Body Language is the non-verbal communication that we are conveying to others through the facial expressions or body positions. Since it constitutes up to 90% of the actual communicated message, we need to master it.

Here are 5 tips that will help you in improving your body language

• Smile: It’s the most noticeable aspect of your face gestures
• Look straight: Look in the eyes of your speaker – not up nor down on them
• Stand and sit upright: Without slouching to convey confidence
• Extend open arms: Instead of crossed ones to convey openness
• Pace the person in front of you: By being in sync with the speed and actions that they portray

The above tips can be applied by anyone at any time to help create better, more effective communications. Remember, it’s what you don’t say that counts.

11 Science-Backed Benefits of Smiling 

Smiling is one of quickest ways you can improve your body language and non-verbal communication. Proper body language increases your confidence and helps our communication skills. A survey actually found that 48 percent of adults say a smile is one of the most memorable features of a person when they first meet them. If you’re interested in having the most unforgettable smile, visit this page.

Though a smile can go a long way when communicating with others, it also has many other health and psychological benefits you may not have known. Here are just a few of the health benefits of smiling, backed by science: 

1. Alleviates stress

When we smile, our bodies naturally release endorphins—also known as happy hormones. These happy hormones allow us to feel feelings of happiness and joy, which directly impact our mood. Because of this, smiling has the ability to relieve stress. A study from the University of Kansas found that smiling during periods of stress, even when we’re not actually feeling our best, can help reduce the intensity of our body’s stress response. So, the next time you’re feeling stressed, try focusing on smiling if you can. 

2. Reduces blood pressure 

High-blood pressure is brought on when our heart rate increases, which can happen when we’re experiencing high levels of stress or worry. Similar to how smiling can help alleviate stress, it can also help reduce our blood pressure levels. Smiling can also help reduce your risk of heart disease, since high-blood pressure is one of the leading symptoms causing this disease. Not only does smiling help keep our mood balanced, it also is a way to improve our overall health.

3. Boosts mood

Studies have suggested that the physical act of smiling has the power to trick your brain into thinking you’re happy. Creating these positive emotions can not only help boost our mood, but others around us as well. Laughing and smiling really is contagious, so remember that the next time your friend or colleague is feeling down. 

4. Strengthens relationships 

Studies and research have shown that those who express happy emotions, like smiling, are more likely to achieve goals in their personal and professional lives. Also, studies have found that people who smile more are perceived as “more likeable,” which can directly influence the relationships they build, whether professionally or personally. This helps us in social settings and professional settings when using non-verbal communication strategies. 

If you’re looking for more ways to actively smile throughout your day, here are just a few ways you can turn that frown upside down: 

• Practice daily gratitude 
• Begin your day with a mindful meditation 
• Do one good thing for someone else
• Watch a funny movie or TV show 
• Spend time in nature 

A smile can go a long way, and studies show that laughter(and smiling) really is the best medicine. To learn more about the health benefits of smiling, check out the infographic created by Auraglow below:

The post 5 Tips For Better Body Language – Benefits of Smiling appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

So, what is a SWOT analysis?

It’s an efficient tool to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that are facing your business.

In a SWOT analysis, the strengths and weaknesses represent characteristics that are within your control referred to as internal factors. The opportunities and threats focus on external factors that could have an impact on your business, project, or product and which are out of your control.

SWOT analysis is a practical method to help you analyze the current situation and help you in planning for the future.

The SWOT analysis process can be used by anyone in a personal or professional context and is very useful as a brainstorming tool for teams to come together to discuss different perspectives on a situation at hand.

It helps in finding new solutions to problems and deciding on the best course of action.

Successful leaders use this simple tool on a regular basis to help them develop their strategy and course of action. It’s also an important tool to get better teamwork. In the process, different points of view are heard and the team can align with the decisions that are taken.

So, I’m sure by now you are convinced about the effectiveness of the SWOT analysis, let’s get right into it.

First, Determine the Strengths of your Business

When doing a SWOT analysis process, the first step is to determine the strengths of your business, or product or project. The strengths refer to positive things that are within your control and allow you to have an advantage over others. When applying this to a business, areas that are in your control include the team, your financial positions, your experience, or processes.

Here are 3 questions to ask yourself to help in determining your strengths:

• What makes us unique and different from others?
• What do people or customers praise us for?
• How are we better than others?

Second, Determine the Weaknesses of your Business

The second step is to determine the weaknesses of your business, or product, or project. The weaknesses refer to negative things that are within your control and that could put you at a disadvantage over others. When applying this to a business, areas that are in your control include the team, your financial positions, your experience or processes.

Here are 3 questions to ask yourself to help in determining your weaknesses:

• How to improve our business or product?
• What do people or customers tell us that we need to improve?
• Things we need to be avoiding?

Third, Determine the Opportunities for your Business

The 3rd step of SWOT analysis is to determine the opportunities facing your business, or product or project. The opportunities refer to positive things that are outside of your control and that could have an effect on you. When applying this to a business, areas that are outside of your control include future trends, economic, laws, or political issues.

Here are 3 questions to ask yourself to help in determining your opportunities:

• What are technological trends that could give you an advantage?
• Are there any laws, policies or economic situations that work in your favor?
• Are there any events taking place that you can leverage?

 Fourth, Determine the Threats to your Business

When doing a SWOT analysis, the 4th step is to determine the opportunities facing your business, or product or project. Moreover, the threats refer to negative things that are outside of your control and that could have an effect on you. When applying this to a business, areas that are outside of your control include future trends, economic, laws or political issues.

Here are 3 questions to ask yourself to help in determining your threats:

• What are technological trends that could disrupt or affect us negatively?
• Are there any laws, policies or economic situations that could impact us in a negative way?
• Are there any market financial risks that could be affecting us?

 Taking Action after your SWOT Analysis

By completing the above 4 steps of SWOT analysis, you can then have a good overview of the current situation and be able to make a decision about moving forward.

