Casual Articles - Business

5 Steps To Making Your Customer Happy
Customers are demanding quality products and services again after the turnaround from the recession of the 1980s. They can no more be seduced into buying just anything through discounts and slick marketing methods. The goal in customer satisfaction lies in making customers feel that their needs have been met.Experience with Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 rule tells us that 80% of the value of business results from only 20% of targeted efforts. This implies that keeping your current customers happy is 8-10 times cheaper/easier than gaining new customers. Get more return on your efforts by focusing on repeat customers. Here are 5 steps you can take to keep your customers happy:1. Put Your Customer First And Identify The Best One: Customer focus is a must to begin with and no matter what you do, you are at the service of your customer. Customer service begins with your employees following this rule. Gathering customer information like birthdays, their preferences, habits, spending pro

m -- so I want to leave absolutely no room to lose my data. For my external backup, I use a 30 GB portable drive made by Iomega, www.iomega.com, and for my online backup, I have 10 GB of space that I pay for at XDrive, www.xdrive.com.

5 Ideas for Writing Effective Sales Letters
Sales letters, sent via e-mail or snail mail, are an effective and inexpensive way to get your message out. Even if your letter goes out to thousands of people, it can give the feel of a personal communication — IF you write it in a direct and conversational tone.To get your creative juices flowing, here are five tried and true formulas that can work for either e-mail or printed letters.1. Tell a story — from either your point of view or a customer's.Example: '"When I started my own business, I was very nervous about keeping my books. I'm not a numbers person and wanted nothing to do with it! Then I purchased 'EZ-CASH-BOOKS' software. Instantly, all my accounting "dirty work" disappeared. I gained instant peace of mind, and now I can focus on my real job — finding and keeping customers!"Copy written in a story format has great appeal. By telling a short story that relates to the reader's situation, you create empathy with her. People are also familiar wi

I'm a recent Hurricane Rita evacuee and survived the evacuation and the ensuing hurricane. Running from a hurricane isn't something I've ever had to do before, nor is it something I'd ever like to do again. However, as a solo business owner, I'm quite thankful that I have a virtual business. The fact that I'm virtual and can operate from anywhere that there's electricity and phone service was of great help to me in this disaster and helped me reopen my business a scant 4 days after the landfall of Hurricane Rita.

As a solopreneur, what can you do to make your business disaster-proof? It seems that we have an increasing number of hurricanes making landfall in the coastal states, and add to that an increased number of other types of natural disasters like tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, mud slides, ice storms, blizzards, etc. makes me think that there is no ideal location in which to operate a business. Now accepting that natural disasters are here to stay, here's what I learned from my hurricane evacuation that helped me get my business back up and running quickly:

1. Know the location of your vital papers. You should be able to quickly put into a folder the following for you and your family: your marriage license, birth certificate, social security card, driver's license or state ID card, car title/mortgage info and insurance contact info, house deed/mortgage info and insurance contact info, employee ID card, and apartment lease or copy of a utility bill. In a disaster, you'll be asked to prove where you live and that you are who you claim you are, especially when applying for disaster assistance.

2. Have an online backup of all of your computer data. I back up my computer in two ways--to an external portable hard drive as well as to an online backup service. I use both because my files are my livelihood -- I would be dead in the water without them -- so I want to leave absolutely no room to lose my data. For my external backup, I use a 30 GB portable drive made by Iomega, www.iomega.com, and for my online backup, I have 10 GB of space that I pay for at XDrive, www.xdrive.com.

Eliminate the Cost, Hassle and Time Associated With Printing and Distributing Enterprise Reports
Like most large businesses, the magazine relies on large reports to distribute information to manage their business. They produce over 1,000 unique financial reports in their central data center for use by their staff around the world. These reports are currently printed on large production printers then physically distributed to their offices around the country.This process proved to be very inefficient and costly. The cost of producing these reports strains the company’s IT budget, both in terms of paper, direct printer costs (including acquisition and maintenance) printer supplies and in terms of personnel costs associated with the delivering of reports around the company. In addition, the cost of physical distribution (courier) also added to the inefficiencies.Secondly, the availability of the report information to the end user was too slow for today’s business climate. Business processes were being delayed while the knowledge worker waited for the report they needed

4 days after the landfall of Hurricane Rita.

