By Kelly Kilpatrick
When things start to go wrong with the economy, many people start making cutbacks right away as a proactive measure. This can be quite frustrating as a business owner, but it is an understandable reaction. There are a few things that are within your power that you can do to ensure that your customers continue to patronize your business during tough times; stay positive, employ these tactics, and watch your customers return.
Know Your Customers
Meeting your customers’ needs is an integral part of any successful business, so make sure that you know who your typical customer is. If this has changed over the years, it’s time to do some market research. This will be easier to do if you own a small business where you interact with your client base on a regular basis and slightly more challenging if you have a larger business that doesn’t require regular customer interaction.
Survey Your Customers
This is a great tool that will help you to understand your customers and see if you are truly meeting their needs. Survey customers can be as simple as posting a survey on your web page or having a suggestion box on site at your place of business. See if you can find any common threads among suggestions and make sure to pay special attention to your frequent visitors.
Make Changes to Meet Demands
If there are some areas you can improve upon based on customer suggestions and surveys, do your best to make them in a timely fashion. This shows your commitment to your clients and your willingness to adapt in the face of challenges. More than likely, positive word of mouth about your attentiveness to people’s needs will help you earn more clients.
Provide Excellent Customer Service
Although this is common sense, the cornerstone of any business is its customer base. You must show through your actions that you care about them and want them to return to your place of business. It is not enough to simply bring them in; you must make them want to come back to do business with you again. Excellent service will separate you from your competitors, especially if you personalize the experience.
Continue to Keep Your Promise
As a business owner, you started out with an idea of what you wanted to achieve, and what kind of goods or services you intended to offer your clientele. Many customers look at this as an implied promise that you will to your best to continue to meet this goal over time. They see spending their money with you as a relationship and each time they do business with you, they feel they are investing in you and your promise. Keep this promise to your customers and watch them come back once the dust settles a bit.
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By Kelly Kilpatrick
Human Resources is one of the most complicated areas of business. Essentially, it’s the glue that keeps all employees working together. When people go to business schools and study HR, professors will give students information pretty much by the book. However, in the real business world, there are many more situations that you will encounter that may not have a textbook answer. With that being said, here are 10 HR lessons that your business professor never taught you. If after this list, you don’t feel more confident about HR, then you might want to consider getting out of HR.
1. It’s all about the people – Human Resources is a people-driven area of business. In order to do anything in HR, be it conflict resolution, or simply evaluating new hires, you have to focus on the people. Knowing that employees have many stresses and have many challenges in the workplace is quintessential to success in Human Resources. While it is important to follow company procedures in everything, having a personal touch is always valuable in HR. Sometimes HR persons have to carry out some of the most difficult tasks in business, such as downsizing. Having people skills can make these challenging tasks much more manageable.
2. Communication is essential – Communication is probably one of the most important skill sets any person in human resources has. Being able to communicate ideas successfully with other members of the company, as well as work on resolving any issues employees may have makes the entire process much simpler. For example, when confronted with a human resources violation, it is important to know how to say things in order to maintain neutrality, and not putting the company at risk. If you overhear employees entering into dangerous territory (like political discussions), knowing a cordial way to suggest a change of subject can be quite helpful.
3. Organization is the key to success – Some of the more negative people in business say that human resources is largely about paperwork. While this outlook is a bit harsh, it is important to have organization when completing HR paperwork. I’ve known people in HR who didn’t have developed organizational skills, and therefore had a hard time managing the demands placed upon them. If you are in charge of managing new hires, having organized files can make filtering through people much easier. Keeping things neat and organized can come in very handy when it comes time to bring up a specific incident report or employee file.
4. You aren’t the enemy – If you were to ask Michael Scott from The Office about HR professionals, he’d probably have some pretty mean things to say. It’s a stereotype that many people who haven’t had true business experience throw around. Human resources is not the enemy. Thinking negatively about your profession, or thinking that other people in the company view your role in a less-positive light is a recipe for disaster. The best suggestion is to realize that human recourses is there to help employees and make sure that everyone works together to help the company become more successful.
5. Always remain neutral – This is a tip that some HR professionals have had issues with. If there is a conflict, or a company policy violation, remaining neutral is of the utmost importance. Even if you may have had personal experience with the situation, keeping a level head and looking at things from an objective, company concerned point of view will make things go much more smoothly. If the HR representative cannot remain neutral, then the conflict will become much more complicated and could even lead to larger problems within the company.
6. If you can’t be neutral, ask for help – If you think neutrality will be an issue, then you should immediately seek a co-workers aid. Report the facts as you see them, and let someone else take the lead on resolving the conflict or reporting the violation. There’s no shame in removing yourself form a situation in which you feel you cannot be entirely impartial.
7. Stick to the facts – Human resources is concerned with facts. Gathering as much information as possible about every incident will ensure smoother and faster resolutions. Less successful persons in HR won’t “go the extra mile” in order to fact-check and interview all employees who may have been involved, or knew what happened. There’s nothing worse than submitting a review to your boss, only to have extremely important facts resurface sometime later. Being thorough with the essential elements of any incident can help you make sure you’re doing the best possible job.
8. Don’t jump to conclusions – It’s only natural for any human to come to their own conclusions on certain events. However, making a conclusion before a final report is released, or all the facts have been carefully analyzed is not a good idea. Depending on your company policy, you may have leeway to include some of your own opinions in an incident report. Keep in mind, though, that if you are going to take the risk in putting your opinion down on paper, you better have thought it through and analyzed all possibilities. There’s nothing more embarrassing than drawing a hasty conclusion that turns out to be woefully inaccurate.
9. It’s okay to be a stickler for rules – Some people think employees in human resources can sometimes be sticklers for rules. It’s okay to stick to company policy on everything. Adding a personal, genuine, human touch to certain situations can help, but your main focus should be doing things by the book. You want to be sensitive to the needs of employees, but you also want to follow policies faithfully.
10. Be aware of the “fishbowl” – If you are in human resources, you will unfortunately be held to a higher standard than other employees. If your job is to investigate violations, hire new employees, and resolve conflicts, then you shouldn’t have any company blemishes. For example, it would make it much more difficult to have employees take an HR representative seriously in a conversation about sexual harassment if the HR representative was often heard making crude jokes at the water cooler. Being in HR places you in a position to be seen differently by many people in the company. Being aware of your actions can ensure that when you do have to be the stickler for rules, no one can accuse you of double standards.
Human Resources is one of the most challenging areas of business to be in. You have to be a leader, know the rules, and deal with employees of all different backgrounds, who all have many different experiences. Once again, HR is essentially the glue that keeps employees together, and working smoothly. HR professors are great when it comes to teaching students the basics, but there’s a large amount of HR that simply cannot be learned in the classroom. Hopefully, with these tips in hand, you’ll be able to avoid some of the rookie mistakes other HR professionals make.
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