As the next steps, you can put the actions needed to make use of the analysis. These would include:

• Leverage your strength and expand what you are doing well
• Minimize your weaknesses and avoid things that are not working
• Be prepared to make use of the opportunities that could be coming your way
• Be prepared to reduce the impact of threats that you could be facing

As the saying goes, chance favors the prepared mind and through the SWOT analysis, you would be better prepared.

Time to take action – start creating your analysis by using Xtensio’s free SWOT and TOWS matrix template.

As a Conclusion,

We hope that through this SWOT analysis process, you would decide on the best course of action you need to take to achieve your set goals.

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Mother’s Day is one of the busiest spending seasons around the world, where fathers/husbands, sons and daughters go in search of unique gifts that say “I love you” to the special women in their lives. Also, savvy business owners ride the publicity wave and seize the perfect opportunity and come up with Mother’s Day marketing ideas to fill up their coffers as customer wallets open as wide as their hearts.

But, how can business owners link their efforts to such a large event, that people are already concerned about, and get an additional boost from the buzz? That is the question. Five simple yet effective Mother’s Day marketing ideas that can help businesses grab their customers’ attention and get the most out of the occasion:

• Mother’s Day marketing idea 1:

  Get closer to your current and potential customers

  Conduct a survey aimed at gathering, scrutinizing, and acting upon customers’ comments, reviews, and feedback. In addition, form a focus group from amongst your most loyal customers, and discuss one or more aspects of the customer experience that can be improved. Bear in mind that people will not care about your business until they know how much you care about them!

• Mother’s Day marketing idea 2:

  Produce and share informative content reflecting the special occasion

  Make sure all content created and posted across your miscellaneous social media platforms is light, engaging, and useful, includes promotional information and calls to action, and links the products you are recommending as gifts to your occasion-themed website.

• Mother’s Day marketing idea 3:

  Make the best use of social media channels on Mother’s Day

  Sending out a message through social media is the simplest and cheapest way of linking your brand to a special occasion. On Mother’s Day, find a quote that is relevant to your brand, and post it as a caption to a mothers day image featuring your product or brand name, if appropriate. This will help you stay on top of your customers’ minds. Furthermore, offer discounts to customers who post your occasion-themed hashtag and help you increase your reach! Also, offering deals through text messages can be of great benefit to your business.

• Mother’s Day marketing idea 4:

  Be nice, and reward Moms

  Treat your Moms with extra care, and get your staff to spread the love. And, as the saying goes, we shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do! Moreover, incorporate gift giving within your corporate culture, and reward your best customers by adding special gifts or incentives on top of what you normally provide them with.

• Mother’s Day marketing idea 5:

  Live out the Mother’s Day spirit

  Donate a portion of proceeds from the sales of particular goods or services to a local deserving charity, and spread the word across your website, blog, e-mail newsletters, and social media platforms, so as to show how you positively contribute to your community and thus attract more and more customers.

The celebration of Mothers Day is probably the most commercialized holiday in the world. Capitalizing on this via strong marketing campaigns will help to gain greater sales, reach and consumer confidence in your organization’s products and services.

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Originally developed by Strategyzer.com the business model canvas has grown in popularity and is a great tool to help you build an exceptional scalable business model that can take your business to the next level. Challenge your existing business model and identify the areas of improvement.

In this Business Model Canvas Innovation guide, we aim to provide you practical tips on how to build your business model canvas

The first part of the business model canvas is focused on your customers. Let’s start with defining your customer segments!

Business Model Canvas Step 1:

Define your Customer Segments

Customers segments have something in common with each other allowing you to reach them more easily by knowing what their interests are, where you can reach them and what do they need.

Here are 3 ways that you can define your customer segments if you are a start-up:

1. Mass Market includes a broad range of people that could be interested in your offerings. This is quite common in consumer products, but reaching that mass market is very costly for start-ups. A lot of consumer goods like chocolates, soap, and milk follow such a model as well as others like WhatsApp
2. Niche Market includes a more specific group of people that come together because of their age, location, and interests. It is easier for a start-up to reach such a customer segment since it’s easier to grab their attention through your knowledge of their interests. Health products, organic, specific apps could follow this model
3. Multi-Sided Market is specific to companies that have users of the products or service who could be using it for free and clients who have an interest in reaching that set of users. Advertising businesses use this model where advertisers are the clients can reach readers who are the users

All through the development of your business, it is crucial that you and your team are very clear on the market segment that you are trying to reach as this would guide many other decisions that you need to take.

Business Model Canvas Step 2:

Define your Value Proposition

Your value proposition is what defines your business, and what excites your clients to do business with you. If you are not exciting your clients enough, they would not go through the effort of trying your product or service.

Here are 4 questions to ask yourself about as you define your value proposition:

1. What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
2. What is the value that your product or service add to your target segment?
3. How do you address the needs of your target segment?
4. How is your value proposition different from others – or unique?

Keeping your value proposition clear and effective allows you to communicate it effectively within your company and to your target segments. Every one of your team members needs to understand how their work contributes to that value proposition.

Business Model Canvas Step 3:

Channel Strategies

Channels are the way that you interface with your clients and services. Your aim is to find the most convenient way for your clients to buy your products and services and to have a great experience doing so.

Here are 2 commonly used channel strategies to sell through to your channels.

1. Direct Channels where you sell directly to your clients either through your website, through your stores or through your sales teams
2. In-Direct Channels where you rely on others to sell your products or services. These could be distributors, retailers or resellers that already have the supply chain or customer relationship and would thus provide you with the most efficient way to reach your clients and possibly to support them

Deciding on the channel model in a startup is very important since each way would have its advantages and disadvantages. As the business evolves, it can have a hybrid channel model that makes use of both routes to reach your clients.

Business Model Canvas Step 4:

Customer Relationship Types

Your customer relationship will influence the experience that they will have with you and the frequency of engagement with them.

