What’s Holding You Back? 5 Things That Could Be Negatively Effecting The Growth of Your Company

As a data consulting and process engineering firm, we frequently find that clients have problems in these 5 areas. This 5  contribute to high overhead costs and expenses, and profit reduction. Watch this video, or read below to see what these things are. You can also view it in presentation form here. It is written from the perspective of a company that is experiencing these issues.

5) Lost Competitive Advantage

Both my competitor and I sell the stereotypical widgets. But for some reason, they are selling more, and still have fewer overheads.

Perhaps they have established a better incentive program and are able to retain more employees. This would lead to fewer dollars being spent on training. Or maybe they are better able to meet their promised delivery times to customers.

Unfortunately without the data, I can only speculate. How do I access the information I need to discover why I am losing my competitive advantage?

4) Incomplete Information

My company was supposed to have a new product launched last week. The product design team submitted their design to marketing, who then began to develop marketing tools. Shortly after, the production team began producing it, when they suddenly discovered that they couldn't produce it the way the design team intended. By the time marketing and sales discovered this, they had already spent thousands, and they had to rework their messaging and strategy. This is setting us back an additional month. How can we ensure that everyone is getting and sharing necessary information in a timely manner?

3) Spending Too Much

Every time a tech must be sent to a customer's house, it costs upwards of $100. Every customer service call that comes in costs roughly $5. But, we were successful at incentivizing our customer service reps to reduce the amount of time they spend on a call, saving us $2 per call. However, now, there are more truck rolls. What is the optimal length of time a rep should spend on the phone to tackle the problem and reduce truck rolls? What questions should they ask to determine how to address a customer's problem?

2) Employee Retention

My company experiences high turnover, especially among our frontline employees. This means that I am spending astronomical amounts on recruiting. More importantly, I am spending far too much on training. I spend $250 to train each employee, and he or she may only stay with the company for a matter of months. How can I retain more employees, to reduce these costs and also provide more consistency for my customers?

1) Customer Retention

Six months ago, Mary moved from Boulder to Denver. At this time, she switched the location of her pharmacy. However, her medication was not ready in Denver, it was ready for her in Boulder. She drove to Boulder with little complaint. However, this is still occurring. She has called and emailed, and directly spoken with everyone who touches her prescription, yet the problem still persists. She has decided that her only option is to switch doctors.

Find out how the barriers to communication between the silos could be making you lose customers. And discover how redesigning business processes could help you grow and save money.