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7 More Benefits of Joint Ventures

October 30th, 2009 | Author: Talkbout Staff

Many business owners are still fearful of forming a joint venture. They have so much to attend to with their own business dealings, and certainly a joint venture success is never guaranteed.

However, isn’t business all about taking and controlling risks? If an entrepreneur can get past the initial fear of joint ventures, they may find that the benefits of a well-planned JV can add big profits and save time on their own business.

Much has already been written about the benefits of JVs. However, there are so many that it’s important to list more so that you get a clear picture of how a JV can improve your business. For your encouragement, here are seven more to consider:

1. Free Advertising – A JV can provide you with free advertising and promotion. A simple joint venture agreement could allow you and your JV partner to cross market each other’s products. You agree to promote his products in your store, while he does the same with your products. You may find that this type of free advertising reaches a new market base that you never expected.

2. Learn New Skills – A joint venture will test your business acumen and abilities. You’ll be required to share your expertise, and in exchange, your JV partner will share his. Through the sharing of individual expertise, you can gain valuable insight into your JV partner’s ability to develop creative marketing, close a sale, or even manage an assembly line.

3. Reduce Inventory – A JV may be a great way to help you reduce your extra inventory. If you need more space for new products or materials, you can formulate a joint venture where you giveaway part of your inventory as part of a cross promotion with your JV partner.

4. Reduce Employee Hiring Costs – You can form a creative joint venture where you can save on hiring costs. Agree to provide your JV partner with ample business in exchange for office space or even the use of his employees for certain tasks.

5. Test a New Product – If you have developed a new product, a joint venture may be a great way to test market. Agree with your JV partner to promote your new product as a sample or as part of a merchandise package. Be sure to get valuable data and feedback from customers who try your product.

6. Expand Business Relationships – Not only does a joint venture strengthen your relationship with your JV partner, but with other contacts in your shared industries. You may find that a contact on your JV partner’s list will become a valuable contact for your own business. Never forget the power and benefit of networking.

7. Get Discounts – A JV partnership could save you money on materials or supplies. Agree not only to share information and expertise, but also on products that you both provide.

There are literally hundreds of potential benefits of a joint venture. It takes creativity to see past the obvious financial profit benefits and discover the plethora of other ways that a JV can be good for your business. Don’t be afraid to explore these possibilities.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/7-more-benefits-of-joint-ventures-1399310.html

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IT Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Identifying the Key IT Challenges Facing Your Company

October 30th, 2009 | Author: Talkbout Staff

Is IT (Information Technology) helping to make your organization highly competitive and efficient, or is IT your company’s Achilles heel? Unfortunately, at many companies if you ask IT’s customers this question, the answer is “IT is our Achilles heel” or “we aren’t sure”. Most organizations spend a significant amount of money on IT without getting the results customers, employees and the company needs.

Running a highly effective IT organization isn’t easy. Tight budgets, fast changing IT requirements, demanding IT customers, competitive business pressure, IT staffing issues and a highly complex hardware, software and network environment are some of the reasons for IT falling short at many companies.

CIO’s, CTO’s, IT managers and IT directors are often under extreme pressure to achieve better IT performance. Many IT leaders are on a treadmill, reacting to problems and trying to keep out of trouble rather than proactively identifying the key issues and taking preemptive action to avoid and solve problems before their impact is significant.

Outsourcing all or part of IT doesn’t automatically solve all IT problems. IT outsourcing companies face many of the same problems confronting in-house IT departments. Just like the performance of in-house IT resources, the performance of outsourced IT functions needs to be measured and managed closely.

Conducting an IT Customer Satisfaction Survey or an IT Help Desk Customer Satisfaction Survey is the best way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of in-house and outsourced IT resources and to hear first-hand from IT customers about what IT needs to do to achieve consistently high levels of IT customer satisfaction. In the IT Customer Satisfaction Surveys we conduct for large and small businesses and other types of organizations, IT customers are continuously providing feedback that shows a clear need for significant increases in IT performance. Their feedback includes identification of the things that are working well and satisfying IT customers, as well as the things that are causing dissatisfaction and that need to be improved.

