Today's times are time for buyers, the central variable of marketing is no longer the product but the customer, it is he who determines what product he wants, how he wants it, when he wants it and what price he is willing to pay.
VALUE PROCESSES
4. Interaction with other employees
Everyone who is part of the company, from the chairman of the board to the safety manager, must be clear about the concept of what a customer means. The customer service process involves a series of interactions with the personnel in charge of the service chain, such as:
SECURITY
The security guards or managers of the company are generally external personnel, so they must have adequate training in the company's service philosophy. Can you imagine a customer who has parked her car with her family in the parking lot of the premises and the security guard comes up and tells her that she cannot do it because that place belongs to the manager? Imagine these same staff asking the customer for a simple "for the soda" to take care of the vehicle, etc. The issue is complex but it is a variable that must be controllable, even more so now that parking lots have become a limiting factor for Shopping Centers, due to the fact that customers want to visit stores where there is this service.
RECEPTIONIST / SECRETARY
Once the client has passed the entrance to the premises, leaving behind an attentive security guard, in his way he meets the reception where he hopes to find a smile and an employee capable of guiding and helping him: «Hello, good morning, in that I can help you », etc. A happy phrase that can convince the most difficult customer to believe that he is in the right place to buy.
BILLING
The billing area must be expeditious, the sale does not end with the order, the customer must check the quality of the service throughout the process chain. In this sense, companies must carry out the implementation of their points of sale, with POS equipment and commercial software, in addition to worrying about having adequate personnel. The idea is to develop a rapid response capacity through trained personnel and applications of technological solutions that allow mechanizing and speeding up this task.
DISPATCH AND DELIVERY
The personnel in charge of the dispatch and delivery constitutes a key link in the value chain; they are in charge of obtaining the client's agreement regarding the delivered product; this is particularly sensitive in the case of products such as household appliances, computers, equipment, etc. Where a delivery can be frustrated by some observation that the client can make about the state of the merchandise, etc. Therefore, the merchandise to be delivered in this product category must be scrupulously prepared, and delivered impeccably, installed and tested; It can sometimes be a slight dent, but in no case should the prestige of the sales house be exposed. If you by an inadequate manipulation of your warehouse personnel make an inventory of damaged merchandise, sell it as such, as second merchandise.
THE STAFF IN GENERAL
First, we must emphasize that staff must be aware of the usefulness of the work they do and its impact on meeting business objectives. The times when the product was pushed to the customer have passed, in a value relationship the question is what benefits do we have to give the customer to receive their loyalty in exchange. In this effort, it must be recognized that all links in the value chain are equally important. For this reason, excellent companies stand out for the quality of work performed by lower-ranking employees; This is something to keep in mind as many great efforts can sometimes be lost due to the awkwardness of a minor employee. The training and indoctrination of the staff then is essential,Because the image of the company can be reinforced by a first-rate service, all of which also involves a motivational theme: a contest program must be created that rewards the work of the staff and motivates and identifies them with the business. Make sure first before taking action that everyone in the organization as a whole understands the proposed business goal, strategy, and challenges.
5. Dispatch and Delivery
Imagine a customer who has chosen a point of sale for the purchase of poultry meat, investigate the reason for choosing the place of purchase, in many answers you will find the same motivation: «He bought here because they deliver it to me clean, cut as I want and doubly bagged ». The dispatch and delivery task, without a doubt, has a lot to do with the rejection or preference of a certain point of sale; Let us therefore analyze together some aspects to take into account:
A first point is the state of the merchandise. You must always have impeccable merchandise, to achieve this it is necessary to control that there is always an adequate handling of the product in the warehouses, or shelves. Another point is that the excess time of the merchandise on display should be avoided, the quantity purchased should optimize the permanence of the product in stock, making the withdrawal of expired merchandise in the cases of food and medical products. This is a broad topic that also has to do with inventory studies and purchasing planning; through measuring the relationship between existing stocks and sales made,We can obtain the rotation rates of each product in order to identify items that are constituting unwanted inventories and according to this information make non-commercial rotation items, avoiding the higher financial cost of inventory, product deterioration, or the withdrawal from the market due to the expiration of its consumption period.
- In some product categories, tools must be available to satisfy special cases that arise.Let's assume the delivery of an American brand refrigerator in a house located in an upper middle area, the staff arrives and find that the delivery is on the second floor. From first intention, the delivery must take a longer time, in addition to this, it is verified that the device does not pass through the door, and it must be removed to enter the department. What to do? Simply be prepared to attend to these special cases, also requiring that the staff be adequately indoctrinated with the service philosophy. When the subject of training is ignored in these cases, there is a staff who transmits their annoyance to the client, hurries, and can even damage the merchandise to be delivered by pretending to do things hastily, etc. This must be avoided, because it is about the image of the company,the customer experience with our staff must be a good repeatable, pleasant, etc. An experience that allows establishing a future relationship. The client is going to test us many times, but we always have to be prepared.The presentation of the dispatch and delivery staff counts as much as their attitude. We must always maintain a neat staff, who wear the company uniform and where the collaborative attitude shown to please the customer is recognized as a hallmark of the service provided by the company.
The dispatch and delivery also have to do with the opportunity in which this is carried out. Many conflicts stem from unfulfilled delivery promises, many transactions are voided. It is not possible to ruin a nice sale negotiation, the excellent attention of the other parts of the process involved, due to poor logistics management. We must remember that marketing favors the timely satisfaction of needs. Then properly schedule deliveries, do not tell him that he failed to deliver because the staff did not come, he felt bad, or the mobility of the company suffered a malfunction that is not the client's problem but his problem; you must work under other concepts and always put yourself in the place of the clients, in order to make them become your subscribers.
