Archives for June 2018

A critical part of running a successful business is managing customers. If customers are served properly and they leave your business premises happy and satisfied, your business can grow and continue to succeed. However, if customers leave upset, it can really hurt your business and bottom-line.

You probably already know this and have set up policies to ensure the highest standards of customer service in your business. But some customers can be difficult to handle. Some customers will be rude to you or your employees. Others will argue and demand they are served a certain way. Some may even be downright disrespectful and abusive. Whatever the case may be, you need to stay calm and handle difficult customers in a professional manner that protects your business and brand image.

So, how do you manage difficult customers and protect your business reputation?

How to Deal with Difficult Customers

According to online financing company for small businesses, Fundera, you can prepare for and navigate any situation coming your business’s way with the proper strategies and tactics.

“Identifying which customer type you’re dealing with is the first step to successfully handling the incident, writes Meredith Wood, Editor-in-Chief at Fundera, in a post on the official company blog.

The New York-based online lending company lists some common types of difficult customers a small business owner may encounter and offers handy tips to handle them successfully.

1. Indecisive Customer

This type of customer can’t seem to make a decision no matter how many questions they ask. The thing to do here is acknowledge the indecision. Avoid being pushy, says Fundera. Instead, help the customer make a decision by offering facts and possible best solutions for their needs.

2. Highly Critical Customer

Critical customers can be a huge challenge. They seem to know it all and are very critical of your suggestions. Be patient and attentive, advises Fundera. Don’t take anything personally. Use clarifying statements, weaving in new information and ideas about the product of which they are being critical.

3. Aggressive Customer

Now, this type of customer is angry and feels their needs should be prioritized above all others. Stay calm and don’t argue with them. Avoid responding to their outbursts or arguments in an agitated or emotional manner. Instead, show you understand. Then look for alternatives and offer other solutions.

More Tips on How to Deal with Difficult Customers

Check out more tips to manage other types of difficult customers and deliver superior customer service each time in the insightful infographic created by Fundera and shared below.

Remember, getting your customer service right the first time can give you an edge over competitors and drive more profits to your business.

Image: Fundera

The launch of Shopify Ping will allow merchants on the eCommerce platform to manage their business no matter where they are.

Ping is going to bring together customer conversations and marketing workflows on websites, Facebook Messenger or SMS along with an intelligent assistant called Kit on Apples’s iOS mobile platform. Shopify (NYSE: SHOP) is going after the mobile segment because half of its 600,000 merchants use the company’s mobile app.

These merchants are in the vast majority of cases small businesses who use the platform to process their eCommerce and in many cases also their retail payment system. With Ping, they will be able to communicate directly with their customers and respond to any demand request or issues on the spot to deliver a superior customer experience.

On the Shopify blog, the company said the goal of Ping is to provide a new way for merchants to run their business. It goes on to say, “Now you can spend less time shuffling between separate tools and more time on what matters most: serving your customers and growing your business.”

Conversations in One Place

With Shopify Ping, all of the conversations you have in your messaging apps will be available in one place under a single mobile app. This will allow you to quickly and easily respond to your customers and build better relationships. And best of all you can do it from anywhere because it is on your mobile device.

Currently, conversations you have on Facebook Messenger, Rep.ai, and Chatkit will be available in a single app.

What About Kit?

Kit is a built-in business assistant which will help you plan, create, and manage your marketing. According to Shopify, Kit will run your Facebook and Instagram ads, email marketing, retargeting campaigns and more based on the information you collect from the messages.

The virtual assistant can also execute complicated workflows including but not limited to product image touch-ups, find new products to add to your inventory and more.

Availability of Shopify Ping

Shopify Ping is available now for free on iOS, and you can download it here. If you have an Android device you will have to wait, but in the meantime, you can sign up here so you will be notified when it launches.

Image: Shopify

Business of all sizes exert considerable effort keeping track of what they spend and what they take in.  And many have employees who travel to meet with customers and prospects in order to drum up business. Managing all of these expenses is a tedious, but important task. Though manually keeping track of it all could be costing you money too.

I recently spoke with David Alexander, Vice President of Marketing and Market Development for SAP Concur, a leading provider of cloud-based integrated travel and expense management services and solutions.  He shared how using an automated platform for managing travel and expense tasks can help small businesses not only be more productive, but also provides insight into how they’re spending money — which can help them save money in the end.

Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear the full interview, click on the embedded SoundCloud player below.

Small Business Trends:  Maybe you can give me a little bit of your personal background.