Inventoritis: The New Buzz Word in Marketing
Have you ever heard the word “inventoritis?” The first time I heard it from one of my friends, I can’t help but think of etymology. I love knowing the origins of words. When I was younger, I used to have a pocketbook of etymology. According to Online Etymology Dictionary, “Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.” My memory is still fresh remembering “ingress” (c.1420, from L. ingressus "entrance," from pp. stem of ingredi "to step into, enter) vs. “digress” and “vicarious” (adj 1: experienced at secondhand; "read about mountain climbing and felt vicarious excitement"). Therefore, when this friend of mine asked me about the word “inventoritis”, what automatically my brain told me was the etymology of “itis” which is noun suffix denoting diseases characterized by inflammation, Mod.L., from Gk. -itis, fem. of adj. suffix -ites "pertaining to." Fem. because it was used with fem. noun nosos "disease," e.g.

disasters are here to stay, here's what I learned from my hurricane evacuation that helped me get my business back up and running quickly:

Keep Your Brand Consistent with a Brand Handbook
Your brand is your promise of value. It is often said that good brands have three primary characteristics: they are authentic, consistent, and differentiated. Of the three characteristics, staying consistent may be the hardest thing to do.The challenge resides with people and discipline. Unfortunately, as your firm grows it becomes harder and harder to keep your brand consistent since everyone needs to believe in and support the brand. All employees must sing the same song, so to speak. They must honor the brand by using the same tag line, by treating customers with a minimum of respect, by using the same logo, and by dressing appropriately in the work environment. In practice, it is a lot like herding cats.By discipline, I mean to suggest that people need to know what to do. Of course, the brand starts with the leadership of the company and the vision communicated. Yes, all employees need to on board with the company mantra. But, it goes beyond cheerleading and mission stat

nfo, employee ID card, and apartment lease or copy of a utility bill. In a disaster, you'll be asked to prove where you live and that you are who you claim you are, especially when applying for disaster assistance.

Accountant To Leader
Let’s face it, Accountants are amongst the most talented people either working for or providing services to businesses. They have successfully got through a set of demanding and competitive exams and got a whole lot of knowledge. They have huge potential yet so often never fully exploit it. Why is that? From my own experience, there are a number of reasons:1. They focus their development on technical accounting2. They don't get clear on what they want to achieve professionally3. They spend most of their time producing numbers rather than contributing to business success. An article in the December 2006 edition of Financial Management suggests as much as 80% of their time is spent producing numbers4. They don't promote themselves and the contributions they can make. It is all very well having lots of people who can come up with creative ideas. Good Accountants can help non financial managers translate it into something tangible5. They don't ask the

3. Create an file with vital contact information. I copied a file with all of my usernames and passcodes for websites, bank accounts, etc. to my USB flash drive (a key chain-like device with 512 MB or 1 GB of memory -- I use one from Lexar, www.lexar.com) as well as the physical and email addresses and all phone numbers of friends, clients and family members -- anyone I needed to contact during the evacuation period. You'll also want to take along your children's school contact info to be able to check on the current operating status of your child's school, as well as local media website info. My lifeline in getting current information about my home city was through the websites of Beaumont's newspapers and television and radio stations. If you keep your contact info in Outlook and have a Yahoo account, Yahoo offers a synchronization feature in which you can synchronize all of your info in Outlook to your Yahoo account. Find out more here: http://help.yahoo.com/help/intsync. All you need to access your info in Yahoo is a computer and to know your username and password.

4. Know the primary office/computer equipment that will be required to get your business up and running. I had operated with a minimal amount of my office equipment recently due to my being a house sitter for a friend for 2 months. So, upon receiving the mandatory evacuation order, I knew in relatively short order that to run my business, I needed my desktop PC, flat panel monitor, wireless mouse and keyboard, speakers, modem and associated cords, backup portable external hard drive, office telephone and associated cords, laptop computer, printer, box of software, and scanner. It sounds like a great deal of equipment, but I packed it all into 2 boxes from UHaul (1 small and 1 medium box). I knew I could work for at least 2 months comfortably with just this equipment.

5. Primary paper files for your clients/business. I have 2 sets of files -- ones for the immediate short-term that I use frequently and my lateral file drawer files that are primarily reference files. I grabbed the contents of the two drawers of my 2-drawer

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Good customer service is an easy way to keep ahead of your competition. Learn how even customer refunds can have a huge upside when it comes to profits. Company’s that are able to see the seed of opportunity in customer refunds will have cheer leading loyal customers who will be good log term assets.

Promoting your website with articles is one of the most effective ways to get traffic to you website.There are many reasons why article marketing is so effective.

If you put your head in the sand then it is not likely you will know what is happening in the marketplace, especially when it comes to your own products and services. Take some time to look around and dig into what is working for your competition and then duplicate what works.

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