SMART Service Desk Works With You To Care About Your Customers

Before you start thinking that customer service is isolated to one department within your company, allow us broaden your business view of customer service. 

If customer service is merely isolated to the people answering your calls, emails and chats, you will miss the mark you are striving for 100%. Caring customer service must permeate the entire organization, inside and out and from top to bottom.  Here are seven characteristics that are essential to caring customer service…

Stay In Touch With Your Customers
Following up with new customers can be a great help for navigating the welcoming and keeping processes.

Use Thank You Notes
A handwritten note makes it so memorable. Writing an amazing thank you note doesn’t take long at all, but the impact that it has is huge in today’s digital world.

Personalize Your Business
A local restaurant takes time to ask customers a little bit about themselves before serving them. They then prepare a custom dessert plate based off of the customer’s interests or anything notable about them.

Never Let Red Tape Get in the Way
Never use a policy excuse to side step your customer’s needs or finding a true solution that corrects a problem.

Really Sweat the Small Stuff
Nordstrom’s stellar service reputation is one case study where the reality lives up to the hype. From their infamous employee handbook to the celebrated tales of the staff’s service overtures, it is clear that Nordstrom is a company that prides itself on loving customers.

Seize The Opportunities
This might seem like strange advice at first, but when it comes to building reciprocity with customers and a reputation for exceptional customer service around your business, the key element is surprise.


Always Make Things Right
The common theme in these memorable customer service stories is businesses that go above and beyond to make a difficult situation right for a customer.

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is a great start to creating your very own customer service legends. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com
http://smartservicedesk.com

Growing Your Business Slow Or Fast… Which Is Best?

In contrast to the sluggish world of big-business bureaucracy, young companies some of which became media darlings, think Facebook and Instagram, are celebrated for the hurried pace of their growth. Clearly, this approach works for some businesses and some entrepreneur personality types, but not every company subscribes to this ethos of a headlong race for success.

 If you have big growth plans for your business, consider this: it’s not as easy as adding money or people. It’s a common mistake; lured by potential dollar signs, business leaders adopt a full-speed-ahead approach, mindless of the obstacles that arise along the way. It may be enough momentum to keep things afloat for a brief period of time, but eventually the lack of understanding of how to balance growth with stability will catch up with them. And the results aren’t pretty, the business suffers, investors suffer and employees suffer. No to mention your customer base that you let down. Dissatisfied customer are never good for any business or should we say business in general?

Successful business owners and managers know that innovation is the lifeblood of company survival and economic growth. It’s this agility and willingness to embrace the new and novel that not only drives growth, but also makes them an attractive target for investment, partnerships or acquisition.

Along the way, accept that you’re going to make mistakes and encounter obstacles. The best operators are highly resilient and cultivate a culture of responsiveness and adaptability. Be ready to openly acknowledge the challenge, set a new course, and rapidly recover. But never forget, every mistake you make is a learning opportunity for future growth.\

There is no hard and fast rule that only those who open a new business full-time with a whole complement of employees and neat office space will succeed. And starting with a “fat” bank account is not a guarantee of success either. You can opt to do it slowly and make a gradual transition of being an employee to becoming your own boss. Going slow gives you time to think, plan and work on existing and potential problems, which should help lessen your anxiety.

As you operate your business, learn the operations of the business and seeing if you can handle all the variables of business ownership or management while making it grow. Smaller businesses have proven to be a great way to learn successful methods, as well as a vehicle for ironing out the many small, often overlooked, challenges and details.

Slow or fast, which is best for you? One thing is for sure... treat your customers like they matter the most.

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is a great start to creating your very own customer service legends. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk

600 West Ray Road

Suite D-3

Chandler Arizona 85225

602-235-0975

info@smartservicedesk.com

http://smartservicedesk.com

How Are You Growing Your Business?

Growing your business is just one way to insure that you stay in business. An increase in sales should lower overall costs per sale and that is good for the bottom line. What can you do to grow your business?

Open another location. This is often the first way business owners approach growth. If you feel confident that your current business location is under control, consider expanding by opening a new location.

Offer your business as a franchise or business opportunity. Franchising your business will allow for growth without requiring you to manage the new location. This will help to maximize the time you spend improving your business in other ways, too.