Here are 5 commonly used customer relationships as part of your Business Model Canvas development:

1. Self Service or Automated relationships where clients can conduct most or all of the service they need without assistance by anyone in your business. A lot of monthly subscription or online services follow this model
2. Personal Relationships where your direct teams are involved in selling and servicing your clients. This is common in physical retail, high value and corporate sales.
3. Co-Creation Relationship where clients contribute to the growth of your business, such as the case with social media sites
4. Transactional Relationship where the client can use your product and service once and might never have the need to return to you and use it again
5. Switching Cost are sticky relationships where it becomes difficult for a client to change a service since they have invested so much time and effort into the relationship. First movers in this type of relationship have the most to gain

Determine which one of these relation types have the most value to your business and to your clients’ experience resulting in great customer service.

Business Model Canvas Step 5:

Key Revenue Streams

Revenue streams or sales refer to how you generate cash from your clients. In the Business Model Canvas, different client segments could pay you in different ways. Without sales, a business can’t function, so this is the most important aspects of any business.

7 most used revenue types include:

1. Asset sales refer to cases where you sell a product to a client who then becomes the owner of that product. This is the most widely used model in business and takes place anytime we buy a car, computer or a building
2. Usage fee refers to when a client uses your product or service but its ownership remains with you. This is common in the hotel or airline industry
3. Subscription fee refers to when your clients subscribe on a monthly or weekly basis and can use your infrastructure. Examples of this include software as a service, gym memberships, etc..
4. Leasing or renting or lending refer to allowing clients to use your assets for a period of time as if it is theirs
5. Licensing revenue is earned when you give clients a permission to use your intellectual property. This is common in content production and inventions.
6. Brokerage fees are earned when you take commission from facilitating a business transaction between two parties.
7. Advertising results from fees for advertising a particular product or service or brand

Ensuring which of the above revenue streams is most convenient for each of your target segments and in turn allowing you to generate the most business is an essential aspect of having your business survive and thrive.

After focusing on the customer aspect of the business, we shift our views to the internal operations which sustain our business model.

Business Model Canvas Step 6:

Key Resource Types

Key resources reflect the most important assets of your business. Identifying them will help you in protecting these assets and making the most of them.

Here are 3 common resource types:

1. Physical resources include vehicles, offices or stores, data center, manufacturing equipment
2. Intellectual Property assets brands, copyrights, patents, platforms and even customer databases.
3. Human Capital representing your team. In most businesses, this is your most important asset as the team helps in keeping innovations coming in and in providing your clients with a great experience

Identifying your most important assets in your business and protecting them is essential to making your business function well.

Business Model Canvas Step 7:

Key Activities your Business Engages in

There are many daily tasks that are done within the business, but it is always important to be clear about what are the key activities that need to be conducted within the business to deliver on the value proposition that you are promising your clients. By identifying these activities, it would help you to prioritize the efforts taking place in your business.

As part of the Business Model Canvas template, some of the common activities in a business include:

1. Production activities which focus on the design, manufacturing, and delivery of a product or service – common in manufacturing
2. Problem-solving which covers a lot of services businesses that work on addressing customer problems
3. Platforms bring together users and clients on a common space for them to interact – Credit card companies, Software platforms, and online merchants are examples that have platforms as a key activity

Reviewing your key activities and improving the performance is an essential part of innovating a better product or service to your clients.

Business Model Canvas Step 8:

Key Partnerships

Forming strong partnerships with your ecosystem is a great tool to help in expanding your reach and making sure that your business is delivering its promise to clients.

Some essential partnerships in a business include:

1. Alliances these are entities that can complement your offerings or your reach to your clients – these can include joint ventures or general partnership agreement
2. Suppliers are essential in providing you non-core business elements that allow you to focus on your core areas of strength

Continuous evaluation of the available partnership options is essential to stay abreast of the latest developments.

Business Model Canvas Step 9:

Important Cost Structures

Cost structure refers to all the costs that you incur to deliver on your business model. Keeping your costs under control is essential to maintain a healthy business.

2 Essential Cost Structure elements include:

• Fixed Costs – which refer to all costs that you need to incur whether you sell or not. These could include factory, general administration staff, rent, management staff costs etc..
• Variable Costs – which refer to costs that are associated with the sales of your products or services. The more you sell the more these costs would go up. Variable costs include things like the raw material for your products or cost of consultants that you would etc..

When you are starting up a business keeping the fixed costs as low as possible is essential so that you don’t run out of cash too quickly before you start selling enough products and services to cover your costs.

Conclusion

We hope that through the above-mentioned steps you would be able to learn what should be done to Build a Scalable Business Model by using our guide to the business model canvas.

To empower yourself through our real-world education and reach your business potential, we invite you to visit our store. You will find in it practical courses, services, guides, products, and other resources to help you succeed.

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Good customer service is what all businesses aim for in order to meet the customers’ needs.

This Customer Service guide will take you through a step by step process of how to design a customer service plan to help you create loyal ambassadors for your business.

This will, in turn, help you build an exceptional customer service team that can tackle almost anything.

Are you ready?

As the say goes” Be thankful for customers who complain, you still have the opportunity to make them happy.”

Making complaining or puzzled customers happy is the main task for your customer service team. However, setting up robust customer service workflows and training a high-performing customer service team is likely to be quite a long process. To make your way to immaculate customer service shorter, you can outsource some customer service activities, for example, help desk. Still, we suggest you to consider nurturing an in-house customer service team and will…

We will provide you with practical tips that could be used to maximize your customers satisfaction.

Let’s start with why you should have a customer service plan in the first place!

