Customer Satisfaction, Accounting + Business Coach

A Top Business Coach Teaches The Importance Of Customer Service 

Learn how to improve your customer service and accounting from an experienced business coach.

Fulfilling orders and providing service is the top priority of operations, but there is opportunity to go beyond. Some companies like Zappos, Southwest Airlines, UPS, and Enterprise Rental Car all utilize the fulfillment workflow as an opportunity to drive customer satisfaction well past expectations. One of my favorite books is The Service Profit Chain by Heskett, Sasser, et al., which covers the relationship between customer satisfaction, loyalty, profit, and growth. The authors state that there are a couple of specific misconceptions about customer satisfaction that many management teams make:

It is sufficient to satisfy the customer. The investment required to turn merely satisfied customers into completely satisfied customers is rarely worth it. As a sought after business coach, I know efforts to improve satisfaction should concentrate on customers in the organization’s lowest satisfaction categories.

As your business coach, let me give you a quick summary of an important concept, the book breaks down companies’ customers into four categories, and we’ve added a fifth:

Terrorists – Customers who have alternatives and use them; they utilize every opportunity to convert others by expressing their dissatisfaction with their previous service provider

Hostages – Highly dissatisfied customers who have few or no alternatives

Mercenaries – Customers who may switch service providers in order to obtain a better price, even though they may currently be satisfied

Loyalists – Customers who are highly satisfied but not WOWed enough to virally recommend the product or service

Apostles – Customers who are not only loyal but also are so satisfied that they recommend the service to others.

Here are a few principles and statistics that the authors of the book found that help us understand the importance and value of going above and beyond to ensure the satisfaction of your customers:

• The US Office of Consumer Affairs suggests that satisfied customers for consumer services were likely to tell five other people about their experience (whether or not they were potential customers), while dissatisfied customers were likely to tell eleven other people.
• A 5% increase in customer loyalty can produce profit increases from 25% to 85%.
• Several companies have found that their most loyal customers—the top 20% of total customers—not only provide all the profit for the business but also cover losses incurred in dealing with less loyal customers.

These statistics show the value of building satisfaction among your customers. To build this kind of customer satisfaction, it’s necessary to give the employees within your company the resources and latitude to achieve total customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, there will always be a percentage of customers who are “terrorists.” I find that these customers tend to inherently hate their current situation in life and are committed to raising hell. YOU MUST PUNT THESE CUSTOMERS. As a business owner, you have a responsibility to achieve customer satisfaction, but you must also protect your employees from these terrorists. Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines, is quoted as saying, “Something….that is entirely wrong….that has almost achieved a religiousity…. [Is] the customer is always right. That is a betrayal of your people. The customer is not always right.”

Keep this in mind as you are building out the operations systems in your company.

Business Coach Gives Booming Business Foundational Principle – Accounting and Finance

During this section of this incredible business book, we are going to be talking about how to effectively handle your cash flow, optimize your profit margins, and finance your company’s growth. As you begin to grow your business, you are going to have to become an absolute wizard of financial management. I am willing to fight almost anyone (depending upon how big they are) who believes that they should delegate the financial aspects of their business to someone else. They are wrong.

“Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.” -Benjamin Franklin (A bestselling author, printer, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, and the diplomat who convinced France to support and fund the thirteen American colonies in their fight against Great Britain)

Proven business coach breaks down the accounting and financial foundation of your business involves the following.

• Collections of your accounts receivable
• Tracking of the money that you are owed
• Distribution of the money that you collect
• Reporting of the money that comes in and out of your business
• Billing processes and procedures that you have in place
• Tracking the money that you owe to others (accounts payable)
• Meeting financial reporting requirements of your business
• Preparing profit and loss statements for your business
• Cash flow management of your business
• Money / capital financing of your business
• Risk management aspects of your business
• Financial forecasting of your business

As a top business coach, most of the businesses I work with almost never have any financial management systems in place.  If that is true of your business, you should not be beat up for it. I get it. As an early stage entrepreneur, you are absolutely working yourself to the point of exhaustion just trying to sell enough stuff to barely survive.

“Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.” -Guy Kawasaki (He was one of the Apple employees who helped to introduce the Macintosh line of computers in 1984)

As you start to grow your business, we at Thrive15.com recommend that you hire an outsourced part-time bookkeeper to work with you to keep your books straight, but we do not recommend that you completely abdicate your responsibilities by assigning all of the accounting duties to some random bookkeeper you just hired. The key is to surround yourself with smart people whom you hold accountable. DON’T EVER TURN OVER YOUR BOOKKEEPING TO AN IN-HOUSE OR OUTSOURCED BOOKKEEPER YOU DO NOT HOLD ACCOUNTABLE.

“As an entrepreneur, I choose my teachers carefully, very carefully. I am extremely cautious of the people with whom I spend my time and to whom I listen.” -Donald Trump (American businessman, politician, television personality, author, and the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for President of the United States in the 2016 election)

Once you can afford it, we recommend that you hire a full-time person who will act as both your Chief Financial Officer and your bookkeeper. So what’s the big difference between a CFO and a bookkeeper? When you hire someone to act as your CFO, you are hiring somebody who should be able to help you make smart and strategic financial decisions while keeping your books accurate. This CFO / bookkeeper really needs to help you build and manage your financial and accounting systems. I am going to teach you the financial management SUPER MOVES you need to properly manage the financial aspects of your business.