S3 Blog

As the song goes “The times they are a changing” and never more so than in the current economic climate of the UK. Over the past 12 months or so the recession has hit thousands of businesses – both large and small, hard and as a result many have now gone bust. The times are changing and there has been a huge shift from the financially frivolous times of the 1990s and early 2000s to a time where millions are out of work and many cannot even afford to pay their mortgages. During the 1990s spending large amounts of money and actually being prod of this was very much the order of the day. Move forward 15 years and the UK is now experiences a credit crunch and those people who had racked up massive amounts of credit are now feeling the strain.

So, how are the times changing for businesses?

- Businesses are also suffering and many are now feeling the pinch as customers are now looking for cheaper deals on the internet and on the high street.

- Spending money recklessly is not seen as something to aspire to and this is forcing many retailers to drastically rethink their pricing plans.

- Business need to see the value of using good CRM (customer relationship management) software tools. Using such software can make all the difference to businesses that want to make the most out of every single customer contact that they have.

- Businesses need to recognise that they have to engage their customers to keep them returning to them time and time again. It is now no good to just market and sell goods or services, customers need to feel as though their thoughts and ideas are valid for a business and identify with the business. Feedback sections on websites and blogs are really useful for this to happen.

- Businesses now need to focus on new ways of reaching their customers. The internet has virtually limitless potential for businesses and there are plenty of methods that a business can choose to advertise which are diverse and attention grabbing.

- The recession has also taught business owners that nothing lasts forever and it will always pay to have a strategy in place for tough times. This can provide a business with the cushion that they need if the economic climate of their country changes.

- Businesses need to be flexible in their approach to their customers and their means of contacting them. With the advent of freely available mobile technology there is more scope to contact customers through email marketing, SMS messages and social networking sites. Smart businesses take notice of this and move with the times.

- No business can ever afford to rest on its laurels and assume that they will always have a strong customer base. This is foolhardy to say the least and all business owners should be constantly looking for ways in which to improve the service that they provide.

A recession can devastate a country, it leaves people out of work and struggling to make ends meet and it can ruin businesses. Over the past 12 months the UK has seen many large household name businesses go bust and innumerable small to medium sized businesses fold under the strain. Today, anyone talking a walk down a city’s high street cannot fail to notice the sheer number of boarded up shops and empty business space going to waste. Previous to this high streets up and down the country were filled with consumers spending and shops jostling for space.

Now, thanks to the recession the UKs shops and city centres are a very different place – but it is not all doom and gloom. Many businesses have weathered the worst of what the recession had to throw at them and they have come out of the other side. In other words for some businesses the recession has actually made them stronger. So how can the recession make some businesses stronger than before but cause others to buckle and collapse under the economic pressure?

Smart businesses always try to have some kind of contingency plan in place should the worst happen, and sensible business owners knew this. By making small but significant changes businesses could protect themselves for the recession. These could include implementing methods that would save the business money or looking into new ways to retain customers. Doing away with old and outdated methods of customer contact or recording information is one good way of doing this as it saves money and time within the business. Taking notice of customer spending patterns is also useful as this can help a business to predict spending patterns for the next 12 months or so.

Many businesses who are still in business after the recession could be seen in a way as being ‘recession proof’ and while there is no guarantee for this it certainly gives business owners a greater degree of confidence. Customers too gain confidence in businesses that can stay afloat during a recession which is good news for those businesses.

It can be easy to assume that a recession will weaken all businesses – but this is not the case at all. Recessions do change customer spending habits and can make people think more before they spend money – but they do not prevent people from spending money. Consumers still need to buy products and services even during a recession and continue to do so, so businesses should stand their ground and they will reap the rewards. Rather than crumbling at the first sign of economic crisis business owners should implement strategies to help them deal with a recession and see it out to succeed.

Recession does make our businesses stronger, but only if there is a firm base to start with. Having a poor infrastructure will cause a business to fail regardless of a recession. The only difference is a recession sorts the wheat from the chaff and strong businesses will get even stronger.