4 Reasons Why You Should Have a Customer Service Plan

Businesses aim to deliver their products or services to the community at a high standard in order for their organization to excel in the future. Designing a customer service plan will guide the business in achieving that goal.  This video will explain why you need to perform a strategic customer service plan for your employees to follow.

https://youtu.be/fpwb121MnDg

Here are the 4 reasons:

1. It creates a positive business environment. Employees know what they have to do which makes them more confident when dealing with the customers. Using the customer service plan as a guide will diminish small unnecessary questions and queries that will just waste time and money.
2. Gives your business a professional image. Building this image takes time but with a customer service plan every individual, internal or external to your business, will have a pre-acknowledgment that your business follows a reliable, respectful and service-oriented strategy.
3. Enhances the quality of your business. A customer service plan can include information concerning the appearance of your staff, appearance of your products, quality of your services, prices of your sales and maybe the tone of voice that employees are suggested to use while dealing with an upset customer. All this and much more play an essential role in improving one’s quality of business.
4. Sets a system to classify customer complaints in order to manage them in a smooth, professional manner. Every individual will try to follow the system in the most convenient way to be able to handle these complaints right away. This will minimize stress and highlight what is most important making both your employees and customers happy.

Every organization is advised to establish a customer service plan for employees to follow. All successful organizations use a customer plan as it is the key path to a growing fulfilled business. So get ready to fight for your clients with your paws as there are others ready to pounce and take them away from you!

Now, we’ll look at what makes great customer service teams.

8 Qualities of Exceptional Customer Service Teams

Customer service is providing services to your customers before, during and after purchasing your products or services. Good customer service is what all businesses aim for in order to meet the customers’ needs. Bad customer service generates problems, complaints and diminishes the existence of good repeated long-term customers.

Here are 8 Qualities of high-standard customer service team and which we suggest you follow:

1. Being patient and empathetic are essential keys to a happy customer. Give your full time and energy by listening and interacting with shared interests. Customers can be boring, picky, problem makers or too slow to understand.
2. Being persuasive is essential. Know your products or services very well to be able to convince your customer that they are worth having.
3. Have a pre-planned strategy on whom to forward the problem to and how. Unexpected problems faced for the first time must be handled in an efficient way.
4. Communicate clearly and immediately. Make sure the customer understood clearly what you are trying to say as to avoid wasting time.
5. Be ethical with good moral values. Give maximum help but with good time management skills. Let the customer trust you completely.
6. Have a full knowledge of your customers’ bad and good experiences. This will help you learn how to satisfy your customer in the future.
7. Being able to close the deal with the customer confirming that the issues have been resolved. Make sure that the customer’s satisfaction has been reached.
8. Conduct regular surveys whether through emails, phone calls, websites or even when sending an invoice to a customer, surveys are really helpful in meeting the customers’ needs.

As explained, good customer service skills are needed at all times to maintain happy long-term customers which are what all businesses need. Everyone in the company can be involved in providing great service, and it is essential that you have a dedicated team or individual who is the point of contact for all customer issues.

Satisfied customers are the key to a successful business! So use the above tips to WOW your customers and create loyal ambassadors for your business.

Five Steps Building a Culture of Great Customer Service

Good customer service skills apply when you have the right interaction with your customer. Keep your customers satisfied by making them feel that they are always right. Customer interaction is a communication skill between the customer and service team. Improving that interaction will lead you on to the path of a great customer service team.

The following are five basic steps that you can implement to improve your interaction with your customer:

1. Make sure your customers feel that there is a common ground between the both of you. Make them believe you have common interests and that their problem is your problem.
2. Listen carefully and empathetically to their needs. In other words, “Put yourself in their shoes”. Listening is a key factor that plays a big role in making the customer feel that you truly care.
3. Admit “yes, I am wrong” when you are genuinely mistaken is important. It makes you reach the customers on a whole new level. You are proving that they are not beneath you and that there is no room for arrogance between the both of you.
4. Follow up after a problem is resolved is very important. Conduct surveys whether through emails, phone calls, websites or send it with the invoice to the customer after resolving all issues.
5. Learn from your mistakes is the fastest way to increase your understanding of customer needs. Experiencing customer interaction on a daily basis increases the rate of learning.  This may happen at the point of sale, at your customer relationship programs or after a problem has been resolved.

As explained, part of the customer service skills is to improve customer interaction so use these five basic guidelines to make your way to a superb customer service!

So we’ve put a customer service plan, we’ve built a team – how do you handle customer complaints.

8 Efficient Ways Managing Customer Service Complaints

Customer complaints are received when customers are not happy with a product or service they have purchased. This is good for your business because when handled efficiently a customer complaint can prevent further problems and lead to stable, long-term happy customers. Happy customers mean more profitable returns.

We suggest following these 8 ways while managing your customer complaints:

1. Analyse your customer complaint. Study the reason that led to the problem. Find out who is making the complaint and how often is this complaint encountered.
2. Record details of your analysis. Implementing software for recording analysis is a great way to prevent problems from reoccurring in the future.
3. Understand your customer needs. Determine what the customer is looking for as a solution. Be polite and listen carefully. You might be surprised that some of their solutions are less than what you expect. Know what will make them satisfied customers. If you end up with unhappy customers, they will leave your company for a competitor.
4. Acknowledge your company’s costs, services, qualities, billing issues and communications. Having the full and right information guides you to find the best solution to the problem.
5. Take the best action to solve the problem. Put all the above-collected information together in order to find the best solution to fix the problem. The best solution is obtained when an agreement is reached between the customer service team and client.
6. Fast response. Quick responses are advised when dealing with complaints. It is not preferable to keep customers waiting. If you have no choice but to pass on the customer to another employee, make sure to explain why.
7. Follow up after the problem has been solved. Make sure the customer is satisfied with the solution. This will encourage the customer to come back to you with any other issue.
8. Always thank the customers for their patience while solving the problem. Satisfied customers will be back and hopefully will attract their friends to social media to come.

At some point, everyone in the organization is bound to deal with an upset customer. As mentioned, the solution is to manage this situation efficiently resulting in a satisfied customer thinking you are part of a wonderful organization.

We suggest you follow the 8 steps above to help u achieve long-term relationships with your customers.