License your product. This can be an effective, low-cost growth medium, particularly if you have a service product or branded product. Licensing also minimizes your risk and is low cost in comparison to the price of starting your own company to produce and sell your brand or product. To find a licensing partner, start by researching companies that provide products or services similar to yours.

Diversify. Diversifying is an excellent strategy for growth, because it allows you to have multiple streams of income that can often fill seasonal voids and, of course, increase sales and profit margins. Here are a few of the most common ways to diversify:

        Sell complementary products or services

        Teach adult education or other types of classes

        Import or export yours or others' products

        Become a paid speaker or columnist

Target other markets. Your current market is serving you well. Are there others? Probably. Use your imagination to determine what other markets could use your product.

Win a government contract. One of the best ways to grow your business is to win business from the government. Work with your local SBA and Small Business Development Center to help you determine the types of contracts available to you.

Merge with or acquire another business. Two is always bigger than one. Investigate companies that are similar to yours, or that have offerings that are complementary to yours, and consider the benefits of combining forces or acquiring the company.

Expand globally. To do this, you'll need a foreign distributor who can carry your product and resell it in their domestic markets. You can locate foreign distributors by scouring your city or state for a foreign company with a U.S. representative.

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is a great start to creating your very own customer service legends. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com

http://smartservicedesk.com

Do You Know When To Change Your Business?

When do you make changes to your business model? Many owners and managers only make changes to their business model when they see a negative impact on their bottom line. Depending on the forces acting on a business that may actually be too late.

In some cases change renders a business model obsolete.  If you need an example, think of the change in the payphone industry brought on by the use of personal phones. Yes, the impact actually occurred over a period of many years. Little can or has been done to return that once thriving business to the former glory days.  Pay phones have joined the buggy whip of industries that have been come little more than museum exhibits.

As buyers have become more “sugar” conscious the ice cream shop has felt a slow-down. Other businesses have needed to change how they reach customers in ways that a few years ago didn’t even exist.

Right now the cable and satellite industries see their customer base moving to the new subscription services that feed not only Television but all of their connected devices. Some say the customer base is not only moving but fleeing to a lower cost model for their entertainment.  The lone holdouts seem to be some sports fans who can only see “all” of their events on the feed from these providers.

What do you look at to insure you are meeting your client’s needs?  Sales dollars? Do trade journals provide all the information you need about the direction of your business field? Do you collect your customer feedback along with any after sale complaints? How do you collect the data from pre-sale questions? Does the pre-sale inquiries show a trend leading to new product or service ideas?

What do you have in place to watch how new and developing technologies may be entering the customer needs and wants pool of philosophies. Do you lose sleep at night wondering how the next big idea will reshape your business model?

The time for changing your business model isn't when you're already overhauling your IT infrastructure or undertaking some other huge initiative. You would have not gone into a rebuild if you were going through a regulation change and changing your point-of-sale system at the same time. You don't land all of the planes at the airport at the same time. Just not good ideas. Know when too much change is too much.

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is a great start to creating your very own customer service legends. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com
http://smartservicedesk.com

How Big Does Your Business Feel?

There are many ways when being a small business can give you an advantage as you seek to remain efficient or win customers. Other times appearing to be larger than you actually are is a wiser move. How can your business create the impression of being bigger? Here are four ideas that may help.

Incorporation
An incorporated business is perceived to be a bigger company. Incorporation can be a quick, inexpensive and relatively easy task – it might even enable you to pay less tax and take more out of your business. Working out roughly whether you would be better off as an LLC company is simple enough to do, although you should seek specific advice from a qualified accountant before making definite plans to change the structure of your business.

Grow Your Brand
Successful big businesses realize the importance of having a world-class brand and making full use of its potential. Branding is much more than your choice of corporate colors, typefaces or catchy strapline, of course. Branding is best defined as the experience customers have when they engage with your business, so it extends to such things as how you dress and how you answer the phone or communicate by email. Your business might be small, but that doesn’t mean you should have limited ambitions. Having a brilliant brand can help you to punch above your weight.

Website Design Is Your Canvas
On the whole, large companies have good websites. Having budget to commission a top agency helps, of course. When potential customers want to find out more about you, chances are they will look online, which is where you can come unstuck if your website looks like a basic DIY job, complete with gaudy colors, poorly chosen typefaces, terrible imagery or badly written copy.  If you want to appear bigger, now could be the perfect time to improve your website or (budget permitting) get a brand new one done. You might be a small business, but there’s no reason you cannot have a website that makes a big impression – often for a fraction of the money spent by the ‘big boys’. While you’re at it, make sure your email address looks the part, too. People who work for larger businesses don’t normally use free webmail addresses (eg Gmail, Yahoo! or AOL) for business emails.

