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Added for You - What About Doing Nothing?
The ability to provide the highest level of customer service with the greatest levels of efficiency is paramount for companies in the market for web based help desk software. With this in mind, there are a few key features managers should look for during the evaluation process.Complete email integration. This is a feature in just about all help desk software, however as your evaluating make sure there is complete email integration that can support multiple mailboxes (if needed), a variety of mail server configurations, as well as key email features such as conversation threading and cc'ing.Interaction Log. To prevent staff from having to sift through emails and note pads to recall the last interaction with a customer, all good help desk software will automatically log all interactions, those with the customer as well as those between staff
Will it Lead to More Profit?
In principle, all of the above actions could lead to more revenue for less expense, i.e. more profit. In practice, all of the above actions could also lead to more revenue with more expense, or less expense but lower revenues:
Product Development
If the cost structure and performance of your p
The most important step before attempting to pick an agent is to decide what you're looking for. Look at your resum? and see what kind of experience you have and the type of work you'd be looking for. Understanding these issues will make it much easier for you to decide which agent best fits your ambitions and talents. Realize that very few actors spend their entire careers with one agent, so as your career changes, so too might your agent.Research is the key to finding an agent that suits your needs. There are many different questions to consider, such as: are they representing extras or principal roles; union or non-union; number of agents on staff; size of roster and are they looking for experienced actors or are they developing new talent? This can all be found out by reading and asking the appropriate questions of both your peers and prospective agent
* Your attention will not be diverted from the daily need to meet customers’ needs
* You will not create anxiety amongst your people that they are about to be “restructured”
* You will save the cost of the project resources needed to make those changes happen.
So why are you hell-bent on throwing it all up in the air and changing everything? The issue is not really changing nothing, but not changing everything. You can be sure that there is something you must do to continue to compete. Have you identified what it is? Maybe you know that you need to change, but are not clear what and why. So you change more than you need in order to be sure that you nail the real problem.
Let’s put this into context. Suppose that your business supplies healthcare equipment across the world. You have to develop products, market, sell, make, distribute, and service them to your customers. You expect to make a profit and you would like to make more. You call for ideas. In a typical organisation this is how different functions might react to such a call.
* Product Development Make the best use of the technology that you have to develop new products with the minimum of effort and risk in the quickest time
* Production Reduce Unit Manufacturing Cost
* Distribution Use the 80-20 rule to sell more to the minority of customers that are most profitable
* Field Service Reduce headcount
* Marketing Seek new high value niches or new markets for existing products
Is this the best approach?
Resource Needed
Whenever you try to do something differently, you must create a 'project' to make things happen. Projects absorb effort, even when managed by the existing staff. So, in the case of Product Development, for example, the efforts to work out how to match existing technology to new product needs will actually reduce the resource available to actually develop products. This may indeed pay off, but not necessarily so. Certainly in Production, reducing cost will require teams of professionals (industrial engineers, lean experts) to plan and manage what has to be done. Implementation will absorb the energies of the production staff as well as incur the expense of the change agents. Presumably Marketing will need to research new niches and then fight internal battles (often of a political nature) with their peers and managers to accept their new ideas. This is again resource sapping. Overall, investment of resource (and that boils down to money) is needed to make things happen across all these functions. The more things that you change, the more resource it will consume.
Will it Lead to More Profit?
In principle, all of the above actions could lead to more revenue for less expense, i.e. more profit. In practice, all of the above actions could also lead to more revenue with more expense, or less expense but lower revenues:
Product Development
If the cost structure and performance of your pr
The big news on Wall Street last year was the initial public offering of Internet search engine Google. If you were a visitor from another planet, you might be asking yourself, What big, sophisticated, high-technology company is behind the success of Google? Could it be IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Oracle, SAP, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Dell, Xerox, Sun Microsystems, Philips or Siemens? Of course not. The brains behind Google are two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who launched the Web site in 1998. Some six years later, the two founders are worth billions.All the advantages:With some exceptions big companies seldom launch new brands that become big successes, even though big companies have all the advantages. Big companies have the resources, the people, the credentials, the distribution networks, the media contacts. I can't think of a sin
Let’s put this into context. Suppose that your business supplies healthcare equipment across the world. You have to develop products, market, sell, make, distribute, and service them to your customers. You expect to make a profit and you would like to make more. You call for ideas. In a typical organisation this is how different functions might react to such a call.
* Product Development Make the best use of the technology that you have to develop new products with the minimum of effort and risk in the quickest time
* Production Reduce Unit Manufacturing Cost
* Distribution Use the 80-20 rule to sell more to the minority of customers that are most profitable
* Field Service Reduce headcount
* Marketing Seek new high value niches or new markets for existing products
Is this the best approach?
Resource Needed
Whenever you try to do something differently, you must create a 'project' to make things happen. Projects absorb effort, even when managed by the existing staff. So, in the case of Product Development, for example, the efforts to work out how to match existing technology to new product needs will actually reduce the resource available to actually develop products. This may indeed pay off, but not necessarily so. Certainly in Production, reducing cost will require teams of professionals (industrial engineers, lean experts) to plan and manage what has to be done. Implementation will absorb the energies of the production staff as well as incur the expense of the change agents. Presumably Marketing will need to research new niches and then fight internal battles (often of a political nature) with their peers and managers to accept their new ideas. This is again resource sapping. Overall, investment of resource (and that boils down to money) is needed to make things happen across all these functions. The more things that you change, the more resource it will consume.
Will it Lead to More Profit?