6. Post Sale
The after sales service requires not only good will and good intentions, but fundamentally infrastructure, clear policies and adequate personnel. The American Management Association (AMA) states that 68 percent of customers who abandon their business relationship with a company do so because the service is poor. What to do then, if we are aware that the usefulness of any business is in repetitive sales and one-time business, in principle, are bad business.
In response to this, current businesses privilege the customer retention policy on the basis of keeping a customer satisfied, the recipes even go further: "You have to delight customers," say some marketers; but the important thing in our opinion is to establish clear and compliant policies. (Tom Peters says replacing $ 1 from a lost customer costs $ 10.) However, there are still many examples on the market of what not to do: “24 hour technical service” notices that do not work; High-sounding advertising such as, "We will refund your money if you are not satisfied" from establishments where precisely the claim procedures have been established to not return anything; as well as announcements such as "We have the best teaching plan",from institutions where Professors are still not clear on the differences between effectiveness and efficiency, objective and goal, and even less understand the value of punctuality, etc. All this of course, with some honorable exceptions.
Keep in mind that a dissatisfied customer expresses his dissatisfaction to at least 10 other people, so do not destroy the company with misguided measures. Most employees tend to overlook administrative errors in the after sales area; they assume that since the order has been placed, the customer paid the bill, the sellers collected their commissions, the company has the profit of the operation, etc. The most important thing was fulfilled. But no, what is being committed is a mistake of focus, the most important thing in a business is the customers and it is precisely at this point that the new sales cycle begins.
Service monitoring, then, is essential, it is the key to success in achieving customer loyalty and retention in our subscriber account. The investment made in creating, developing and managing an information system that allows us to tune in to customer appreciation factors and have a responsiveness to address marketing-related problems should definitely be allocated to product quality. The difference in seeing marketing, after sales service as an investment and not as a cost, differentiates excellent companies from those that are not. You must maintain the quality of your product, otherwise you will lose competitiveness and affect your market share. Don't forget that the customer's perception of the product is global, it includes everything;the shopping experience, consumption experience, post-sale care, the psychic income received by the brand image, etc.
Certainly, the new business scenarios have expanded the responsibility of the producers, manufacturers, distributors and product suppliers with respect to their customers. Today the motto is "win to win", business is such when the benefit is mutual; that is, from sellers and buyers. The responsibility does not end with the delivery of the product to the distributor, because nobody buys to save; the supplier must be concerned that the merchandise rotates at the point of sale, for this he must provide training services to sellers; volume awards; promotional campaigns; product advertising, cooperative advertising, image advertising; adequate technical service, consumer orientation, etc.
This will make our clients become our subscribers, and that our product (read the article plus the added service) will become our best expansion vehicle.
Almost 90% of companies fail to achieve the objectives of their strategic plans due to the lack of adequate monitoring of their value chain.
Are there the necessary means, including capital, but the results are not given? So, it is time to audit your strategic activities.
7. The Monitoring of the Value Chain
To be successful in business practice, it is necessary not only to worry about having professional support at every link in the process chain; but also to have the global focus of the strategic activities carried out by the company, through permanent monitoring of the interactions of the value chain. For this, it will be necessary to establish not only an alert system on critical points that may affect our competitiveness, but also to define a set of performance indicators that will allow us to measure the efficiency with which the processes occur, in order to carry out the corrective measures. timely.
The companies that make the difference today are those that hire managers who, in addition to the technical level they exhibit, "are not placed on a pedestal" - the times of the cult of personality have passed - but are people with a sense of empathy who commit themselves with the integral project of the business operating therefore under the same rules that they themselves establish; in other words, they lead by example. This style of management allows them to develop an environment of stability, coexistence and teamwork; a synergistic environment where the staff that comprise it, values the importance of the role it plays "as part of the chain", and knows how their efforts contribute to the success of the organization.
Business relationships, in order to make sense, must be constituted in practice, in a value relationship; that is, a relationship that is established deliberately with a long-term vision. It is precisely this vision of the future in our relationships that will lead us to carry out each commercial transaction with the desire and energy of "the first time"; taking care above all of the details. This attitude of having our "working area" as if it were "the day of the premiere", and attending to "our guests" as if it were "the day of their birthday"; It can make the difference in perception between good and bad customer service. To win the market battle we have to create in the company this virtuous circle of attitude and dedication to the objective,for which we must ensure that "those who must be" are part of our business project; that is, people with values and an authentic vocation for service.
A global vision of the processes and how the interactions through the business value chain occur, developed through the six preceding published articles, necessarily leads us to the analysis of the set of "unwanted waste or temporary" that are generated in each phase of the chain and put at risk the breakdown of the relationship with the customer. A non-exclusive relationship of these could be:
- Lack of sales force manners / unfriendly, unfriendly vendor. Lack of real product knowledge / Vendor unable to demonstrate to customer. Lack of high-demand products, 'vendor not arrived' / Out of stock brands The premises lack parking / Parking is not adequately demarcated. Business hours are not met / They close before the hour. Failure to deliver to the customer, "the delivery vehicle failed". The service installation takes A long time. Technical support is not followed in practice. Help desk phones do not answer, etc.
This is a first work prepared for the portal and therefore perfectible, our following articles will start a new one equally related to the current topic, which will be called «The Value Chain in Organizations»; But if you are interested in starting a relationship with us now, write to: fzaratearrobainfonegocio.net.pe