David Alexander:  I’ve been here at SAP Concur for about a year and a half now. And my role here, I’m the Vice President of Small Business Marketing and Market Development. So I am essentially responsible for all of our pipeline and early conversations with existing customers and new business customers for all our prospects and customers under 1,000 employees.

Prior to that, as you know, where you and I met, I was at Microsoft for about 12-1/2 years and in various marketing and sales roles over at Microsoft as well.

Small Business Trends:  Maybe you can give us a little bit of a high level view of what Concur does.

David Alexander:  I think most customers out there would probably expect us to be a travel and expense company. I think that’s traditionally been where a lot of customers have gotten to know us. But we’re more than that. We’re really a travel, expenses, invoice company. We’re providing a number of different resources for our customers, specifically in the small business segment.

I like to think of them in what we deliver to customers in three big buckets. The first is the things that we help small businesses do to thrive and grow. That’s giving them automated tool sets. That’s giving them a tool to give them access to their spends, and enable them to spend more effectively. And that’s going to be the sweet spot where I would say our travel invoice and expense products fall into. And I would say that’s where a lot of customers are most in tune with what we deliver.

The second part though, would be add ons to those services, that’s helping our customers … what we say, like see the unseen, right? That’s giving them insights into data and into their business and their operational cashflow. So that’s going to help them ultimately identify risks before it finds them, which is really critical, especially for when we’re talking to customers in small business. And also help give them visibility into their end to end total spend management.

Then there’s the third piece, which is the area where we continue to grow as well, which is more of that “better together” story that we provide small businesses. So we’re trying to enable small businesses to give them a platform with SAP Concur as a solution where they can get some of the benefits of being a … similar to being a large enterprise, even though they are a small company with the collective buying power of other small businesses.

That would include products like our new Hipmunk offering, which you may be familiar with. And several of the solutions that we provide as part of our apps, and our end solution partners as well. So it’s kind of those three buckets is really where as an organization we live. It’s beyond that category of total spend management and into kind of a newer, bigger, broader category.

Small Business Trends:  How does being able to manage that through a system like yours in the cloud, what does that bring to the table?

David Alexander:  It brings a number of benefits, right? Like I said, the primary benefits are really enabling them to increase their financial viability, right? Help them … as we all know, the keys and the tools to being a successful small business is managing your spend effectively and helping to avoid some of the risk that would put you in a financially difficult situation, especially in those early years where it can be very, very difficult. And so our tools not only help you automate the processes that can become very time consuming … as we all know, as far as managing your expenses and managing your payments as a small business. We help automate that piece, which actually can help you get to your son’s baseball game or your daughter’s baseball game, right, for example.

We also enable you to start to get insights into pieces of your business that you may not have visibility into on a spend part. As we go and talk to a number of different small businesses, it’s actually fascinating when I talk to them to hear the stories of what they see as they start to dig deeper into their spend and start to find places which, number one, may be out of compliance. But number two, may also be places where they can start to identify risks for their business as well. It’s not just that negative identify compliance issues and risk issues. But it also gives you that visibility so you can go and optimize and spend in the best way possible as well.

Small Business Trends:  Yeah, I would assume that you use the term automate as part of this process. How does this data get entered in around travel and expense?

David Alexander:  Yeah, I would say the integration piece is absolutely critical. So integration with your payment systems and your ERP systems is absolutely critical. And then getting the information into the system actually starts to become very simple at that point for our customers, and we have a number of ways that you can go and access that information. For example, the mobile app, which is very, very convenient. I use this thing weekly, almost daily myself, whether it’s approving expenses or approving invoices that are coming through the system.

You can also use that to go and set up your trips and manage the trips that you may have as well if you’re part of a broader organization or traveling a lot. So, the mobile component is key to our story as well. We know specifically for small businesses, a lot of what we do every day as small businesses is be out on the road, deal with customers, and that mobile component really helps you to be productive, keep your business moving forward no matter where you are.

Small Business Trends:  Does this also help in terms of maybe allowing employees to optimize their loyalty points or loyalty program stuff? Is there a way that this actually helps employees not only do the mundane, but also optimize their opportunities to get rewards?

David Alexander:  Sure. And that’s kind of that big community component I talked about before where as being part of the SAP Concur community, you start to gain access to different partners like American Express and ADP that you may not have had access to discounts previously. Additionally you’ll find, to directly answer your question about kind of consolidation of loyalty points and those kinds of things, our Triplink app actually does a lot of those things and really helps you manage your travel and your spend and all of your various travel suppliers in a single application.