One of the main reasons that businesses fail today is that they do not stay in touch with what their customers want and begin to appear dated in the way that they advertise, conduct business and contact their customers. What might have worked well for a business 20 or so years ago will not cut it in the consumer world of today and businesses are realising they need to reinvent themselves to keep up to date. Initially it can seem like a costly venture for any business owner to reinvent their business, but thanks to S3 CRM it is much more cost effective than you might think.

S3 CRM can help businesses to reinvent themselves by streamlining their procedures and process through:

1. Providing the means to create easy to access and add to customer and employee contact databases.
Creating invoices and quotes quickly and easily and attaching them to customer contact details.
Plan projects and assign them to employees using S3 CRM, business owners are also able to see who has the most projects, which projects are open and which are approaching their deadlines.
Set alerts for when projects and tasks are nearing completion dates.

2. Create email marketing campaigns using an easy to follow structure which means that even a novice can successfully create email marketing campaigns in minutes. Email marketing is one area that many business owners are wary of as they believe that it takes certain expertise to do so and as a result shy away from attempting to produce them. With S3 CRM a business can move forward and reinvent themselves adding email marketing to their methods of contacting customers. Once an email marketing campaign has been sent users can check on its effectiveness using the reporting tools available through S3 CRM.

3. Send SMS messages using S3 CRM – this is another great way for businesses to stay in touch with customers.

4. S3 CRM also has additional reporting tools which can allow business owners to see the conversion rate for quotes, which customers have the most outstanding invoices, which customers have the placed the most orders and so on. In fact using S3 CRM can help a business to get the best from reporting so that it can increase profits and reduce outstanding invoices.

5. Each individual user is able to customise their own dashboard upon which they can place widgets of the features they use most often, this helps to cut down on the time spent opening different features and scrolling through screens.

6. As S3 CRM is web based users can access their account from anywhere in the world with internet access, this allows a business to provide the same service from anywhere – a total reinvention if users previously all had to be based in the same office.

These are just a few of the ways that S3 CRM can help businesses to reinvent themselves and there are many more to choose from.

When your business is doing well it is all too easy to rest on your laurels and believe that this will continue indefinitely, but this is not the case, particularly in light of the recent recession that has hit the UK. Business owners are now facing the fact that they need to compete or get beat and as a result they are looking for ways in which to do this. Here are a few suggestions on how you can compete and beat your competitors:

1. Do away with old and outdated ways of recording customer contacts, using complicated and ineffectual methods to record customer contacts creates confusion and vital information is sometimes missed. Without streamlined way to record contacts conversions can be missed and customers lost.

2. Cut down on the number of software applications your business uses – spending thousands each year on software licenses eats away at money that could be spent on other areas of your business, such as advertising.

3. Check out what your competitors are doing – if you have no idea what your main competitors are doing you need to find out, and fast! In order to compete you need to know and understand your competition or your business is out of the running and is already beaten.

4. Use email marketing to reach more customers – more and more businesses are seeing the value of email marketing as it is a fast and effective way of sending advertising directly to their customers. S3 CRM offers email marketing as one of its features and this can help any business to instantly compete with its rivals by enabling users to plan, create and send email campaigns in minutes.

5. Create a business website if you don’t already have one. The internet is an amazing way of generating business and the chances are that your competitors are already doing all they can to increase their internet presence.

6. Think about using other internet methods to further spread the word about your business brand. This can be done in many different ways including blogging – these are massively popular right now and a great way to engage with your customers and keep them interested in your business, social networking sites – create a profile for your business and spread the word, or you might want to take out advertisements on these sites as they get huge amounts of traffic. Not only are these types of methods effective, they are also cheap and they encourage customers to visit your business’s website more often.

As you can see there are a variety of ways in which you can start to actively change the way that your business competes with your competitors if you are not already doing so. Customers are becoming more and more fickle when it comes to choosing who and where the purchase good and services from so it is essential to engage with them and make them feel valued to retain their custom.