Here are just a few of the many issues that IT customers typically identify in IT Surveys as causes for their dissatisfaction with IT support:

1. Enterprise systems are causing pain for IT customers and the company’s customers – Enterprise systems including SAP, Oracle, SalesForce.com and other software applications are cumbersome and time consuming to use, and data is frequently inaccurate and incomplete. IT customers often say the systems were first implemented a few to many years ago and there still are implementation problems that have not been resolved. The problems frustrate employees and cause them many extra hours of work. According to IT customers, poorly implemented enterprise systems also impact the company’s customers and suppliers due to billing and transaction errors and a myriad of other problems. These problems contribute to lost sales, significant customer dissatisfaction and countless customer problems and complaints that frustrate customers, sales and support staff.

In one IT Customer Satisfaction Survey a sales person commented: “I can spend my time selling, or I can spend my time using and updating our CRM system, but I can’t do both. Our CRM system is very cumbersome to update and use and it buys me very little. Our sales managers use our CRM system to measure the wrong things.”

2. Slow response time – IT customers often have to wait a long time to talk with a Help Desk or Desk Side Support technician, or to receive a call back or response to an e-mail service request.

3. Premature closing of IT incident tickets – IT surveys indicate that Help Desks often close out incident tickets prematurely, before issues are resolved. This wastes time for IT customers and for IT, who then needs to open a new ticket and start the resolution process from scratch. This is also a significant source of frustration for IT customers.

4. Underpowered equipment – Old, underpowered desktop and laptop computers and slow networks, frustrating IT customers and seriously impacting their productivity.

5. Inadequate support for smart phones and other portable devices – Some companies are not willing to provide their sales and field service employees with smart phones and laptop computers needed for timely communications with customers and internal support staff from the field. This is very frustrating for employees that need to be responsive to their customers. It also makes it hard for companies to compete with other companies that provide these devices to their sales and field service staff.

6. Systems not configured to provide access to employees working from the field – At many companies the sales force and many of their field service employees spend most or all of their time working in the field. In IT surveys employees often comment on their inability to access needed information and to perform other functions for lack of access to company systems from the field.

7. Poorly trained and inexperienced IT staff – IT Help Desk and Desk Side Support staff often lack the training, knowledge and information needed to perform their jobs well.

8. Rude IT staff – In many IT departments, some IT Help Desk and other IT staff members are discourteous. IT customers have zero tolerance for rude behavior.

9. Poorly designed websites – When IT Customer Satisfaction Surveys include questions about company websites, we often see comments saying the website is hard to navigate and it lacks important information needed by prospects and customers.

Well designed IT Customer Satisfaction Surveys identify a wide range of IT problems that are impacting your company overall, as well as identifying the things that IT is doing well. The survey reports should also provide results by department, location and other demographics, enabling focused improvement initiatives. While a one-time IT Customer Satisfaction Survey can help a lot, annual or semi-annual IT surveys are recommended to assess ongoing progress and to identify new problems and opportunities in isolated areas of the company as well as companywide.

Of equal importance to conducting IT Customer Satisfaction Surveys, IT management must be committed to taking action based on the survey findings. To help facilitate communication of the survey results to IT staff, company management and IT customers, and creation of IT survey action plans, part of our IT Customer Satisfaction Survey process includes performing analysis of the survey responses and preparing an executive summary report. The report includes a summary of the survey findings, recommendations based on the findings, and a benchmarking comparison of the survey results with results from other IT surveys.

A final thought – While some IT managers might think they accurately understand how their customers feel about IT, if they are not conducting IT Customer Satisfaction Surveys, there is a high probability that they are working with filtered information and that they are missing out on some of the key issues that are causing dissatisfaction with IT. They are likely also missing the information needed to focus solutions where they will achieve the greatest benefit. Given the relatively low cost of conducting an IT Customer Satisfaction Survey, no IT manager can afford to run their department without the benefit of making decisions and taking action based on IT Customer Survey results.

When was the last time your organization conducted an IT survey assessing all of your internal and/or outsources IT functions, including the IT Help Desk, Desk-Side Support, Application Support, Network Support and other IT services? If not recently, now would be a great time to conduct and IT survey and take action based on the survey results.

Howard Deutsch is the CEO of Quantisoft, a full service survey company. Contact Howard Deutsch at (609) 409-9945 or hdeutschatquantisoft.com •••
Quantisoft – Cost effective surveys •••
IT Customer Satisfaction Surveys •••
Quantisoft – Employee Engagement Surveys & Employee Satisfaction Surveys

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/it-customer-satisfaction-surveys-identifying-the-key-it-challenges-facing-your-company-1399343.html

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7 Ways To Match Employee Performance Standards and Customer Feedback in Small-Medium Business

October 30th, 2009 | Author: Talkbout Staff

A Valuable Resource.
What customers tell you about your business and employees is quite valuable. You can create a clear link between customer feedback and employee standards. But remember, no customer likes filling out forms. A structured telephone call or interview is preferable.