This is part of the One-on-One Interview series with thought leaders. The transcript has been edited for publication. If it’s an audio or video interview, click on the embedded player above, or subscribe via iTunes or via Stitcher.

The industrial world has been in the throes of digitization for well over a decade. Primarily through enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems (MES), critical planning, scheduling, warehousing, inventory management, and logistics processes have been automated and simplified. But these gains have been restricted to technology silos, supporting separate functions of the factory rather than improving the performance of the plant — and its extended supply chain — in a broader way.

Those days may finally be in the past, as manufacturers now have a golden opportunity to take advantage of digitization’s promised outsized benefits. The advent of complex smart sensors, artificial intelligence, big data pools, and robotics, combined with the vast connections of the cloud, is heralding a new era for manufacturers, marked by totally integrated factories that can rapidly tailor products to individual customer needs and respond instantly to shifting demands and trends. This fully digital factory can be a catalyst for a kinetic growth agenda delivering gains in productivity, financial and operational performance, output, and market share as well as improved control and visibility throughout the supply chain. The factories also foster improvements in safety, environmental sustainability, and the rightsizing of global factory footprints.

Sometimes known as Industry 4.0 (the first three industrial waves were built upon steam-engine mechanization, electricity and the assembly line, and the emergence of computers), the digital factory is a broad network featuring equipment from the catalog of the Internet of Things, integrated into an end-to-end ecosystem. This ecosystem includes internal functions — for instance, sales, procurement, engineering, and R&D — and external players, including suppliers and customers.

The contours of the digital factory are still evolving as technology advances, but in today’s nascent reckoning, it looks something like Fujitsu’s plant in Augsburg, Germany. At this site, an all-encompassing information technology backbone controls a supply “supermarket” where components for Fujitsu’s computers and other hardware products are stored. As customer orders are received, parts are picked for assembly by robots, loaded onto self-driving electric vehicles — which make up what’s known as the logistics train — and carried out to production stations using just-in-time and just-in-sequence processes. The specifications of each assembled product may differ and dynamic screens show workers precisely which components belong to each order and display detailed work instructions. Changes to product features can be made on the fly throughout the assembly process by on-site design and engineering teams, whose members are also available to respond to late shifts in customer requirements. Downtime is minimized because predictive maintenance procedures, based on historical and real-time data for each piece of equipment, automatically address incipient problems before a breakdown. The entire production process is paperless, the factory leaves virtually no carbon footprint, and the daily output of 12,000 PCs, laptops, and workstations and more than 1,000 servers ranks Fujitsu’s Augsburg plant among the most productive and cost-effective in the world.

Digitization Meets Customization

Although it’s exceptional, the Fujitsu site just hints at the possibilities for digital factories. Indeed, the overall slow adoption of digital factory concepts can be seen in a recent PwC survey of 200 German manufacturers (German companies were examined as a proxy for advanced manufacturers globally because they have a well-earned reputation for production innovation). Although more than 90 percent of survey respondents said they had earmarked money for digital factories, these investments were overwhelmingly for stand-alone or only partially integrated technologies. A mere 6 percent of companies categorized their factories as being “fully digitized.”

However, perhaps the most intriguing takeaway from the PwC survey was that despite their timidity about digitization, manufacturers are beginning to recognize its strategic potential, which previously tended to be overlooked. That’s not to say that bread-and-butter tactical considerations are ever far from manufacturers’ minds; 98 percent of respondents still view digitization somewhat blandly as a path for increasing production efficiency. But at the same time, a whopping 74 percent of companies named regionalization (being able to set up or expand factories in markets where their products are sold and where opportunities exist to widen revenue streams through customized products and improved service levels) as a primary reason for digital investments.

Moreover, in a sharp departure from the recent past, the possibility of being able to immediately tailor products to match customer preferences and to offer customers the option to “build” their own products appears to be driving production decisions more strongly than slashing labor costs. Indeed, only about 20 percent of respondents now plan to relocate manufacturing facilities to low-wage countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America; nearly 80 percent are looking at Western Europe (where their largest customer bases are) for new digital factory capacity. Evidence of this trend can be found in Adidas’s new “speed factories” — one established last year in Ansbach, Germany, and another this year in Atlanta. In these facilities, automated production lines, managed by human programmers and fed by networks that oversee the sportswear company’s supply chain, are able to make a pair of expensive, customized cross-trainers from start to finish in about five hours. In Adidas’s low-cost, less digital Asian factories, this process can take several weeks. According to the company, the speed factories will more than pay for themselves in the next few years when they are scaled up. In particular, the speed factories are expected to slash the long lead time for debuting new shoe designs and allow Adidas to react quickly to about-faces in customer preferences.