Today the number of people with internet access in their homes is staggering when compared to even 15 years ago. Mobile communication has meant that even when a person is on the move it is possible to communicate with people all over the world at a fraction of the cost and it is all due to the fact that new technology is becoming cheaper. Desktop computers, laptops, notebooks, mobile phones etc are all getting cheaper by the day and this is increasing the potential for businesses to reach more customers than ever before via the internet and mobile communications.

Traditionally, new technology was only available to those in business or people who were wealthy enough to afford it as it was so costly. Now everyone is basking the glow of the internet at home, at school and even when travelling. With the advent of social networking sites keeping in touch has never been so popular or so easy. In order for people to connect to such sites electronics companies have realised they needed to make new technology cheaper and therefore more accessible for everyone. They realised that doing this would increase their profits tenfold and keep customers wanting the latest technology at low prices.

Gone are the days when only a handful of people had mobile phones and laptop computers, and instead in their place are people of all ages and abilities who are all wanting to have new technology for themselves. This increased demand for new technology means that more items are being sold, so more are being manufactured, bringing down the cost of new technology for the consumer. So now there is no reason why anyone who wants to keep up to date with new technology can’t do so for a very reasonable price.

As well new electrical technology getting cheaper software applications etc are also getting much cheaper as companies can design and implement new technology cheaper and faster than ever before. CRM (customer relationship management) software for instance used to be incredibility expensive for a business to buy and run and now the smart businesses are recognising that many companies are providing this cheaper than ever. To put this into perspective it now means that there is no reason why a small to medium sized business should not benefit from using CRM software to assist them.

Using a good CRM software solution is not only cost effective (especially since new technology is getting cheaper) it can also increase a businesses profits substantially. Making these savings for a business means that new technology can be seen as even cheaper as it can pay for itself in just a few months, rather than being seen as expensive and unattainable. New technology is constantly being developed and as it is now so cheap and so widely available there is no logical reason why consumers and businesses can’t embrace this new technology and enjoy it.

With the credit crunch on everyone’s minds it is no wonder that businesses are developing customer strategies to cope with the downturn. Any business that planned ahead and had a contingency plan for this will no doubt be feeling less of the strain, but for any business who did not have a plan or a strategy here are 10 customer strategies for the downturn:

1.Find out what kind of a return the business is getting from its marketing. Doing this will help to streamline business costs and will prevent customers from feeling the impact of over priced and ineffective marketing.

2.Target pricing – this means looking at your pricing and targeting it more effectively. If your customers can no longer afford your rates (and this will show in your sale figures) it is time to think about carefully targeting your prices

3.Listen to customer feedback – this is always essential for a business but never more so than in a credit crunch, listen to what your customers want and take notice! Do this and it will make all the difference.

4.Be relevant to the correct customers – being too general in your marketing and casting your net too wide can have disastrous effects during a downturn. Businesses who try to do this will find that they rapidly lose revenue and customers in the process by trying to be everything for everyone.

5.Enhance the customer experience – make sure that you are using CRM software that will make every customer contact count and enable a business to get the most out of these every time.

6.Perform a ‘healthcheck’ on your business – see which customers are loyal even during a downturn and give them a little something back. This could be in the way of loyalty discounts, something which customers are always keen to use when money is tight. Remember you want to keep hold of loyal customers and not just the ones that buy from you when you are giving discounts.

7.Increase customer engagement – engaging customers with your brand or business will create loyal customers which is exactly what you are looking for.

8.Take a close look at your loyalty schemes – are they targeting the right customers and are you, as a business getting the most out of them? If not it is time to change your loyalty schemes and raise revenue at the same time.

9.Think about affiliate programmes – these can stand to make customers who know, understand and willing to commit themselves to an affiliate programme a fair amount of money, whilst driving more customers your way. If you don’t already have an affiliate programme maybe it is time to think about one.

10.Keep costs to a minimum so that you are not having to penalise customers by increasing prices – do this by trying to use just one software application to run your business through, such as S3 CRM – the one stop shop for all your business and customer relationship management needs.

