Creating customer confusion is one of the quickest ways to eliminate potential repeat and referral business. To avoid falling into this trap, one of the easiest fixes is to make sure your company is using the same terminology whether you’re talking to an associate, or a customer. This will ensure seamless conversations, comprehension clarity and margin protection.

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Each touchpoint creates an opportunity for a customer impression. However, very few owners, or executives, have ever counted the number of touchpoints in an average transaction. With that said, it’s hard to manage customer satisfaction if you can’t identify and measure satisfaction. Impressions are good and bad, and research shows it takes about 10-12 positive impressions to erase one bad impression. Maybe it’s time to start charting, training and managing touchpoints? If not, then buckle up, because your are on a road that will take you anywhere it wants to go!

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Perpetual procrastination can literally send your company to the boneyard. How? As proprietors, we constantly see opportunities for improvement, but we rarely act on them. In many cases, these missed opportunities might be costly enough to sink your company. I know because I have lived out this scenario in one of my business failures. If you’re constantly procrastinating, why don’t you try waking up tomorrow and start hunting for three, small ways to improve your business. Not wholesale changes…just minor tweaks to product development, administration, customer service or processes. If you were to install three, one percent changes, you would have 36 improvements in the course of one calendar year. The results could literally save a sinking ship! It might be time to put perpetual procrastination in your rearview mirror.

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One of the biggest time wasters in business, and a large contributor to margin erosion, is being in the habit of touching the same thing multiple times. Streamlined businesses, mega-profitable businesses, and many well-run manufacturers realize the significance of touching things one time only. If you want to decrease touches, then we have a great place to start. We suggest you begin your improvement journey with your incoming email and postal mail. Simply open it, read it, process it, and file it. If you start doing this on a regular basis, you’ll find that your streamlined task management mindset will create more quality time to devote to other business duties.

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This is a classic contributor to broken promises. So many customers get upset at vendors who dropped the ball. Customers often chalk this up to a vendor that they think is inept and incapable, when in fact, the vendor is overcommitted. Are you overcommitted? Do you suffer from FOMO when it comes to taking on jobs? If so, we encourage you to think about taking on what you can handle.

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Sounds like a silly question, but you would be shocked at how many of us vendors miss the mark time, and time again. Most of our customers are given the name, “Hey”, when we could easily address them by their name. Maybe it’s time to take a good hard look at how many times you call a customer “Hey”, when you could call them by name? Always remember, to that person, their name is the sweetest sound they could hear. Increase your repeat and referral business by making one, simple change as to how you say hello to customers.

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Have you ever examined your business through the lens of identifying pain points in your business? It’s a great exercise, and can be very fruitful. Every once in while assemble your team for a story-telling session. Encourage them to share their stories that illustrate customer pain points with your business. Once identified, get rid of them and replace them with customer-pleasing methods of handling that experience component of your transaction process.

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Sounds like a funny question right? Well I just ran into a very strange situation a few months ago, and I feel compelled to share it. I was leaving a voice message for a vendor when I heard a bunch of F-bombs coming from him as I was leaving my message. Apparently, the vendor never stopped recording, and it eventually captured an inter-office business conversation laced with vendor F-bombs. The F-bombs start revealing themselves about 10 seconds after the vendor voice message finishes, but the caller never hears a beep prompting the caller to start leaving their message. Imagine how many customers, or better yet, potential customers, have heard this, but never said anything to the vendor. I called the vendor to let him know, and he was flabbergasted. Maybe it’s time to check your voice message. Keep listening to make sure it doesn’t contain something potentially embarrassing, or damaging to business opportunities.

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