Welcome to Your Operations Solved, for Wednesday, April 14th, 2021
I'm your host, Channing Norton, of PC Solutions, and this is the Eleventh episode of our show,
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With that out of the way, let's get started on today's headline
Washington state has voted to dismantle Community Broadband Restrictions, paving the way for municipal internet.
So, Many states, municipalities, and cities have adopted laws limiting the ability of local governments to create internet providers to service their areas in the way that these areas have jurisdiction over their power and water utilities. This comes at the behest of the ISP industry, basically spectrum, comcast, and ATT, who see community run internet as very serious competition to their otherwise stagnant, monopolistic position in their respective markets. For washington state, this means the potential in 5 years time to have faster, cheaper, more reliable internet, which is valuable. We see that areas with community broadband become Technological Meccas, with lots of them building up a community of tech startups and major tech companies regional facilities VERY quickly after implementation, leading to general economic growth, and lots of benefits for existing businesses in the area that serve such companies, primarily the professional services and consulting industries. Better, more reliable, more available, and cheaper internet, which this heralds, also allows more people to work from home, which, prior to 2020, was not a significant issue for many business, but has surely become one. This regulatory change is the first step in bringing about all of these positive changes for affected areas. This has large implications for those outside of Washington as well. For over a decade, ever since Chattanoga, TN, became one of the first cities to implement community broadband, states and cities have been adopting these regulations banning themselves from doing the same and reaping the benefits, at the behest of these Internet Giants. This is a sign that the tide is turning in this matter, and we could see other states and cities follow suit, at a time when faster internet is essential to everyone for both businesses and consumers as the work from home revolution continues. In short, this is the first step to lower internet costs and faster, more reliable internet for offices in washington, and a tech boom in areas that develop such municipal broadband, as well as consumers in those areas, and possibly an indication of what is to come for those of us not operating out of Washington State. Finally, it can present a valuable business opportunity for those who could serve such a tech boom, especially if they get set up early, before the physical infrastructure does, in areas removing these restrictions.
With that done, let's look at today's Solution
Better Customer Relations Management for a better customer experience.
So, You want to be able to communicate with your existing customers, especially if you are in the professional services, medical, or business to business space. You need to examine how your Customer Relations Management system is set up, and see if you are utilizing it to its full potential. Customer relationship management goes by many names depending on industry. For the Medical space, it's analog is the Practice management system. For my industry, IT services, it's a ticketing system. Fundamentally, this is the software that connects you to your customers. Every business not serving the consumer directly, and many that are, likely have some form of CRM hiding somewhere. Let's look at what it should be doing for your business specifically in regard to your current book of business.
It should serve as a single source of truth in your business operations. Your CRM should state clearly and unambigiously, the status of every customer, every communication with that customer, and every bit of work previously performed or currently being performed for that customer, and the status of work planned for the future. This way, there is never ambiguity or question as to if a task got performed for a customer, you can always check your CRM. There's a saying in the IT industry "If it's not in a ticket, it didn't happen." If you live this, or its equivalent for your business, you will find a dramatic reduction in errors in work performed, rework, and the like. Furthermore, you'll be collecting valuable data in one, hopefully easy to access place to construct metrics and KPIs off of, which, even if you don't use it now, will be valuable going forward.
Your CRM should be the hub of all business data, even data collected elsewhere. This is a part of the previous point, but a good CRM system should be able to be a hub for business data, and pull information from other software like your inventory system, to serve as a single pane of glass for most in your operations. It should also be able to push data out to other systems like your billing and accounting systems, to keep data in sync across your organization, and reduce data entry tasks. Thereby saving you labor and money.
Automation, automation, automation. With your CRM being a data processing pipeline that pulls in data, gets that data worked on by your staff, and pushes it out to other systems, there's lots of potential to automate some of these processing tasks, or tasks beyond that. For instance, I mentioned in point 2 pushing data to your billing and accounting systems. Any good CRM with billing functionality should be able to automatically calculate the proper amount of an invoice, and send invoices out to customers automatically when needed, along with reminders, late fees, and the like, allowing you to almost completely eliminiate labor involved in accounts receivables.
Customer self servicing. Customers like being able to assist themselves without talking to anyone. You also like customers being able to utilize your services without needing as much expensive interaction with your staff while still going away satisfied. You can use the capabilities we've already covered to implement systems on your website or elsewhere for customers to request and sometimes even recieve work without any interaction with your staff at all, which then gets pushed directly into your CRM, with no additional input. This can dramatically reduce the amount of time spent by your staff taking and fulfilling orders.
In this respect, you can use your CRM predictively, to forecast future demand and supply, kind of like we discussed in our conversation about inventory management several weeks ago. This can help you plan staffing levels to ensure fewer wasted hours of labor.
Finally, we can help keep our customers for longer by improving conversations with them. The example of this is automated feedback forms. Imagine if, after every order, your customers got a satisfaction survey. You'd hear about a lot more pain from your customers that can be fixed before those customers become former customers, allowing you to retain them longer and keep capturing their revenue, all without significant additional labor.
All of this just scratches the surface of what you can do with your CRM, but we've seen how we can use ours to save time and incrase profitability at every stage of our customer journey. This is a topic we will come back to again and again in our podcast, so be sure to stay tuned. Next episode, we will talk about how these CRMs can potentially help you acquire more sales in addition to getting more profit out of your existing customer base.
That's our show for today, thank you so much for listening. Tomorrow, join us for a conversation about what your CRM should be doing for your sales team in building new customers. In the meantime, check us out on the web at www.YourOperationsSolved.com, where you can join our newsletter, and opt to be notified of all our uploads. I will see you next time.