Customer engagement is a term that is given when customers engage with a brand or company and it is based on interactions that are repeated and enhance the psychological, physical and emotional investment on that brand or company. When a business gets it right customer engagement can work to create lifelong customers for that business and during a recession customer engagement is essential. Many companies traditionally believed that customer engagement stemmed from television-based advertising, but now thanks to the recession and the emergence of Web 2.0 technology companies are now seeing the usefulness of the Internet in increasing customer engagement.

For customer engagement to continue and survive the recession it is important that businesses realise they need to find cost-effective ways of engaging their customers with their brand. There are several different ways in which this can be done with massive success such as:

- Blogging - today most businesses which have their own website will also have a business blog through which it can inform its customers of any news relating to their products and services or are just fun for customers to read. Adding to this every few days means that the customer will return to a website time and time again and become further engaged with the brand or company.

- User generated content is also a great way to increase customer engagement as people like to have their views on their opinions up on websites for other customers to read and comment on. This method is customer engagement at its best and it encourages more customers to become engaged with the brand by creating their own content on websites.

- Social networking sites are also helping to increase customer engagement during the recession as millions of people all over the world are members of such sites. By joining these sites a business can engage frequently with their customers and at a fraction of the cost that advertising previously used. The use of social networking sites can also help a business to attract more investment from its backers as its potential is so huge.

- Customer feedback on websites is also a very useful form of customer engagement which helps customers to feel valued and as though their opinions are welcomed by a brand.

- Many companies also using smaller blog sites such as Twitter to increase customer engagement and for many this is a yet to be explored avenue which can help to increase customer engagement even further.

As shown, customer engagement during the recession is possible and it can even provide savings for any business who chooses to use the Internet to their advantage. Businesses that have not developed an Internet-based strategy for customer engagement during the recession (and to continue after it) will find that their customer engagement plummets. So any business that wants to raise customer engagement and help to increase their profits even ensuring a recession needs to get Internet savvy and start to utilise the potential of this huge marketplace.

2008 was a year that saw many changes all over the world, it was also the year in which the finances of millions of people suddenly thrown into turmoil. All of a sudden the credit driven lifestyles that many people were used to came to an end. Banks and other financial institutions realised that their reckless credit giving had caused thousands to live way beyond their means. This meant that repayments for mortgages, credit cards, loans and hire purchase agreements were suddenly being missed and people who had taken out large mortgages up to 125% were now faced with repossession.

From the late 1980s up until 2008 the feeling in the UK was one of spend, spend, spend on something had to give. In 2008 well-known shops and banks were now in financial crisis thanks to the global credit crunch that was hitting both the UK and the US hard. This meant that people could not afford to lead the lifestyle they have become used to and thousands found themselves out of work as businesses folded or were trying to save money through losing staff.

So what have we learned from 2008?

- Financial institutions giving lenders credit that is way beyond their means is not financially viable and this can plunge a bank, building society or the lender into crisis.

- People should learn to live within their means, even if this can seem as though they are putting their own wings. Getting credit you can’t afford is not the way to live your life and businesses will ultimately suffer as consumers are not able to carry on spending excessively.

- Jobs are not forever - too many people felt safe in the knowledge that they would have their job for life. 2008 show the world that no job is forever and any people who thought that their jobs were safe were soon to find out that this was not the case.

- With so many people out of work and with so many banks collapsing people had to find out how to live more frugally and within their means. For some this was a very difficult process and one which did not come very easily to them, whereas for others this was not a problem and something that came easily.

- Businesses also learned that they needed to look for more cost-effective ways of operating which meant that they could keep their costs low while still providing the same service to their customers.

- Giving potential homeowners mortgages of up to 125% just before house prices crashed was a very poor and miscalculated financial step for many mortgage companies.

2008 showed both businesses and consumers that the previous 15 or so years of reckless and often needless spending and living on credit was not good for the economy or the country. Today people are actively trying to combat the problems that were caused in 2008 that it will take some time before the economy is back on its feet again.