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Dealing with Customer Complaints – The ‘Act Now’ Policy
A business coach, when explaining to a group of entrepreneurs how to deal with a dissatisfied customer, asked how serious is the following customer complaint? (Add complaint here_________________.) Answers ranged from an easy fix to unrecoverable. The coach replied the actual seriousness can be immaterial; it depends on how long you wait to deal with [...]

What is Customer Service, Really
Much is made of customer service. This is the prime factor in keeping customers and getting referrals. There are a few things that any customer needs to hear before feeling that your approach to customer service is the right approach.

How To Be Innovative
Innovation means finding ways to bring unique products to market and differentiating your business from the competition.

How to Deal With Smartphone Search
We have entered a new era of shopping. People now go into business establishments armed with smartphones and sometimes tablets, and they search out anything they are interested in buying using one of these devices. They compare prices to what they see in front of them, and they then make a buying decision. How the world has changed.

How to Create Repeat Customers
It’s great for a business to have a stream of new customers, but the real backbone of any business is repeat customers. Repeat customers remove the worry of having to rely on new customers all the time. It’s important to have a plan in place to ensure repeat customers.

Winning Back Lost Customers
Businesses lose customers for many reasons. Very often it’s about too much of the same thing in a particular region. If they can get something they need and the business is close that’s where they’ll go. This doesn’t mean that customer loyalty doesn’t exist. It means only that despite having businesses they happen to like, people look for convenience in shopping as well as quickness. They want it and they want it now. That makes holding on to customers difficult, but not impossible. All businesses lose customers. It is possible to get some of them back.

Mobile Payments Are Taking Off
Mobile payment is something that even the pundits believed would take years to really kick in. This hasn’t been the case. More and more smartphones and tablets are being equipped with mobile payment software. It makes buying as simple as using PayPal when you buy from a computer. The customer just presents his phone or tablet software and a payment is generated. Research shows that people using mobile payments buy more. This is another plus for small business. More mobile payments, more cash flow.

Are You Ready For E-Commerce?
It took the Internet five years to reach 100 million users. Compare that to radio and television and we see a proliferation of users that so transcends anything that came before that nothing in the history of human communication can compare.

Let Your Customers Advertise For You
Advertising can be expensive and is often impossible for new businesses, but customers can provide free advertising, if you manage them in the right way. Customers talk to others and anything positive that they take away from your business can very well end up being passed on to someone else. That is free advertising.

The Power of Word of Mouth
Social media can be important components of building a business, but word of mouth still wins. Discussion about brands and businesses takes place offline among people chatting all the time. People talk at work, they talk in social settings and they talk about businesses they deal with. The power of word of mouth should never be underestimated.

Know Your Critical Success Factors (CSFs)
Knowing the factors critical to your success (CSF’s) means knowing how to run your business far more efficiently profitably and by only doing (or prioritizing) those things that make the biggest difference to your customers and your bottom-line.

Why You Need a Mobile Website
54% of Canadian cell phone users use smartphones. Within a year more people will access the web using a smartphone than with a PC or a Mac. 87% of the world is now using mobile devices. 49% of mobile web users have made at least one purchase from their device in the past 6 months.

Tech Worth Watching
More small businesses are relying on tablets and smartphones than ever before. Companies are going mobile. The tablet got off to a slow start in the corporate world, but as users began bringing personal units into the workplace, their prominence grew. Today, tablets are becoming the new laptop for a growing number of professionals.

“USP”: Every Small Business Owner Should Have One
When advertising guru Rosser Reeves of Chicago-based Ted Bates & Company coined the phrase, Unique Selling Proposition, in the 1940s, he likely had no idea that USP would live on as a popular expression, even as a mantra, that companies often use to differentiate themselves from the competition. Its longevity might be connected to the simplicity of the concept behind USP.

Face To Face Still Matters
We live in a world of social media. More and more business is being conducted via Facebook or LinkedIn. But Facebook and LinkedIn do not replace the importance of face to face communication in business dealings.

Design Your Website to Sell
There are excellent website designers out there, and if you’re among the luckier ones, you’ll have tapped into some of that talent to create your site. Nevertheless, some of the nicest sites on the web don’t do a good enough job. A business site is there to sell. It may be direct selling or it may be a less direct approach of educating your visitors about all of your offerings and keeping it up to date. Regardless of the site’s purpose, it either works or it doesn’t.

Simple Marketing Strategies
Marketing for a small business can be expensive and it can eat into important resources. There are several simple, yet effective, marketing strategies that can work well for any small business. Staying in communication with existing clients and customers, and even prospective customers is a important first step.