4 Things to Do to Handle an Unexpected Customer Complaint to Perfection

An unexpected customer complaint in customer service happens when one has encountered a specific product problem for the first time or a service issue that has never appeared to one before. Surprises are bound to happen in any business. Part of good customer service skills is to be able to handle such circumstances efficiently and promptly in order to keep your customers satisfied and happy.

Have a time-efficient strategy. We suggest your strategy to follow these 4 steps when dealing with an unexpected complaint:

1. The person to-go-to or forward the problem to. We suggest pre-planning your hierarchy of chosen employees according to the magnitude of the problem.
2. The part of the information that you will forward to that selected person above. Be clear and definite on what the problem is so as not to waste time.
3. The communication method that will be used to pass the information. Emails, chats, phone or face-to-face. The communication method will be chosen depending on the size of the problem. The bigger the problem the more contact is needed between customer service and client.
4. The rate at which the problem should be adhered depending on its magnitude. More immediate action to be taken the bigger the problem is.

Learning and applying these steps in the business improves with experience. The more problems encountered the more a customer service team will be able to handle them with good time-management skills.  The customers’ satisfaction is essential to every individual in the organization.

As explained, dealing with unexpected complaints is one of the skills a good customer service team can endure so follow these four steps to resolve your unexpected issues in a smooth, professional manner leading to a WOW performance!

Listen to the Customer Service Fundamentals Audio Course here:

5 Things to Ensure That You Have Achieved Customer Excellence

Customer Excellence is making sure that you have fully met your customer needs before, during and especially

after purchasing a product or service. All businesses aim to reach customer excellence by providing strategies for their employees to follow. This will guide the employees to understand the customers and thus play an essential role to drive a profitable growth of their organization.

Here are 5 things we suggest you follow to make sure that you achieve customer excellence:

1. Don’t leave your customers waiting. A fast response should be taken. Customers hate waiting and if there is no escape, make sure you have a plan of entertaining the customers while they wait. Maybe let them take a survey, fill up their details in an application, explore new products of your business or give them an overall view of your up to date services.
2. Know your customers well even on a personal level. Collect all information needed for your customers’ needs. What their likes and dislikes are. Get to know their names. Customers are happy when they feel that you really do care.
3. Find solutions to your mistakes. High standard of customer service is achieved when the organization admits they’re wrong and fixes the problem as soon as possible. After the problem has been resolved, performing a nice gesture towards the customers as a sign of apology is advised in order to ensure that the customer will return.
4. Be creative. Take an extra step. Whatever makes your customers happy should be taken into consideration even if it may seem like a strange action to perform. Twisting the ropes little might attract your customers to repeatedly come back to your business.
5. Create long-term relationships with your customers. This can be done by conducting surveys as a source of feedback on whether your customer was fully satisfied. Ensuring that your customer leaves your business with a memorable experience can lead to long-term loyal ambassadors of your corporate organization. Remember these ambassadors will probably bring others through social media leading to a profitable success in the future.

Delivering what is promised by your product or service and more importantly following up with requests and queries after that, will lead to fully satisfied customers. Reaching customer excellence gives your organization a competitive advantage over other businesses. As explained, the goal is to have long-term customers that will not leave your brand for other competitive businesses.

So follow the 5 steps that we have advised in order to make your business a unique and memorable experience to your fans!

Conclusion

We hope that through these Customer Service Tips you would be able to learn what should be done to Build an Excellent Customer Service Team.

To empower yourself through our real-world education and reach your business potential, we invite you to visit our store. You will find in it practical courses, services, guides, products, and other resources to help you succeed.

The post Customer Service Tips For Your Business appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

The Innovation Design Thinking Process will guide you through 4 steps of developing your innovation.

This will, in turn, help you to take your idea to the next level.

As the say goes “It is not about the ideas. It is about making ideas happen.”

So, let’s start the innovation design thinking process.

Step #1: Understand the Problem

The first step in the innovation process is to understand the problem you’re trying to solve or the need that you are trying to address.

To understand the problem, it’s good to put yourself in the shoes of the user or customer and empathize with them. You can do so by observing, surveying, and embed yourself in the situation.

In addition to understanding the problem from the user perspective, you can explore what are the current solutions available, what technology exists that could be used in solutions and where do they fall short in fulfilling the user needs.

Understanding the problem and need is key to finding the right solution.

Step #2: Ideate 

The second step in the innovation process is to come up with as many ideas as possible to address the problem that you are working on. At this stage, there is no right or wrong idea, anything works, no matter how crazy it is.

If you are working in teams, it would be best to have a board or flip-chart and have everyone explain their idea and post it or write it up. This helps trigger new thoughts in others around you.

To come up with more ideas, approach the brainstorming from a technology, user, emotional, functional, business and any other angle you can think of.

At the end of the ideation process, consolidate some of the ideas, remove some of the ideas that have no relevance, and then vote on the best most promising one which you can pursue further.

Step #3: Prototype

The third step in the innovation process called prototyping is where you take the best idea or consolidated group of ideas that you came up with, and turn it into a sample product that can explain and demonstrate to users the idea.

If you’re building a software or app, it would be to come up with the minimum viable product that you can give to users to test.

If you’re building a physical product, you would be able to create a mock of that product representing how that would look in real life.

The aim of the prototype is to get as close as possible to the real product or service that you want to build, without having to spend a huge amount of resources or time doing it.

Step #4: Evaluate and Refine

The fourth step of the innovation process is where you take your prototype, and put it in the hands of users to get their feedback. You can launch a simple marketing campaign to test your user’s feedback and learn from it.

Your role here is to be like a scientist where you observe and document how your users are interacting with the prototype, what is the feedback that they are giving you, what else would they like to see in such a product, what did they like and didn’t like etc..

