Successful Blog

Should You Be Dialed-in to After Call Surveys?

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Customer Services RepresentativeIf you have ever been asked to provide your opinion or give feedback after you complete a call, you have just been involved in an after-call survey.

You may wonder if these surveys provide any value to the business, especially if you were one who elected not to participate.

Do they have any value in today’s business world? If so, what do you need to know to make them effective?

Know What You Want to Learn

There should be a reason for everything you do in business, and after-call surveys are no exception.

You should know what information you want to find out, how you will learn this information and what you will do with it. If you do not have answers to all of these questions, you don’t need to take a survey.

Creating a goal doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, for these surveys, you should keep it simple.

Learn which call agents receive the best marks in customer satisfaction. Find out what percentage of customers have their problems answered when they call.

Keep your goals to one or two points to ensure that you get the information you are looking for.

Know What to Ask

Even if you know what you want to find out in these surveys, you won’t get the information if you don’t ask the right questions.

Make sure the questions are straightforward with enough options for the customer to answer accurately, but don’t overwhelm the person.

You cannot get feedback for complicated issues in this manner; keep your expectations simple and your questions easy to answer. You will use these surveys to gauge perception about general topics.

This may include finding out if the customer had a long wait time, if his or her questions were answered and if he or she was treated courteously.

Know How You Will Use the Data

Customers don’t mind filling out surveys or answering questions if they know their answers make a difference. They want to see that you make changes in your business based on the information they provide.

You should know before starting a survey what actions you will take with the results.

Obviously, if everything comes back positive, you won’t need to make changes. If you have less than desirable results, you should have a plan of what you will change.

As the article, “After Call Surveys: Are They Really Effective?” mentions, you should have a plan to follow up on any negative feedback.

You may even want to implement a mailed survey or contact specific customers if the reaction is strong enough.

The goal of any survey should be to make your business stronger, better and to improve customer satisfaction. When you accumulate information directly from the customer, this is your best weapon to improving your services or product.

Take your survey results seriously and they will be a valuable tool to help ensure that you retain customer loyalty so that your business thrives.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Joyce Morse is an author who writes on a variety of topics, including customer service and technology.

Build Your Online Portfolio from the Ground Up

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White Keyboard with My Story Button.Is your online portfolio ready to impress?

With potential employers checking out new hires online, having an online portfolio makes good business sense, providing a valuable introduction to your skills.

Your choice of information and how you organize it could make the difference between being hired and being overlooked, so just what should you include?

Start with these six things:

Lead Off with an Introduction

Visitors want to get a feel for the person behind the portfolio, so be sure to include an introduction.

Your introduction should inspire confidence, giving a brief background on what you do, and who you are. Keep it short, but relatable. Your visitors are interested in the person you are and what you are like to work with – you don’t need to include your life story.

Industry Awareness

As the article “The Power and Impact of an Online Portfolio” points out, it’s a good idea to start by asking yourself about the expectations within your industry.

What skills, qualifications and personal attributes are employers in your industry looking for?

By cultivating an awareness of what employers want, you can tailor your profile to make sure it answers those needs.

Clear Focus

Avoid confusion by keeping your focus clear.

An overcrowded portfolio will fail to make an impact. Instead, summarize your key skills in one or two sentences that will leave visitors in no doubt as to what they’ll get when they work with you.

Be sure to include a strong introduction, an easy to browse selection of your work, a clear call to action to encourage contact, and visible contact details to facilitate that.

Qualified Statements

The maxim “show, don’t tell” holds true when it comes to your online portfolio. It’s not enough to simply list what you’ve done – details about your achievements are a must.

For example, if you re-designed a website for a restaurant, don’t just show your design. Talk about how many more visitors they got as a result, or how much revenue increased after it went live.

Leave your visitors with a clear impression of what you can achieve for them when they hire you.

Your Best Work

Choose your work for your portfolio carefully.

This is your chance to show your best work. It can be tempting to include everything you’ve done. However, it makes better business sense to take the opportunity to showcase the best of your work.

As well as choosing your best work, be sure to include some background on each project, such as the remit for each one and how you set about completing it.

Provide the Right Layout

Layout matters when it comes to your online portfolio.

The focus should be on your work, not on the layout surrounding it. Aim for a clear, professional look that easily draws attention to what you want to say.

Your portfolio should be easy to browse, leaving your reader free to focus on the quality of your work.

Make sure your portfolio is mobile-friendly too, or you could risk losing mobile visitors.

Your online portfolio gives you an opportunity to make your first impression count.

Take the time to plan and build it with this in mind so potential employers will like what they see when they visit your online home.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Tristan Anwyn is an author who writes on a range of topics including social media, SEO that works, and careers.

Take Your Resume on the Road

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Airplane At The Terminal Gate Ready For Takeoff - Modern InternaDon’t automatically turn down the idea of taking a gap year in between college and your first professional job.

