Many large businesses keep flourishing, while some start to fail at some point along the way.
Here are four tips on how your company can continue to grow and prosper year after year.
1. A Successful Business Revolves Around a Shared
Purpose
Virtually every company has goals, whether those are about introducing new products, breaking previous sales records, or expanding operations to new geographic locations.
However, a successful business needs a purpose, too.
A purpose does a better job of getting customers and employees behind a company rather than a set of goals. And a shared purpose works even better.
Business management experts have long talked about how leaders can produce a compelling
corporate purpose by aligning a company’s values — or what it is and what it stands for — with its
value, or what it does and how this benefits others.
A shared purpose takes this sense of purpose even farther by engaging both customers and employees in the company’s vision. Sometimes, a shared purpose is reflected in the company’s mission statement.
Starbucks, for example, gives the following as it mission statement: “Our mission: to inspire and
nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”
Here is Coca-Cola’s mission statement:
“To refresh the world…
To inspire moments of optimism and happiness…
To create value and make a difference.”
Read also: How This Serial Entrepreneur Buys, Sells and Grows Businesses
2. Retaining Existing Talent
Employee retention is important for several reasons.
Not only does high employee turnover raise a company’s expenses
By focusing on retention, a business can keep talented employees with all levels of experience employed while improving their job satisfaction, performance and productivity.
Businesses can show appreciation to their workers by paying competitive rates, providing ample opportunities for advancement, and offering flexible benefits packages that empower individual workers.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is just one example of a successful company that supports employees in this way.
In particular, a forward-thinking company might allow employees to telecommute from home several days a week, offer access to health and fitness programs, provide generous maternity and paternity leave, and run voluntary mentoring programs for staff at all levels.
3. A Successful Business Addresses the Total ‘Customer Experience’
Superb customer service is certainly a must for any successful company. Customer service,
however, shouldn’t just be an action that happens when an unhappy customer contacts the company
after something has gone wrong.
Instead, the company should adhere to a proactive approach to the customer experience, taking actions at every touch point to optimize the customer journey and prevent customers from becoming dissatisfied.
Touchpoints can range all the way from company websites, TV commercials, sales calls and in-store transactions to multi-channel contacts through voice, text, chat
4. Outsourcing Services Outside The Core Competency Areas
Businesses can save considerable amounts of time and money by outsourcing services outside their
core areas of expertise to companies with the right facilities and skill sets already at hand.
One excellent example is the increasingly common practice of outsourcing customer service to a call center in the cloud with IVR systems in place.
Instead of building and maintaining their own customer contact centers, businesses can leverage state-of-the-art systems that provide a central point for managing inbound and outbound customer communications.
These systems can include advanced features such as preserving the context of communications
across channels, predicting call intent based on the customer’s recent transactions, adapting to each
caller’s experience level, and providing self-service for customers who prefer a DIY approach.
What’s more, a state-of-the-art call center in the cloud makes it easy to provide customer service
proactively by sending out frequent alerts and notifications to customers, as well as by offering
in-queue callback features for reducing potentially annoying wait times.
Conclusion
Businesses achieve ongoing success by continually responding to the needs of customers and
employees alike. By formulating and articulating a shared purpose, the company engages both
groups in its success. Outsourcing sources outside of the company’s core competency areas can be
a very effective way of helping the business to focus on what it does best.