Within your service business, there is a tremendous opportunity to improve customer service and operations.
Opportunities for improvement include:
- Improving response capability,
- Understanding operational risks,
- Exceeding your customers’ expectations,
- Increased security
Here are five things you can get started on that will put you in front of the crowd and make your customers love you even more.
Step 1: Getting Started on a Data Management Program
A recent IDC study says, “the amount of managed data will increase by a factor of 50x by 2020.” The bulk of that information, about 94% of it, will be non-actionable logs, texts, and emails. However, 6% of it will be incredibly important for you to find and use to your and your customer’s benefit. Get started on a data management program right away. Download our template.
Step 2: Do Your Background Research on Your Data
Talk to your managers and staff and customers and find out what information they are missing that is critical to their decision making processes. Then figure out how to deliver it. You may want to consider an integrated customer support/project management system like TeamHeadquarters. By centralizing everything and providing a customer portal, you are jumping ahead of your competitors and improving customer loyalty.
Step 3: Analyse Operational Risk Management
Do you know which of your customers, projects, or service teams are at risk right now? Analyze your daily operational risks and use TeamHeadquarters to provide reports and dashboards that you can use in your daily scrums.
Step 4: Analyze and Repeat
If you want to improve you need to adopt Deming’s PDCA cycle of Plan, Do, Check, Act into your business. It’s vital to move to a continuous improvement business model. I would even go so far as to bring in a consultant to help you transition to this process.
Step 5: Continuous Improvement
By adopting step 4. PDCA you’ll embrace continuous improvement. It’s also critical to be on top of data. Consider bringing together data your accounting, customer service, documents, etc. collectively into a single customer-focused system will help you to report accurately on the activities of your organization.
Consider updating your policy documents to include:
- EULA for your staff, an updated privacy policy that embraces and includes social media, texting, emails and other web-based communications, BYOD policy and
- an updated privacy policy that embraces and includes social media, texting, emails and other web-based communications, BYOD policy and
- BYOD policy
- Data management policy and
- Intellectual Property policy
Conclusion:
There are critical, valuable data that you are not currently using. You may be aware of it and for whatever reasons you’re not using it. It’s important for you to start taking advantage of that information to improve customer service, retention, and loyalty. It’ll make you stronger and put you out in front of the competition.
Make sure you check out TeamHeadquarters as your Operations Tool, see our blog post on Daily Scrums.
