Offering a service to customers can provide several positive benefits for your business; the primary benefit is that it establishes predictable cash flow for your business to build from. However, because many small businesses compete in such competitive markets, the challenge is to find ways to streamline your business operations in order to give your organization a competitive advantage over others in the market.
While there are certainly many ways to streamline your business operations, here is one possible setup that you should consider. Be sure to add your tips and insight.
Improve Business Operations By Incorporating a Customer Portal in Your Website
In most cases, I would recommend that small businesses start by developing their business’ online presence. In addition to marketing to potential customers, this will ultimately act as a central hub for your current customers to go and manage their account.
Of course, developing an online presence isn’t always cost-effective for a small business. Ultimately, this is why we decided to create the Beckon Online service; your service business needs a scalable and systematic solution that generates leads online while you are out in the field closing those deals.
Additional Thoughts:
- Customer portal – customers can help themselves
- Content marketing – educates current/potential customers about your business
- Social Media – allow current/potential customers to reach you via social media. If need be, you can respond immediately when you’re on the-go.
Improve Business Operations By Creating a Central Hub For Your Management Team
At first, it’s likely that you will want to try and use free technologies to streamline your business operations. Once your business has reached a certain point, however, you will need to start expanding into paid services. For service businesses, you will want to focus in on customer service. A great way to do that is through a customer relationship management software (or “crm”) such as salesforce’s “service cloud“.
In short, this essentially acts as your central hub to managing relations with your customers and even other related business tasks.
Quick breakdown of notable features and benefits:
- “Software as a service” – you pay on a monthly basis
- Stored in the “cloud” – accessible via Internet from anywhere you have a connection
- Customer portal – customers interact on your website and information transfers into your crm software
- Approvals and workflow – you can set it up to automate various processes
- Centralized data – in most cases, all of your business’ actions can be integrated into the crm software. This gives you a central location to measure, record, and analyze your organization’s data.
Likewise, you’ll need to find some sort of software that allows you to create and manage various documents. While there are certainly many different options out there to choose from, I personally am a fan of Google apps
Quick overview of features and benefits:
Improve Business Operations By Streamlining Your Field Service
If you offer a service, it’s likely that you send employees into the field to take care of various tasks. (Likely the bulk of your “business operations”) If so, you’ll want to have a way to communicate with them and ultimately measure their actions.
Here is one possible setup:
- purchase an iPad with an Otterbox cover and Internet connection
- purchase a field service app like ServiceMax that integrates with your crm software and can be used on your iPad
The benefits to this setup are essentially the same as the benefits I mentioned in the above sections; it’s a scalable and cost-effective way to measure, record, analyze, and improve your operations.
Improve Business Operations By Streamlining Your “Money” Process
And lastly, another great way to streamline your business operations is to figure out ways to streamline your “money” process. Because small businesses are so sensitive to cash flow, it’s important to know exactly how money flows through your business. Once you and your team have a good grip on that, you can start to streamline that process to give your business some stability.
Here is one possible setup:
- purchase some sort of accounting software subscription that is capable of integrating with your crm software. Quickbooks online or FinancialForce seem to be two pretty good options.
- connect your bank accounts to automatically record any transactions that occur into your accounting software
- if appropriate, use a credit card to make transactions and then pay off in full at the end of the month (also helps for recording transactions)
- use a credit card reader like Square to accept payments from your iPad when you close the deal
- since you offer a service, offer to automatically charge a customers credit card at the beginning of each month at no additional cost (this is convenient for the customer and allows you to get paid in advance for your service)
- since you are streamlining your field service operations, you should be able to automate your payroll process. If possible, configure your accounting software to automatically pay your employees via direct deposit (your employees will most likely love you for this and it will save you time and money)
Conclusion
So there you have it; one possible way to streamline business operations. Of course, this may not be appropriate for every business and you should ultimately develop a solution that is effective for your business.
What are some ways you’ve streamlined your business operations?