If you spend that time traveling, you could be looking at better job opportunities on the horizon than if you go straight from college dorm to cubicle norm.

Here are some great reasons to fill your backpack and roam if you want to:

You Can Demonstrate Your Independence

Many employers complain that kids go from living at home to living on campus and then starting their first professional job without ever having to be independent. They then end up with young employees who don’t know how to manage their time at work, and can’t manage project tasks without asking everyone within sight for help.

When you do some traveling either solo or with a buddy, you can prove to interviewers that you know how to take matters into your own hands and take care of yourself without your parents’ help.

That says a lot for a 20-something, and it will help distinguish you from other job candidates.

Your Resume Will Grow

If your only jobs prior to college graduation were part time gigs like pizza delivery guy or dog walker, your resume is probably full of a whole bunch of white space. You need to find some way to bulk up your resume so it looks like you’ve actually done something worthwhile.

As the following article looks at, here is how travel enhances your resume.

You can add all the places you traveled to, new skills that you learned along the way, and include some references of places you stayed, such as bed and breakfasts, hostels, etc. If you picked up a new language during your travels, add that to your resume, too.

More to Discuss During the Interview

Interviews can get downright terrifying, especially when your interviewer asks you something, you answer with a couple brief words, and they say nothing more. It’s like they’re waiting for you to fill the empty air, but all you can hear are crickets.

As someone with some traveling under your heels, you won’t be short of stories to tell of your adventures.

You’ll find some way to integrate your travel tales with the job requirements your boss is looking for. Is he looking for a problem solver? Tell him or her about the time your taxi driver didn’t show up, but you made it to the airport anyway.

Is he or she looking for an arbitrator? Tell them all about your haggling skills in the open markets in Morocco.

You’ll Become More Worldly

There’s nothing more boring than a person who’s never been away from their hometown.

If a person doesn’t travel, they have little to no way to truly understand people or world events. There’s just no context in life unless you actually venture outside your front door.

A worldly person can make conversation with just about anyone on some topic or another.

As a job candidate – even one only recently out of college – you’ll exude more confidence and worldly experience if you take some time to travel before you settle in to a professional job.

Don’t let others dissuade you from traveling when you’re young and out of college. There’s no better time to see the world.

This is a time of life when you have no ties, no commitments, and no timeframe when you have to get back.

Roam around the world and come back a better person.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Kate Supino is an experienced traveler and recommends it to anyone who is the least bit curious about the world.

Do Your Workers Need More Education?

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secretary-and-boss-discussing-10054901

If you are reviewing your employee benefits package, you may want to consider continuing education.

While not one of the traditional components of benefits packages for employees, it is an attractive addition.

People like the idea of getting education for free to help their careers and income potential to grow.

Benefits for Employers

Offering continuing education doesn’t just benefit the employee; it provides advantages the employer as well.

The most obvious advantage is the fact that you can promote from within when a higher position opens up. Instead of hiring strangers to take a supervisory position, you can place someone you already know and trust in that job.

It also helps reduce the cost of turnover because employees are more likely to stay with an employer if they feel they can continue to grow and advance.

They also know that they will make more money if they can promote up through the department or even move into a new department within the same company.

Happy Customers

The better trained your staff is, the better satisfied your customers will be.

This translates into more revenue for you. Even small businesses can benefit from helping their employees get more education.

For example, say you own a beauty salon.

As the following article looks at, by offering your staff the opportunity to take cosmetology online classes, they can learn new techniques or expand their knowledge while continuing to work. They can sell their new skills to customers in the form of additional services.

This concept works for just about any small business, so explore how it can help your company.

Are There Any Downsides?

Even if you can see all of the advantages to offering employees continuing education, you may wonder about the downside. The first is the cost.

Of course, you can limit the cost by offering to pay only for tuition or for a portion of the tuition.

To prevent your employees from getting the training and then leaving immediately, you can also include a requirement of service for a reasonable period of time.

For instance, an employee may need to be employed for at least a year and plan to stay at least a year after completion of education.

The other big disadvantage to employers is that employees have gained new skills that they can take elsewhere. However, this is not as big of a problem as you might think.

By offering educational help as part of the employee benefits, you show that your business cares about the people who work there. It inspires loyalty in the staff and the employees are less likely to leave.

People who make a decent salary and have the opportunities to grow and face new challenges in their jobs are less likely to look elsewhere for jobs.

Instead, they will turn their focus inward when they are ready to make changes.

By offering continuing education to employees, you equip them to become even more valuable to your organization and encourage them to stay and share their new skills with your company.

Photo credits: Images courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net and Got Credit

 

About the Author: Joyce Morse is an author who writes on a variety of topics, including business and education.

Is Your Office as Productive as It Should Be?

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There are a number of ways to improve your office productivity this year and beyond.

Take an objective look at your office operations to see if you or your team are guilty of any of these time wasters.