By collecting all of this feedback, it would allow you to go back to the prototype stage and refine it further and to test it further with users. In some cases, you might come to the realization the product you’re building wasn’t that great after all, and as such you go back to stage one and understand further the needs of the user.

This whole process allows you to very efficiently develop a product or solution that is in line with the needs of your users and which adds value to them.

As a Conclusion,

We hope that through this Guide you would be able to learn what should be done to take your idea to the next level.

To empower yourself and reach your business potential through practical courses, services, guides, products, and other resources, we invite you to visit our store.

The post Innovation Design Thinking Process appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

The Social Media Tips we will provide below will support you in setting up a strategy, launching and growing your social media presence.

This will, in turn, help you to grow your business and provide a better service to your clients.

Are you ready?

You don’t have a choice on whether to DO social media, the question is how well you DO IT.

We will provide you with practical tips that could be used to maximize the return on your social media efforts.

Social Media Tip #1:

Four Ways to Use Social Media Sites for your Business

Social Media has become the place where people spend most of their time compared to any other media outlets. When implemented well Social Media can help any business with a limited budget do what only large companies were able to do a few years back.

Here are 4 ways to make use of Social Media for your business

1. Advertising: even with limited budgets, businesses can engage with their prospects and promote their products and services
2. Referrals: There is nothing better than a happy client talking about their purchase from you to their friends and fans on Social Media
3. Customer Support: to efficiently be able to monitor any issues with products or services
4. Product Development: where you can poll and test your prospects’ opinions prior to help in developing your next products and services

The above use cases can be deployed by businesses of any sizes and at various stages of development.

By using Social Media effectively, businesses can save a lot of money and provide a better client experience.

See also: The Ultimate Digital Marketing Guide

Social Media Tip #2:

Top 5 Social Media Sites for your Business

Social Media is being used by billions of individuals around the world and there are hundreds of applications and sites.

The top 5 Social Media Sites include:

1. 1. Facebook: the largest network by far allows you to reach a very wide set of users that could be interesting for your business. It also has the most flexible and targeted advertising capabilities
   2. LinkedIn: the largest professional network is very useful if you are selling to businesses or are in the services business yourself
   3. Instagram: an efficient and easy way to promote images of your products or services. If you are into handmade or food items, it’s extremely effective. Once you build up your audience of Instagram followers organically, your engagement, as well as your sales, will start to increase steadily.
   4. Twitter: useful if you are providing thought leadership or news services. It requires more effort to get a loyal following but can be very influential when you do
   5. Pinterest: is also a great tool for businesses to promote products and services especially if you are targeting women buyers

There are many other social media networks that could be useful for a specific set of audience, such as Google+, Tumbler and many local language sites in countries around the world. Even if you are present on all these networks, as a small business, you would need to focus your efforts on the channels that can provide you with the best return on your time.

Social Media Tip #3:

A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Social Media Strategy

Coming up with a solid strategy to guide your social media activities is essential given that without it, you could end up investing a lot of your time without seeing the return on your investment.

Here are the 6 steps to set up your social media strategy

1. Decide what are your primary objectives for your social media activities – are you going to use it for advertising, customer service, product sales or development, recruitment
2. Decide on the 2-5 best social media channels to reach your target audience and objectives
3. Set SMART goals for each channel that are in line with your objectives, such as expected response time to an interaction or expected number of leads
4. Come up with key engagement approaches that you can use to attract and engage your audience on each of the chosen channels
5. Book or Update your social media channels adding your brand elements such as the logo, about us section, attractive banner and links to your website
6. Develop a content marketing plan that includes the frequency and types of posts that would be rolled out on each channel and who from your team is responsible for making that happen

Setting up such a strategy can be done every 3-6 months after reviewing the results of the previous period and your actual results in comparison with your plan. It is important to have at least one person responsible for your social media presence whose role is in collecting the necessary elements from your team or external parties.

Social Media Tip #4:

10 Tips for Crafting the Perfect Social Media Posts

Social media posts can take many forms and should be designed in a way to reflect your strategy. The frequency of posts isn’t as important as the quality of your posts, to ensure that your time is being invested in the right kind of posts.

Here are 10 quick tips to help you in crafting better posts:

• Include engaging images or videos in your posts
• Distribute your posts to cover different time zones in your target countries
• Recirculate old and effective posts with new approaches
• Optimize the posts for each type of channel that you are using
• Rewrite the posts for various target segments that you are reaching
• Identify influencers and mention them in relevant posts
• Be personal in your tone of messages
• Do A/B testing for the same message to identify most effective style
• Identify what’s trending and tag along with your messages or comments
• Keep your audience engaged in the conversation by asking feedback and mentioning them

These are tips that could be applied regularly to your posts and by doing so, you can increase engagement with your audience and increase the return on your invested time.

Social Media Tip #5:

When & How Often should you Post on Social Media

With all the effort that goes into preparing your social media posts, you want to make sure that when you do post them, you will get the maximum number of views for those posts.

Here are some suggestions on the time and frequency of your posts per social media channel per day:

• On Twitter you can be expected to post several tweets a day with some brands posting over 10 a day.
• On Instagram it’s common to for brands to post 2-3 posts a day
• The average number of posts on Facebook for brands is 1 post a day
• LinkedIn posts are more scarce with an average of 1 post per working day

Keep in mind that you might need to post tweets again to cover different time zones if you are working globally. Given that people are continuously connected, posts get the best viewing in the evenings.

In the end, you would need to try, measure and adapt your posts to the time when you get the best interactions.

Social Media Tip #6:

4 Best Practices to Promote Your Business on Social Media

Everyone is spending more time on social media so if you want to reach out to new prospects, go to where they are. Social media can be a very effective tool to reach new prospects and promote your business.

Here are 4 ways to promote your business on social media:

• Use Twitter for updates and announcements about your latest accomplishments including press releases and press coverage
• Use Facebook for competitions that could engage your target audiences – such as the development of a new innovation, or logo
• Come up with useful content in your area of expertise. Create infographics, templates, tools, ebooks that could be promoted on all social channels
• Engage in LinkedIn forums on topics that are relevant to your clients and in your areas of expertise

Using social media as a way to reach prospects could be the most cost-effective way for you to do so.