Use An Impressive Address
Including your address on your website could immediately show that yours is a home-based business. Even if not, potential customers can quickly search online to find your exact location, and if that’s in a residential area, they’re likely to work out you’re a small home-based business. Paying for a PO Box address can provide a solution or you could rent a trading address, perhaps in a more desirable area of town. There’s nothing wrong with being a home-based business, of course, but bigger companies aren’t usually operated from someone’s home.

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is a great start to creating your very own customer service legends. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com
http://smartservicedesk.com

We Want To Do Business With Your Business

If you are looking for a IT Service Management software solution for your business you want to know many things about that software product.

Is it scalable, so that it will work now and then continue to grow and support my business needs in the future?

How is easy is it to load, implement and use? How quickly will my employees be able to use the software to support our customer’s needs?

Of course the investment your company needs to make to bring this solution online can be a primary concern.

Considering how customizable the SMART Service Desk software is the pricing is not like buying a new car where looking, liking and purchasing is a very set process and amount.

SMART Service Desk software enables comprehensive, best practice based Incident / Case management processes via intuitive, easily adopted, enterprise scale web technology. Integrates core service and support components into one complete Help Desk solution which help you to reduce service costs and increase service delivery operational efficiency. Manage service issues from the initial call; too complete job and service restoration. With SMART Service Desk you can reduce call volumes and encourage user self-service by letting users search FAQs, approved solutions, and workarounds. You can use Increase customer / user satisfaction ratings using surveys.

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management software can be either or both a desktop or cloud service based for your solutions and what will be best for your individual business needs.

We think that our price structure will be both surprising and very affordable for your small to medium sized business.

Our solutions are not only scalable but we have different solutions that can be a better fit for your specific business needs. Our SMART Service Desk Plus delivers a customer-friendly IT self-service portal, powerful dashboards and reporting, and superior mobility to your organization. With SMART, IT organizations can support ITIL® best practices for IT Service Management (ITSM), consolidating the service desk function with the processes that underpin the efficient delivery and support of service, With PinkVERIFY® certified ITIL® processes in SMART Service Desk Plus; you can be assured of the best practices you will implement for your process and workflow.

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is a great start to creating your very own customer service legends. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com
http://smartservicedesk.com

Customers Care … Does Your Business Care?

Does that headline’s question sound just a bit harsh? In recent surveys customer often vent about the direct interaction with a business that leaves them wondering if that business really cares about them as a customer.

Can I relate a recent story that came to my attention? A customer needed to put a shelf in her laundry room and the width of the area was 71 inches. When she approached her local home improvement store to cut one inch of the width of a standard 6 foot (72 inch) board she was told they didn’t (wouldn’t) do that. They lost a sale… they lost many potential future sales… and they let down a person who needed a simple fix. Did they care? Did they want that person to spend $50 on a power saw for a single cut?

Some business seem to feel that customer care or customer service only occurs post sale and nothing could be further from the truth.

The question in the above case could be that the individual employee let down both the customer and the company. But, the company may never get another chance to make the employee (if it was) error right. Does this happen in your business?

Nationally there are very few (2 or 3) home improvement companies. Do you want to guess which one this was? OK, was it Orange or was it Blue?

Poor customer service can negatively impact a business in a variety of ways. This is especially true for small businesses that rely on repeat business and positive word-of-mouth advertising for its success. In addition to running the risk of alienating current customers with sub-standard service levels, chronically poor service can impact the business’ potential for attracting new customers as well.

A reputation for poor service can be hard to shake. It can keep other businesses from partnering or working with you. It also can turn away good employment candidates who might assume that if customers are treated poorly, employees are treated badly as well.

Customers who experience poor service levels often tell their friends and family members about the bad experience to warn them away. This will cost your business potential customers. People will have already formed a negative opinion of your business before ever setting foot in your door.

Customers Care … Does Your Business Care?

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is a great start to creating your very own customer service legends. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk

600 West Ray Road

Suite D-3

Chandler Arizona 85225

602-235-0975

info@smartservicedesk.com

http://smartservicedesk.com