Modernizing the Technology Spine

Some of the technology spine in digital factories involves relatively old-fashioned software (primarily legacy ERP/MES systems or even MS Excel) that was originally acquired to perform basic planning and address operational inefficiencies. By joining these isolated data and analytical networks, via sensors and the cloud, to a common infrastructure, it is possible for components, machines, production managers, transportation vehicles, and assembly-line workers to continually communicate with one another and the extended ecosystem in real time — greatly shortening the distance and time from raw material to finished product and facilitating proactive equipment maintenance.

Much of the impact of digital manufacturing will come from significant advances that are still evolving and that postdate the traditional ERP era — for example, robots that can learn through repetition rather than programming. This equipment can give workers the opportunity to train machines quickly to tackle multiple tasks, flexibly shifting robots from job to job as specific factory activities take precedence.

Another example is drones, which can be used for rapid transport of a missing part to an assembly station and for visual surveillance of plant and equipment performance. In a somewhat more open-ended application, Austrian automotive supplier Magna Steyr employs drones in its plant in Graz, Germany, to independently fly through the assembly line, scanning materials labels to compare against available stock in the warehouse and provide information to the network for managing factory inventory. Magna Steyr has also embraced an intriguing component of the digital factory whose potential value is just beginning to emerge: namely, the digital twin, or a virtual doppelganger of the plant, including form, functions, and chemical and physical processes. With this approach, new factories can be designed and engineered in three dimensions, and potential glitches and inefficiencies may be remedied before the plant is put into service. After the plant is on-line, real-world performance and activity data is fed back into the digital twin, which can be monitored and adjusted to continuously optimize processes and maintain equipment at peak efficiency.

Understanding the Obstacles

One of the more intractable obstacles to a successful digital factory is the makeup of the workforce itself. This type of advanced production approach represents an entirely new model of human–machine interaction, one that not many workers — or manufacturers — are prepared for. In our view, understanding the impact on the people in the company is at least as important as calculating the financial benefit of the digital factory, in part because the former will ultimately impinge on the latter. Employees who feel marginalized by the emphasis on new technologies or who are not equipped to work in that environment will compromise the factory’s chances for success.

Purely from this perspective, companies are clearly aware that they are not ready for digital factories. According to our survey, around half of manufacturers believe that their employees are not open to digital change, and an equal proportion feel that their company lacks a truly digital culture. Part of the solution is to retrain the company’s ablest workers to be more data oriented and conversant in programming factory automation equipment; another is to support government-based apprenticeship programs and recruit employees who better match the requirements of a digital factory. In other words, manufacturers cannot afford to be passive but instead must lead the charge toward reorienting the skill sets of their current and future employees.

But that alone is not enough. Top management must actively support the move toward digitization and, very publicly within the organization, build trust and acceptance for the new strategy by offering employees a convincing narrative of how they will benefit from the technologies.

Executives could stress that workers will be relieved of tasks that are highly repetitive, physically difficult, and unsafe while improving their accuracy and productivity. They may enjoy the benefits of a cleaner environment inside and outside the more ecologically sound factory. And their employment and salary prospects may actually improve. Approximately half of the companies responding to the PwC survey expect wages in digital factories to increase, and they believe that older employees will be able to stay at their jobs longer; 86 percent expect that overall, the number of hours employees work will stay the same. This suggests that companies will be sharing some of their new gains in efficiency and revenue with their workforce.

There also may be ways to monetize the data generated by the manufacturing process itself. The implications of this are profound. With a digital factory, instead of focusing solely or primarily on production, some companies may have opportunities to increase profit margins and customer share in the lucrative after-sales market as well as tap entirely new business sectors. Importantly, the digital factory ecosystem must include an integrated digital supply chain that is fully networked and transparent to all the players involved — from the suppliers of raw materials, components, and parts, to the transporters of those supplies and finished goods, and finally to the end customers.

Because successful digital factory applications are transformational, don’t expect a quick payback as might occur in a more isolated technology upgrade, such as adding a single robot to the assembly line. Although the benefits of a digital factory far outpace the gains from one-off technology improvements, it is likely that the return on investment for a digital factory could take as long as five years. But that just adds to the urgency for manufacturers to get started on the path toward transforming their plants now. Think about it: In 2023, is it even possible that industrial factories will look anything like they look today? Now consider the competitive position your company will be in if it is the last to realize that the factory of the future has arrived.