Social Media Tip #7:

Which Digital Advertising Channels are Best for Your Marketing Campaign

All major social media channels offer affordable advertising options. Choosing which channel to use for each type of advertising can be difficult.

Here are some considerations on which advertising channel is best for your specific marketing objective:

• Google ads are great if you want to promote a specific product or service that people could be searching for
• Facebook ads are great if you want to raise brand awareness by targeting a certain demographic with specific interests. To assess the impact and analyze key metrics of your ads, consider employing a comprehensive Facebook Ads report template tailored to your business goals.
• Twitter ads are great if you want to promote a message or announcement
• LinkedIn ads are great if you want to target a specific function or profession
• TikTok ads are great if you want to attract the younger audience

Be very clear about your objectives from any marketing activity and as such decide on the best channel for your campaign.

Social Media Tip #8:

4 Ways to Use Social Media for Customer Service and Support

Everyone including your users and customers is spending much more time on social media. So why not go to where these customers are instead of asking them to come to us. Provide them with customer service and support on social media itself.

Here are 4 ways social media is being used to improve customer service:

• Tracking sentiment about products, services, or the brand in general. In a nutshell are customers positive or negative in their comments on what we are offering
• Addressing negative issues quickly by spotting any bad experience that is posted and quickly addressing it. Even if not solved quickly the quick response is taken very positively by customers
• Launch a poll to identify how well are you doing. Conducting a simple net promoter score poll can provide you with a wealth of insight and allows you to track your customer service improvements
• Putting a human touch to business transactions. With more and more people interacting with your brand through online channels, social media provides you with an opportunity to connect with your clients on a personal level

The bottom line is that social media provides you with a great opportunity to monitor what your users are saying about your products and services and to quickly address issues that could come up. Make the most out of it to provide a better customer experience.

Conclusion

We hope that through these Social Media Tips and Tricks you would be able to learn what should be done to have a successful social media strategy in 2018!

The post Social Media Tips For Your Business appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

Planning and time management are essential skills in today’s workplace as we are getting more and more challenged to do more with less. Choosing what to focus on in our day to day work becomes a necessity that all employees, managers or entrepreneurs should master.

Effective Planning and Time Management are essential to help you succeed and reach your potential.

We will take you through a step by step process to determine what is important to you. For you to be successful in time management, you need to know where to use your limited time well.

Then, you can reflect those important set of goals into your plan. This will help you manage your time to ensure that you will be doing what you planned for. As you then execute your plan on a day by day basis, you will get less stress and much more satisfaction.

As the saying goes “Failing to plan is planning to fail”

So, let’s start the planning and time management process.

First, Setting your Long-Term Objectives

The first step in the planning process it to think as far out into the future as possible by identifying what is important to you. One way to do that is to think about the following:

• What will you have liked to accomplish upon your retirement?
• Would you want to be a very successful person? a wealthy person? the most liked person? a powerful person? One with high academic status? a great family person?

“When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.” – Leo Burnett

Think about the areas that are most important to you and choose 3 characteristics that matter to you.

Second, Set your long-term plan – Your 3 Year Objectives

Keeping in mind where you want to be when you retire, think about what you want to accomplish in the next 3 years. After 3 years from now, what are the achievable – even if a little challenging – goals that you want to have done. It could be a business that you want to start up, a career move that you want to make, a house that you want to buy, a personal objective that you have or anything like that.

Choose 2 SMART objectives from your professional and 2 from your personal side that you want to accomplish within 3 years.

Then your mid-term plan, Setting your 1 Year Objectives

Keeping in mind what you want to achieve in 3 years, think of the concrete steps that you need to take in the coming year that would help you reach that 3-year objective. A good way to do so is to put one milestone that you want to accomplish each month along the year. Make sure that you are taking into account the 2 personal and 2 professional goals you had in your 3-year objectives.

See Also: Everyone should be earning a passive income in 2018

Manage your time by Setting your Day To Day Plan

What you have put as a plan for the year and on a month to month basis is your guide for what is important for you to do on a daily basis. Every evening or every morning, before you start getting distracted by errands and daily requests, make sure that you put together a list of 5 things that you should do in the day that would help you towards achieving your monthly objectives. Some of these tasks could need more than 1 day to complete, so you can keep them for the upcoming days.

By being in control of your to-do list, you can ensure that you end up doing what is important to you and feel the pleasure of accomplishment. Your plans over time might change, but at least you can always be sure that you are the one that is adapting them and whatever you have done or will do will be aligned with your goals.

As a Conclusion,

We hope that through this Guide you would be able to learn what should be done to have a successful 2018!

To empower yourself and reach your business potential through practical courses, services, guides, products, and other resources, we invite you to visit our store.

The post Time Management and Planning Guide appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

Get your employees out of the box; the puppet’s game is over.

Now is the time to empower them so they can empower you and your organization. After all, leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.

Nowadays, as a result of the severe and sometimes frightening times that stroke our economy, the most strategy that supreme successful leaders are following is to give their employees the opportunity to become leaders.

They stimulate every one of their employees to take on leadership roles in their organizations. When you have more than one leader in a company, decisions are made more quickly, in addition, remarkable amounts of time; energy and money can be saved. The basics of the company will be more sustainable against any force majeure or crisis.

Responsibilities and stress are alienated which will result in having a positive and more relaxed atmosphere in the company. As a result, performances are improved and goals are reached.

However, the question is when will you give your employees the opportunity to lead? Actually, the answer is simple: At any time if they meet the following requirements and of course if you are ready to share control.

• Trustable:

  Do you trust the team you are working with? Do you believe in their skills and their ability to make decisions, as well as to solve problems accurately?

