In times of such economic upheaval, one of the major deciding factors separating the businesses who fail and the ones who succeed is the establishment and execution of best practice procedures in the workplace. Building up the reputation of being a great service provider will ensure that your customers return again and again. The Times recently published an article on the importance of established best practice procedures for the success of businesses during the recession.
Taking the time to go through all the processes involved in the provision of your business’ services and establishing a best practice procedure for each process will ensure that mistakes are avoided and the service is provided to the customer in the speediest and most efficient manner. It can be a tedious task but will be worth the time. Each step of each process should be identified as well as the staff member responsible for each step and the material or technology they need to complete that step. Any problems that could affect the completion of each step should be identified and alternatives proposed.
Larger companies employ business process managers on a full time or consultancy basis. However, for smaller companies this can be done by management if the time is set aside. It can be done as a team task as the staff member who currently carries out the task probably has valuable insight into problems that can occur and ways of avoiding these.
A possible repercussion of not doing this is that tasks are not carried out properly and the customer is left feeling dissatisfied with the service (or lack thereof) provided by your business. For example, a simple task such as administering the post in the morning can have a huge impact on the performance of a business. A member of staff needs to be appointed to delegate the post, and in the absence of this person another member of staff. Then, within each department (depending on the size of business) a member of staff should be appointed to respond to postal correspondence. Also, all post should be recorded in some manner and a member of staff should be appointed this responsibility. Some may view this as bureaucracy gone mad – however think of the repercussions. If a letter received in your business with a query about your services/products from a potential client is left on a staff member’s desk who does not realise the importance of the letter then it may be left by the wayside until it is too late and then your business has lost valuable business. The identification of a member of staff who is aware of the importance of such a query to be responsible for the correspondence then losing valuable business can be avoided.
The identification of best practice procedures is an important task in the management of a good business, but of course the execution of best practice procedures is a deciding factor for the success of a great business. Of course, with a franchise investmentcomes an established business model incorporating best practice procedures which is why during a recession; a franchise investment is well worth considering in terms of the likelihood of you staying in business for more than a year.