Putting Your Customers' Needs First

All kidding aside, turnover is a serious problem in American business today. Gone are the days when a person would launch his or her career at a company and retire working for the same company. Statistics suggest that an employee will change jobs (companies) no less than NINE times during the life of their career. While most companies that suffer from severe employee turnover tend to worry about the “financial repercussions” associated with replacing the old employees and training the new ones, the real loss is a breakdown in the customer relationship between the company and its customers. Unhappy employees do not make good company ambassadors!

• Training with a Purpose

Training is an important and necessary function in any company. Unfortunately, many training attendees view the exercise of sitting through all-day training classes with about as much enthusiasm and excitement as getting a root canal. Companies often fill the room with pastries and other goodies to keep the participants well-fed. The instructors can be entertaining, very knowledgeable and engaging but the real test of a good training session will always be the content. Are you providing the participants with information and tools that will enable them to better serve your customers? Building customer support tools provides your company with a “double benefit”; your support personnel will have new tools to show your customers which makes them a greater asset to your customers and your customers benefit by having more support tools that make them more “self-sufficient” in selecting and applying your products and services. It becomes a win-win for both your sales personnel as well as for your prospects and customers. Everyone in your company who works with your prospects and customers should receive training in new products and services and support tools whether they be sales personnel, tech support, customer service representatives or other support personnel. Meetings…the practical alternative to work. Not sure what to do…hold a meeting! You can visit with your associates, share war stories, view charts and graphs, have some coffee and doughnuts…why you might even impress your colleagues all on company time! Too often, we use meetings as a tool to procrastinate or to defer an action or simply to avoid a decision on what needs to be done. Meetings should have a very specific purpose with a stated goal so that all attendees are prepared to address the relevant issue(s) at hand so that a decision can be made on the best course of action to pursue. If it becomes obvious, that all the right parties are not present or, if insufficient information exists to take an appropriate • Meetings, Meetings and More Meetings