1. Feedback and Performance: Not Form Filling. No one likes filling out forms. Your customers are no exception. So don’t ask them. If you must use a form for customer feedback find an inducement so that they’ll complete and return it. A brief personal talk or a phone call will gain you more useful information than a form.

2. Show Customers You Are Serious. Leaving a blank form in a “prominent” place and doing nothing else tells customers you don’t really value their opinion. Form design is important too. It’s easier for customers to tick boxes than to write statements. A telephone or face to face interview shows your genuine interest.

3. Ask The Right Questions. You want your customers to tell you four things * what they enjoyed about dealing with you * what they didn’t like about dealing with you * how you could improve the transaction * whether your staff met your performance standards

The meeting or not of performance standards may also be part of the first three objectives.

4. Be Specific. However you ask your questions, be specific. Say “Did the technician wear a clean uniform?” not “Was the technician clean and presentable?” or “Did he clean up to your satisfaction?” not “Did he leave a mess?” To make things easier for the customer, you could use Yes/No responses or seek “percentage” answers e.g. “If you were rating the serviceman on a 1-10 scale, what score would you give for keeping you well informed?” Avoid generalizations.

5. Doing It. List the performance standards that customers should experience. Write questions relating to each standard. Be careful to include all standards even if they seem small. What’s small to you may be big to customers. Prepare a script incorporating the questions. A script is essential. Determine what you want your staff to say, the exact words to use, questions to ask and the order in which they should ask them. Get answers to all your questions. And before you conclude, always ask customers if there’s anything else they’d like to say.

6. Using A Form. If you do use a form, still seek answers to specific questions. But leave plenty of room for “Any other comments”. Remember, leave plenty of room not two lines squeezed in at the bottom of the page.

7. Review. If you’ve prepared your questions well and phrased them carefully, you’ll obtain very valuable information. Use it prudently to improve staff performance, review and improve performance standards and as a basis to reward staff. Never use it as a “blunt instrument to beat people over the head with”.

Conclusion. In a nutshell, performance standards make good business sense. They also help to ensure that customers get what they want. It makes sense to involve customers to help you assess staff performance. It also shows that in your business, staff performance and customer opinion are closely related.

Leon Noone helps managers in small-medium business to improve on-job staff performance without training courses. Some say his ideas are too unconventional. Find out for yourself by reading his free Special Report Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/7-ways-to-match-employee-performance-standards-and-customer-feedback-in-smallmedium-business-1399422.html

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Business Credit Cards Helpful In Problem

October 29th, 2009 | Author: Talkbout Staff

‘Yes’ is the answer that’s comes out almost immediately. That is true at least for most businesses (especially small businesses). Before we delve deeper into how business credit cards are helpful, let’s try and understand what a business credit card is. Put simply, a business credit card is a credit card that is owned by a business and not an individual. To understand this better, you can simply draw an analogy between the business credit cards and business bank accounts, which are in the name of the business as well. Other than that, business credit cards work in pretty much the same fashion as the personal credit cards; with a few exceptions. These exceptions are in the form of flexibility in credit limit, low APRs and some other additional benefits that are available to business credit cards only. Even from just that, business credit cards seem a good proposition. However, business credit cards would be attractive even without those benefits because the main benefit lies elsewhere. The big-big benefit from a business credit card is realized in terms of business expense accounting. For most small businesses, business expense accounting is a big overhead. With business credit cards, this is handled very easily – you just have to ensure that you make all your business expenses on your business credit card and let the personal expenses be on the personal credit card i.e. segregation of business and personal expenses is all you need to do. So the bill for your business credit card will have all the business expenses on it and you wouldn’t need to collate all the various bills or sort out the items from your personal credit card bill. The key here is to make sure that you use your business credit card for all your business expenses (or as much as you can). Moreover, a lot of business credit card suppliers realize this need of small business and even organize the business credit card bills in a way that meets the accounting requirements of these businesses. So mostly, they will appropriately group the expenses on the business credit card bill so as to facilitate business expense accounting. In fact, some of the business credit card suppliers go to an extent of providing the bills in a format that can be downloaded and exported to an accounting system i.e. you don’t need to enter the data manually in your accounting system. In case the format is not suitable for your accounting system, you can hire a software professional to write a small quick program to convert it into a suitable format. Thus just one reason – ‘facilitation of business expense accounting’, is enough to support the case of small business credit cards.