  We should also reverse the question: Does your team trust you to be willing to work hard, delicately and enthusiastically for you for the benefit of the whole organization?

  Though you may need sometimes to be cautious and prudent with your decision-making, our recommendation is to stop short of micromanaging. If you want to be trusted, you have to show that you trust your employees. Make sure everyone identifies the ground rules for decision-making and then you will easily allow your employees to apply their talent, creativity, and initiative.

• Passionate:

  Are your employees passionate about what they are doing? When employees love what they do, then they have a burning desire to reach and achieve goals.

  Make sure the employees you chose to lead really care about their tasks and what they are doing. People with passion can easily create visions and have the urge to work dedicatedly and constantly in order to bring themselves and their company to a higher level. Trust me, passion for business is contagious!

• Communicators:

  Communication is today’s business world weapon and it has a great effect on many levels. Good communicating employees have one of the most important keys to close business deals, to connect with the customers and to correspond with other employees.

  They also have the ability to share their ideas clearly. Furthermore, they are better at explaining tasks and how things should be done. When you talk about a good communicator, you talk about a good writer, listener, and speaker.

  So observe carefully whether the employees you chose as leaders are good communicators as those are the ones who can create the homogeneity between you, other employees and the customers.

• Fighters:

  A business fighter is someone who can bounce back from hardship and preserve through challenging times. Fighters don’t give up, they are ready to go all the way to attain the goals already set.

  They have the ability to overcome any obstacle confidently. This no-quit attitude will have its impact psychologically and mentally on other employees, which will create a dynamic atmosphere in the whole organization. These employees are worth being leaders!

• Teamwork attitude:

  In other words, no ego and no self-centered attitude. When you notice employees who care about others around them and about the business, you will know that these are the ones to trust taking leadership.

  Nevertheless, employees with a personal ambition and the worry to improve themselves are not bad but it shouldn’t be to the limit that they become a priority while ignoring others.

“You are bigger than your defined role and you are much more than your job title. Play your part and transcend your job title. Be a hero!” Your employees are your company’s best assets. With your help and encouragement, they can be fully engaged to accomplish the demanded tasks collectively and successfully.

One of the most important secrets to an organizational success is to recognize and value your employees. Give them wings to fly and you will be astonished how far they can reach!

The post 5 Leadership Traits of High Potential Employees appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

Numerous studies show that physical activity and mental wellness strategies and programs in the workplace reduce employee health problems and raise overall productivity. This can be implemented in your workplace in collaboration with a registered nutritionist. Incorporating a physical activity and mental wellness program in conjunction with the nutrition program in your workforce has many benefits. These benefits can be assisting in reducing weight, relieving anxiety, depression, and stress, reducing absenteeism, lowering risks of health problems, improving sleeping patterns, and energy as well as an overall feeling of well-being.

Recent evidence indicates that prolonged sitting at your desk, which occurs in the workplace, is linked to premature mortality, heart diseases, and diabetes. Furthermore, lack of physical activity can lead to work-related illnesses and prolonged recovery. The World Health Organization (WHO) has shown to reduce sick leave by up to 32% and increase productivity by 52% when incorporating a physical activity and mental wellness program (1).

Integrating only 30 minutes (accumulated or continuous) of physical activity every day and 30 minutes of mental wellness weekly can enhance and positively boost your workplace environment. A number of physical activity and mental wellness strategies in collaboration with a nutritionist can be implemented in your workplace. Such programs found positive effects on dietary, mental and physical behaviors and improved risks of chronic health-related conditions(2-12).

The following 9-step Plan will help your organization become active and promote mental wellness:

• Provide support and information

  Collaborate with the nutritionist for weekly group meetings, individual sessions and up-to-date informational resources for employees.

• Walking and standing meetings

  Instead of the typical sit-down meetings opt for standing and walking meetings. This minimizes sedentary behavior, keeps the body active and promotes body circulation.

• Promote stair use

  Get employees more active by promoting stair use overtaking the elevator. You could hold a “who can take the most steps during workday” competition within each department as an incentive to increase employees to be more active.

• Affiliations with local gyms

  Obtain group discounts at your local gyms. A bonding of employees can be beneficial for teamwork, employee morale, etc, which can well improve work performance of employees.

• Create corporate sporting events

  Organize corporate sporting events and fun runs. Alternatively, the organization can sign up their employees to take part in local runs, thus promoting their organization as being a health conscience organization.

• Provide onsite yoga classes

  Conduct yoga and meditation sessions to reduce stress, enhance mood and motivation and create a feeling of relaxation before meetings. The workplace can be very stressful; Yoga can help to overcome this.

• Create a workplace that promotes active living and wellness

  Swap office furniture with equipment that gets your employees moving, energized and feeling great. Replace smoking breaks with wellness and active breaks.

• Motivational signage, alerts, and announcements

  Create a workplace environment that advertises active lifestyles and well-being, promotes stair use, usage of uplifting quotes that boosts self-esteem.

• Provide free pedometers as gifts

  A pedometer is a great tool that keeps track of steps taken throughout the day. Provides incentive to increase their daily step count. Creates a competitive, fun and interactive workplace environment.

Poor health is not only a side effect for employees, but it can be damaging to the organization. Healthier employees are happier employees and therefore enhance job performance, morale, satisfaction, and productivity. Programs that promote active, healthier and more relaxed employees in the workforce will in inadvertently lead to greater success in the organizations’ operations, savings on medical health bills, absenteeism and retention of employees. Ultimately, these health programs provide a win-win situation for both the organization and their employees.

References:

• World Health Organization (WHO). The workplace: A priority setting for health promotion 2011.
• Wall J, Ni Mhurchu C, Blakely T, Rodgers A, Wilton J. Effectiveness of monetary incentives in modifying dietary behavior: A review of randomized, controlled trials. Nutri Rev. 2006;64(12):518-31.

The post 9 Strategies & Activities for a Healthier Working Place appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.