In principle, all of the above actions could lead to more revenue for less expense, i.e. more profit. In practice, all of the above actions could also lead to more revenue with more expense, or less expense but lower revenues:
Product Development
If the cost structure and performance of your p
What is the first thing you would do if you started losing your key customers to your competitors?Well the simplest way to find out why they are leaving and stop the loss of business is to obviously ask them. To find out what made them leave you and what attracted them to another supplier.In the same way, you should make ‘exit interviews’ with employees who leave your business a standard part of your procedures.Usually conducted in their last few days, an exit interview is a conversation between you and the person who is leaving which allows you to obtain valuable information from them which will help you keep staff in the future.Some of the questions you may consider asking are: 1. What are your reasons for leaving?2. With hindsight, what could we have done d
* Product Development Make the best use of the technology that you have to develop new products with the minimum of effort and risk in the quickest time
* Production Reduce Unit Manufacturing Cost
* Distribution Use the 80-20 rule to sell more to the minority of customers that are most profitable
* Field Service Reduce headcount
* Marketing Seek new high value niches or new markets for existing products
Is this the best approach?
Resource Needed
Whenever you try to do something differently, you must create a 'project' to make things happen. Projects absorb effort, even when managed by the existing staff. So, in the case of Product Development, for example, the efforts to work out how to match existing technology to new product needs will actually reduce the resource available to actually develop products. This may indeed pay off, but not necessarily so. Certainly in Production, reducing cost will require teams of professionals (industrial engineers, lean experts) to plan and manage what has to be done. Implementation will absorb the energies of the production staff as well as incur the expense of the change agents. Presumably Marketing will need to research new niches and then fight internal battles (often of a political nature) with their peers and managers to accept their new ideas. This is again resource sapping. Overall, investment of resource (and that boils down to money) is needed to make things happen across all these functions. The more things that you change, the more resource it will consume.
Will it Lead to More Profit?
In principle, all of the above actions could lead to more revenue for less expense, i.e. more profit. In practice, all of the above actions could also lead to more revenue with more expense, or less expense but lower revenues:
Product Development
If the cost structure and performance of your p
Many people wish to become an entrepreneur and own their own business. While buying franchise has many upsides to it, there are also the downsides and risks that you take. It is extremely expensive to get a franchise up and running, so there are many things that you must consider before purchasing a franchise. There are many positives to owning your own business, but it is important to be cautious with a large investment such as buying franchise.Buying franchise can reduce your investment risk by allowing you to work with an established company, but it does not come free by any means. One of the costs that are put on the bill is the initial franchise fee, which may be non-refundable and cost thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is why it is important to make sure you know what you are getting into before you make anything official.Oth
Will it Lead to More Profit?
In principle, all of the above actions could lead to more revenue for less expense, i.e. more profit. In practice, all of the above actions could also lead to more revenue with more expense, or less expense but lower revenues:
Product Development
If the cost structure and performance of your p
Hard times create amazing successes.Despite all the talk today of an oversupply of goods and services, industry consolidation, menacing imports, stalled prices, and shrinking margins, a few remarkable businesses have discovered how to make their brands irresistible to more and more customers. And they have done it in remarkably speedy fashion, seemingly coming out of nowhere to virtually own their markets. Consider, for example, Google, which went from being a nonsense word to a global verb and supernova of the Internet in only three years, which then led to its becoming a publicly traded company with an $80 billion market cap.Or how about the gizmo named TiVo, which changed television viewing forever for millions of American families by creating buzz outside the typical sales and marketing channels.Dozens of similarly surprising brands -- names
Will it Lead to More Profit?
In principle, all of the above actions could lead to more revenue for less expense, i.e. more profit. In practice, all of the above actions could also lead to more revenue with more expense, or less expense but lower revenues:
Product Development
If the cost structure and performance of your products is in fact largely determined by the current technology (for example, in diagnostics the use of micro-titre wells) then the only long term way to eliminate constraints to cost and performance must be by adopting a new technology.
Production
Suppose that you can adopt a '6 sigma' philosophy. This will involve a large investment in training and staff. Their choice of projects will be compromised by the need to do things that fullfill Black Belt certification timescales (for example). Further, in a highly regulated environment, you will soon find that you need to change things that will involve validation that is expensive or takes too long. At the end of this exercise, you might be lucky to get your money back on the investment.
Distribution
You may decide to promote a current best-selling product to more of your best customers. However, their calculation of “profit” will be based on transfer prices from the factory. The true profit margins may well be completely different. This means that the organisation as a whole may end up making less profit from the change.
Field Service
This department is widely regarded as just expense. The only way to reduce it is to reduce headcount. This could well lead to poorer service to the customer. Eventually you pay the price in losing customers. You reduce expense, but then reduce revenue too.
Marketing
It will be difficult for marketing to assess the incremental operating expense for any new markets that they enter. If the extra revenues are not up to expectation, then profits will not be as good as they hoped.
Could You Do Better?
It is clear that an uncoordinated approach will definitely involve extra expense in the short term and is unlikely to produce the best possible increase in profit for that extra effort. This means that at best you will have improved profitability, but you will certainly have spent more effort than you needed to do so. There is a worse scenario. Suppose the key constraint on profitability lies outside the individual remit of any of the departments, or more probably depends on actions across departments. In this case, you will not achieve any kind of “breakthrough” improvement at all. You will effectively get nothing for your money. Doing nothing in this situation is better than doing a lot that is ineffective.
Of course, you WILL hit the jackpot if you identify just one project that removes the key obstacle to improving profitability and apply resource to making just that happen. Elsewher
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