Dissecting a Problem to Death

In any group of people, there are the talkers and there are the doers.

If you’re not careful, the talkers will suck the life out of the doers until the problem has been discussed, dissected, considered, disseminated and dried up. At some point, you need to have a course of action, and the first step is to stop talking about it.

Sometimes any action is better than no action at all.

If your team is unsure what to do to solve a problem, pick one proposed solution and implement it. Eventually, you’ll land on a solution that works, and in the meantime, you’ll all learn what doesn’t work.

Over-referencing

Some office managers love to create cross-referencing systems.

They’ll have employees keep a binder or Excel sheet of data, check off work that’s done on the project in five places, and create summary project binders for “dashboard” views.

If you have an office manager like that, he or she will have created a team of paper-pushers just for you. People will be so busy making check marks and flipping through binder tabs that no real work will actually get done.

Of course a checks-and-balance system makes sense. But invest in a software system designed to do all the backend heavy lifting for you.

Online dashboards can be customized for your business where your staff has only to enter data once and it can be viewed in a variety of different ways by team members both local and on the road.

Meeting Madness

Meeting madness is when you and your staff attend so many meetings there’s nary a minute left in the work day to actually get to any of the work that was delegated during the meeting. If your 8-hour days are spent more in the meeting room than at your desk, you may be a victim of meeting madness.

It doesn’t take a 45-minute meeting to announce that you have a new client and discuss their needs.

Instead, use email, memos and company newsletters to get any information across that doesn’t actually require feedback from employees. If you’re just announcing something, or giving out general instructions to a team, skip the meeting.

As the following article looks at, here are 6 ways to take your office productivity into the next generation:

File Disorganization

Remember the old days when your office used filing cabinets and if an employee removed a file they had to leave a sign-out sheet in its place? Of course, everyone forgot to leave the sigh-out sheet at least once, leaving the next person wondering where in the office the file was.

File disorganization still happens today.

Even if your company is on a network, misnamed and misplaced electronic files on the “system” make it difficult for staff members to get work done.

Move on up to the cloud.

With a third-party cloud-based system, multiple employees can work on the same file at the same time.

Everyone can have their own log in and username authentication, and employees won’t be stepping on each other’s virtual toes.

These are easy changes to implement in any office to enhance productivity.

About the Author: Kate Supino writes extensively about best business practices.

Study up Before Going the Franchise Route

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Are you thinking about purchasing a franchise business?

Many people are drawn to franchises because they allow you to be a business owner with much of the legwork already done.

The business plan, what the store will sell, the logo and the advertising are all taken care of for you.

Franchises are often viewed as the best of both worlds because you run a business and start making a salary immediately, whereas if you opened your own new business, it could take months (if not years) to see results.

Businesses that can be purchased as a franchise include Allstate, Arby’s, Chick Fil-A, Econo Lodge, Subway, U-Haul and hundreds of others.

Study Up Before Purchasing

If you’re thinking about owning a franchise, it’s important to study up beforehand to make sure that it’s the right business for you.

The best way to start out is by reading books on franchising. There’s no better way to understand the scope of the industry than by learning from those who have been there before.

If you’re not sure where to start, check out the top 8 books to read for franchising.

The top three books on the list include The Educated Franchisee by Rick Bisio, Become a Franchise Owner by Joel Libava and Franchising for Dummies by Michael Seid and Dave Thomas.

Is Franchising Right for You?

In addition to reading books on franchising, it’s important to learn all you can about the industry to make sure that it’s what you want to do.

Just because the business plan and product are taken care of doesn’t mean the work is going to be easy. You can expect long hours, little vacation time (especially when starting out) and other stressful situations that will arise.

To be sure franchising is for you, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Are you willing to run the business someone else’s way? – This is perhaps the biggest question you will need to ask yourself. Yes, you are in charge of the franchise, but the systems are already in place and more than likely, the owner is not going to be willing to change them just for you. Make sure you’re willing to work under someone else and adapt to their way of running a business, not your own.
  • Can you afford the start-up costs? – Franchise start-up costs can range from a couple thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Before choosing a company, make sure you can afford the cost it will take to get your store up and running. If you can’t afford it, consider picking up a part-time job, working overtime or selling unused items to bring in some extra money.
  • Is running a franchise something you will enjoy? – The best way to test the waters when it comes to franchising is to talk to other franchise owners. Ask if you can meet them for coffee and learn what they like, what they don’t like and what the challenges are which come with the job. If you see yourself being happy by running a franchise, then by all means, go for it.

Running a franchise requires discipline, a support system and the motivation to see your franchise succeed.

Once you’ve done your research on franchising and figured out if it’s right for you, it’s time to move forward with running your own franchise business.

About the Author: Sarah Brooks is a freelance writer living in Charlotte, NC. She writes on a variety of topics including small businesses, social media and personal finance.