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Online Home Based Business for Real Profit

October 29th, 2009 | Author: Talkbout Staff

Today we can easily claim to be a top home based business idea among online home based businesses. The most important success strategy that you can adopt is to treat your online home based business like a real business, not a hobby. Discover the advantages of our unique online home based business opportunity today. Having an online home based business has 95% to do with the business aspect, but there still are 5% legal matters that should be in the back of your head. The more you are aware of the various legalities to having an online home based business, the less chance you have of losing your business. You can of course spend hours searching for online home based business opportunity in Yahoo but if your time is valuable then start right here. Everyone has heard of Yahoo as one of the most recognized names among search engines and is a great resource for finding more about online home based business opportunity. We Looked Inside Yahoo To Discover more about online home based business opportunity. Over the past months we have visited hundreds of online home based business opportunity sites and looked for the very best. Do you know why you want to start an online home based business? Once you have written down as many things as you can think of for why you want to start your own online home based business then pick the best one that applies most to you. I don’t know a thing about you, but I’ll bet you’ve decided to start your own online home based business. In fact you’re so excited that you want to tell everyone that you’re going to start your own online home based business. An online home based business is ideal for anyone who has some spare time, such as a mother who has opted to look after her children rather than continue with her full time job or anyone who is otherwise unemployed. The best online home based business idea with residual income programs is defined by each person. It is also easy to see why many people end up choosing the online home based business idea that is not the best for them. If nobody will buy them then the chances of the online home based business surviving are not good. Business opportunity abounds on the Internet, more and more people are looking to start an online home based business of their own. There is also the fact that, although there are several reputable companies that will offer you a good online home based business opportunity, there are also those that are just looking to steal your money. You will want to know which companies that offer you an online home based business opportunity are legitimate, and which ones are out to scam you. I’ll let you decide if there really is an advantage to any online home based business opportunity. It is perhaps easier to define the worst online home based business idea. This guaranteed online home based business opportunity uses no tricks, no games, no BS. Get in on one that is guaranteed and you have a better chance to succeed.

Today we can easily claim to be a top home based business idea among online home based businesses. The most important success strategy that you can adopt is to treat your online home based business like a real business, not a hobby. Discover the advantages of our unique online home based business opportunity today.

Having an online home based business has 95% to do with the business aspect, but there still are 5% legal matters that should be in the back of your head. The more you are aware of the various legalities to having an online home based business, the less chance you have of losing your business. You can of course spend hours searching for online home based business opportunity in Yahoo but if your time is valuable then start right here.

Everyone has heard of Yahoo as one of the most recognized names among search engines and is a great resource for finding more about online home based business opportunity. We Looked Inside Yahoo To Discover more about online home based business opportunity. Over the past months we have visited hundreds of online home based business opportunity sites and looked for the very best.

Do you know why you want to start an online home based business? Once you have written down as many things as you can think of for why you want to start your own online home based business then pick the best one that applies most to you.

I don’t know a thing about you, but I’ll bet you’ve decided to start your own online home based business. In fact you’re so excited that you want to tell everyone that you’re going to start your own online home based business. An online home based business is ideal for anyone who has some spare time, such as a mother who has opted to look after her children rather than continue with her full time job or anyone who is otherwise unemployed.

The best online home based business idea with residual income programs is defined by each person. It is also easy to see why many people end up choosing the online home based business idea that is not the best for them. If nobody will buy them then the chances of the online home based business surviving are not good.

Business opportunity abounds on the Internet, more and more people are looking to start an online home based business of their own. There is also the fact that, although there are several reputable companies that will offer you a good online home based business opportunity, there are also those that are just looking to steal your money. You will want to know which companies that offer you an online home based business opportunity are legitimate, and which ones are out to scam you.

I’ll let you decide if there really is an advantage to any online home based business opportunity. It is perhaps easier to define the worst online home based business idea. This guaranteed online home based business opportunity uses no tricks, no games, no BS. Get in on one that is guaranteed and you have a better chance to succeed.

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