Chamber Spotlight: ?Top Business Challenges for 2013? ? Pulaski ...

By Sheila D. Nelson

Most business owners, if asked, will tell you that they are focused on their customers and try to look at their business from the customers? perspective.? Yet in truth most are still focused on price as their only competitive advantage with the resulting pressure on margins.

1)????? ?Recent surveys have indicated that 80% of businesses believe that their customer experience at their business is superior.? Yet only 8% of customers agreed.? Businesses need to start really listening to their customers instead of continuing with their ?we know it all? attitude.

2)????? ?At least 57% of most workforces is disengaged at work.? This statistic must improve if the business is to grow its productivity.? Employee engagement equals increased productivity.

3)????? ?Businesses confuse repeat customers with customer loyalty.? In most instances repeat customers are not coming back because they are loyal, but for other reasons like convenience or price.? Any reason other than real loyalty leaves a business wide open to losing customers to a competitor.

4)????? ?Businesses continue to think that a ?satisfied customer? is the goal.? A satisfied customer is merely one who has had their expectations met.? In today?s competitive economy, you never hear anybody rave about a business just because their expectations have been met.

5)????? ?Most businesses lack a long-term strategic approach to improving their customer service. In most cases any improvement in a business?s customer experience will be a short-term reactive response and nothing to do with a proactive long-term strategic approach.

6)????? ?Businesses lack the knowledge and expertise to develop and implement a long-term customer strategy.? Businesses still fool themselves by thinking that providing their front-line people with some customer service training will do the job.? In this environment, however, they are only kidding themselves.

7)????? ?Very few businesses capitalize on the creativity of their people.? Every day your employees come to work with ideas that will grow your business, and just about every day they go home having received no encouragement to share those ideas.

8)????? ?Most businesses are using gimmicks (coffee cards, etc.) to try and grow customer loyalty. Real customer loyalty is about building relationships.

9)????? ?Most products and services are commodities, leaving price as the only point of difference. Consumers today are looking for what value a business can add to their experience with a company over and above just providing the product or service.

10)?? Recent research indicates that less than 15% of customers can remember the last time they had a great customer experience.? Most of the experiences we have as customers are less than memorable, but rest assured that a customer who has a negative experience with your business will not only remember it but will tell all their acquaintances about it.? Just as word of mouth advertising can sometimes be the best kind of advertising for your company, a negative experience will spread like wildfire and can do some significant damage to your sales.? You as an owner or manager might not ever even be aware of the negative experience.? This alone is reason enough to develop a strategy that will deliver a consistent high quality customer experience.

11)?? ?60% of businesses who even bother to do surveys fail to act on workplace and customer survey results. ?Gaining feedback from employees and customers is pointless, costly and annoying to those taking part unless improvement is the result.

12)?? ?The majority of businesses either don?t have a sustainable competitive advantage or are not actively promoting one.? With the business environment of 2013, continually thinking about and developing competitive advantages must be a priority for every business that wishes to be successful.

However, we also need to remember what Henry Ford once said, ?Competition whose motive is merely to compete, to drive some other fellow out, never carries far.? The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.? Businesses that grow by development and improvement do not die.? But when a business ceases to be creative, when it believes it has reached perfection and needs to do nothing but produce ? no improvement, no development ? it is done.?

Source: http://www.pulaskichamber.info/news/chamber-spotlight-top-business-challenges-for-2013/

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