Implementing 'Best Way' Skills
In the last article, we looked at what I call 'The Three Step Skill to Set your Home Business on Course for Success,' and which Michael Gerber more simply calls 'The Best Way Skill.'
Now I want to show you in more depth ways to put this idea into practice. I do hope you have all done the 'Things to do' list in the last issue, but if you haven't you need to think about your goals, how you want your business to look in 3 months, 1 year, 5 years as this will motivate you when things get tough, and more importantly for your purposes today to list questions which will enable you to innovate, quantify and orchestrate your own business so that the continual process of improvement can begin.
Questions to ask your customers
Depending on the type of home business you run or are thinking of starting, the questions you ask your customers will obviously vary. The mail order entrepreneurs will want to know about whether the position of items in the envelope helps or confuses potential customers, and the maker of knitted scarves may want to know if customers prefer purple or blue this season, whilst the computer repair technician needs to know how his service compares to the competition's up the road.
Questions about: -
- customer service Were you delighted with the service you got, if not why not?'
- products ' Does your product work like you thought it would, is it scratched or damaged?'
- customer's wants 'Do you forsee yourself buying another widget for your home or company in the next 12 months, if so why? Should widgets be available in lilac instead of just black?
- will help you to guide your business into a position of being able to give customers more and help make them come back to you in the future, or recommend you to someone else.
Designing a questionnaire
There are several ways to get feedback and questionnaires are a relatively easy method. Think of 10 or at most 15 simple questions which affect your customers and list them with space for answers, on one side of A4or A5 paper. Every time you get a customer, or in some cases a 'near miss,' ask first if they would mind doing a questionnaire and send them one, with a stamped return envelope. Use a program like excel or OpenOffice calc to collate their answers and over time this will turn into a useful tool which you can even use to make adverts more effective. Headlines like, 'Over 75% of our new customers last year said we were the best suppliers of widgets in Little Widgetington' can be effective in marketing material.
Another way to do a questionnaire like the simple one above is over the telephone. This works if you get a high number of telephone enquiries, because you get enough response without pestering those who say no. Each call is either another customer or a near miss and finding out what makes the caller a customer means putting their money in your pocket (can't trust the banks these days!) While the caller is on the phone ask gently and politely, “Do you mind helping make Widgets Co. a better business by completing a small survey/questionnaire,” and maybe you can think of something like buy to get one free for people who answer the questions.
Remember, you may think the cost of sending out loads of return envelopes to people and giving some of your product away in return for info on how and why your customers buy is a big cost, but believe me the cost of getting others to do it for you is way higher, and the information you gain is worth so much, it could be the difference between playing golf in the Bahamas or filing for bankruptcy, or even divorce.
Try to make it so that customers think answering questions is kind of fun, or exciting, or that they will be your friend, I mean try to make them feel special for doing the survey as that can help to keep them returning to your business next time, even if the competition is offering a slightly better deal. The customer feels part of it, part of someone's success and that can be nice.
One of the problems of asking questions over the phone is that if you haven't slept well, or the dog has vomited on the carpet, you may come across as aggressive and sound like you hate the world and have a gun. Another problem is that say you have a customer on the line you have to tell them to go to such and such web address, they have to get a pen, you have to repeat the web address five times. Although it is simple to stick the web address on all your paperwork invoices and stuff, how likely are they to look up your website to fill a form in?
As an alternative, it is possible to get access to a website that will ask questions for you and let you view the answers and download the information collected. This type of service is really useful if you happen to be the computer technician or web designer sort, but may work out more expensive than other methods if you have to design your own website just to ask questions although any good web designer will help you sell your products or services too.
There is a solution to some of these problems. You don't have to build a website for yourself as there are others who have done it for you, and provide surveys for charities, big businesses and people like us.
The best site offering free surveys that I have found so far is free-online-surveys.co.uk, [not an affiliate link] the service allows you to store up to 1000 answers and there is a paid version which expands functionality by enabling downloads of data and other improvements like comparsons. Steer clear of the bigger companies like TNS or Harris OnLine unless you have the budget as these will be very expensive.
Surveys are a great way of quantification, however not all the answers will come from your customers. Innovation is the process of taking the numbers quantified and knowing what to do with them. Quantification needs to take place internally, inside the business, so that efficiency and turnover, the ratio of near misses to customers increases and you can set it to run without you being there, working in it, freeing time to work on it, and play golf or whatever your personal goal is.
Example: on Thursdays there are more sales than on other days, and John works on Thursdays, so asking John what he does that is different to everyone else helps you to realise that the innovation needing to be made is the introduction of a sales script.
You would not be able to do any of that if you did not know how many sales opportunities there were, how many of those turned into sales and you would not be able to know if your innovation, your new sales script was effective unless you counted how many sales there were on other days before and after its introduction. That is why surveying the whole of your business is important in terms of business development but quantification also has benefits on the customer service side.
This article was first published in Home Profits Mania+
