business needs a website. The first place customers go when they want to research a product or service is the internet, so having a strong presence on the web is critical. Once you have a great website, include the URL on any print ads you buy, so potential customers can visit your website for more information. Print, radio, or TV ads are also great places to plug URL’s and email lists, which are in themselves great marketing tools.

Some online businesspeople fail to recognize the power of face-to-face, print, and traditional media marketing to engage customers. You may be able to find customers, sell to them, and get them to sign up for your email list, without any real personal contact, but nothing will cement a customer’s commitment quite like a face to face meeting. Many online businesspeople are using online marketing to promote offline events, sending out electronic invitations via email, Facebook, and Twitter. One of my favorite restaurants regularly hosts parties after hours that are consistently well attended and they conduct all of their event marketing through Facebook. They know their customer is active in social media, so they use it to drive sales at their physical location.

The first step is for a company and its manager / directors to admit that firstly the business is facing problems and that they need some sort of help as the current strategies are not working. More often than not a company gets itself into major problems because the people running it will not try new ideas or look for outside help to get them past the initial problems. This often results in them becoming more stressed which then create more poor decisions and before long the company can get into serious trouble.

A coach differs from a business consultant in their approach as a coach teaches managers and directors how to solve their own problems through good questioning and new methods and ideas that they do not know of. A consultant does not do this but they will give the managers and directors solutions based on their own ideas. Both are effective but in recent years more people are turning to coaching as it is just as effective moreover they have recognised that their staff learn much more and develop further with a coach rather than a consultant.

Like all business’s there are good and bad companies and this applies to business coaches as well. There are however three traits that good business coaches should posses and they are as follows:

1. Good presentation skills which should be present form the first meeting and pitch as they are going to be interacting and teaching staff and management directly so these skills need to be exceptional. If they are not then a business might want to look at other coaches who can convey ideas etc much more smoothly.