Businesses will always need to improve, find better solutions to their client’s problems and create new products. This can be quite challenging for small businesses, but even bigger companies struggle with keeping up with the trends, social events and the economy.
A great example of companies succeeding was when the pandemic struck the world, and everyone moved their activities online. Companies adapted their products and services to the outside events and helped people when their needs changed.
If you want to be one of those businesses, too, here are some improvement tips.
What you need to Improve to grow your business?
Productivity
Productivity at the workplace is the most important thing that drives the business to success. As a manager, you should be able to find the balance between ensuring productivity and overworking because there’s a fine line between these two situations.
Also, by maintaining a good relationship with your team, you’ll create mutual trust, which is crucial for a team to work on the same level. But increasing productivity should start with making a simple and concise plan about what to do.
You’ll have to analyse the current situation and act accordingly. Luckily, you can count on online software and programs to help you keep track of the team’s progress and review your goals frequently to see if they’re still relevant to your business.
Lastly, it would be a good idea to minimise time-wasting activities. Anything from meetings or emails that are not necessary can be cut and replaced with better organisational instruments.
If you can’t figure out what these draining activities are, you can ask for your team’s opinion. In this way, you’ll find a solution and enhance to keep your employees safe and confident.
Customer satisfaction
Customers are the only ones who keep your business running, so providing customer satisfaction is mandatory if you want future growth. But this area of your business depends on how you train your employees because they will be the ones receiving feedback, and they should know how to act in order to help customers.
Therefore, employee training is necessary. But if you want the best results, you can go further than that and invest in courses, seminars and classrooms to provide your team with the latest knowledge on your industry.
For example, you can try a Six Sigma Black Belt course to ensure your employees develop analytical skills in your sector. This program provides a deep understanding of soft skills and how to use them, as well as tools and methods employees can use to provide better services.
Also, don’t forget to improve your communication channels and offer,
- Social media support for engaging with customers and showing you care about them. You can create an automatic messaging system for instant answers to common questions.
- Website support for reducing the need for live support representatives. You can do this by developing a frequently asked questions section on your website.
- Phone support for customers who need immediate service. A call-back system implemented can reduce wait times.
Operational costs
You’d usually want to reduce operational costs. They include costs associated with producing your company’s services or goods, but also labour costs, sales commissions and more.
These operating expenses are important because they include charges required to maintain and administer your business on a daily basis, but sometimes they might get out of hand.
You need to identify inefficiencies and see how you can improve them. You could save money, time and resources by knowing what could get better in your business, but you need to be consistent about it. If you can’t act on the problem at the moment, at least put it on hold until the solution is easier to assess.
One of the first things you should consider to minimise these costs is embracing technology fully. You’ll find plenty of software programs and systems that can streamline and automate business functions (depending on the size of your company).
You should digitalise areas like website hosting, accounting, payroll and marketing communication, and you’ll see a significant change in your finances. Also, to improve profitability and trim unnecessary spending, you could go green and make your business sustainable.
You can lower your expenses by getting energy-efficient equipment, choosing compact fluorescent lighting instead of regular light bulbs, applying window treatment, and installing insulation to reduce cooling and heating costs.
Social media
Growing your small business can’t be reduced to only a few departments, but we can all agree that social media is the one holding power when it comes to the rise or the fall of a business.
Many corporations found themselves dragged on social media when they posted something offensive. Or sometimes, companies don’t know where they stand in the online world and ignore the feedback from people.
But you, as a business owner, will be able to avoid these situations and work on your social media accounts and skills to make sure that your customers understand everything about your business and are not intimidated to leave their opinions about your products.
Your clients should be comfortable enough to engage with your business; otherwise, you won’t get the feedback needed.
At the same time, you should adapt the content you post to your target audience. You can identify it by:
- Analysing your customer base and carrying out interviews
- Conducting market research to see what the industry you’re working in is lacking that your products can fulfil
- Analysing competitors so that you can learn something from them
- Creating a customer persona (the general demographics, personalities and needs of your target customers)
- Defining who is not your target audience
It’s also important to know what social platforms fit your business better. For example, if you’re selling software products, you might need to make tutorials on how to use them, so YouTube or TikTok would be the first to come, but if you’re selling beauty services, Instagram is your friend.
Finally, growing a business is not that challenging if you have the right team next to you. Support can sometimes do more than you’d think, so surround yourself with the best employees.
