idea for your business

Archive for October, 2009

In the current global business scene, it is important to be highly competitive. Companies’ ability to beat and rise up from competition is considered important because revenues depend on it. Of course, it is apparent that competitive firms are more able to generate good income and profits because consumers and customers are reliant and trusting on them.

Competitiveness and good relationship with customers can be ensured by setting and putting in place good customer service practices. Good customer service levels would help your business achieve the competitiveness it needs. That is because putting into consideration the major perceptions of customers would make your company strive harder to develop good products and improve already existing products and services. To do so, you must adhere to good and working customer service metrics.

If your business has a customer service operations, you must ensure a recommended customer service metrics is in place. Usually, working customer service metrics include the following as main factors.

– Volume of customer inquiries handled per hour. This is a measure of productivity. Of course, the higher the number of customers attended to in an hour, the better. But there is one common and logical setback. If you would force your customer service representatives to take numerous and continuous calls, for sure, the quality of call service would suffer.

– Volume of customer complaints. This is not actually a direct customer service metrics but more of a performance indicator of the business and production operations. The more complaints your company receive, the more it is evident that your company has failed to be efficient in rendering and producing quality goods and services.

– Volume of resolved customer complaints. If you would run a daily tally about the volume of resolved complaints from customers, you would be able to distinguish the effectiveness of the customer service unit. In return, customer satisfaction would be boosted. Customer service metrics should always include this measure.

– Return customers volume. If customers keep on returning or buying your products, that means they are satisfied with the quality of services and products. In the customer service level, if clients keep on coming back despite their complaints, that means they realize that your business is still satisfactory.

Such customer service metrics can be considered more inclined on the quantitative side. Of course, by looking and tallying volumes of satisfied and dissatisfied customers, there are numbers involved. Quantitative metrics like the one described above are easier to handle and interpret.

However, you can also adopt and integrate within your quantitative metrics a good and working qualitative customer service metrics. A qualitative customer service metrics would take note and reflect stated opinions and overall perceptions held by customers. Most of the time, it is much more interesting to look at qualitative customer service metrics because they point more to quality issues. Interpretation would be easier and more convenient. If you would be able to look at qualitative measures and at the same time at quantitative customer service metrics, the better. Customer service metrics are a great way to evaluate the performance of helpdesk or call-center unit of any company.

One of the topics that is often discussed on forums and message boards around the internet is the topic of online business. A number of people will tell you exactly what they think about online business and to people that have been successful in it, the majority of what they say is positive. This is because there is a bias in the positive direction when it comes to online business because many of the people in online business sell products specifically about how to make money online. Therefore, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the things they tell you. One topic not often considered is the topic of how it might be disadvantageous to get involved in online business. There are definite disadvantages to online business and some of them are discussed below.

Firstly, there is the distraction factor. Online business usually entails working from home and therefore you can find any distraction at home in order to take you away from working on your online business. The television, the stovetop, the microwave, the bed and the backyard are all distractions that can result in people getting dropped from online business and losing their sense of concentration. Concentration is key in online business and ultimately it is going to be what drives people forward to succeed.

However, the offline distractions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to online business. Because a lot of online business work is tedious and boring, it is easy to get distracted. Have you ever heard people playing online games in the workplace because their job is boring at times? Well, consider how that could easily be you if you are working at an online business. You’d be sunk before you even started and that is not going to be good for anyone; least of all you.

In addition to distraction, there is also the competitive nature of online business. If you want to get involved in a particular niche, chances are there are already going to be people there ahead of you. And with the internet, larger people can crush smaller people a lot easier than big businesses can crush small ones. Competitors think nothing of discrediting each other and ultimately everyone is only interested in selling their products and making money. It is a cut-throat world on the internet and people that aren’t aware of this could get crushed so fast it would make their head spin.

So, as you can see, there are a number of disadvantages to online business. This is not to say that it can not be lucrative; far from it in fact. The internet gives you a great chance to reach people you would never have been able to reach otherwise and it is primarily for that reason that you need to be aware of all of the disadvantages inherent to online business; to understand both the good and the bad.