Marina Martin

The first step in addressing business efficiency is to get an idea of the issues you want to address, and then you have to state what sort of improvement you’re seeking. Not only does a goal provide context for determining an action plan — the steps to save $1,000 are often far different from the steps to save $100,000 — but it’s also the only way you can know when you finish a project and whether that project was a success.

So, what determines efficiency in your business as far as customer service? Setting goals that describe exactly what you want to happen also involves measuring whether or not these goals are being met. When you call to confirm an order, you want confirmation within one minute or less. If you go online, you want easy, one-click confirmation capability.

Customer service is a broad term. When trying to determine how effectively you are meeting the needs and demands of your customers, several areas need to be analyzed. The following sections look at each. One way to determine the effectiveness (and efficiency, of course!) of your self-help resources and processes is to have someone not familiar with your products and services attempt to use them, first alone, and then with some additional guidance in testing specific customer-centric aspects.

Increasing your business efficiency can seem daunting, but in five relatively straight-forward steps you can get a handle on how to identify and eliminate costly inefficiencies. Measure where your business is today across spectrums such as finances, customer sentiment, product/service quality, and employee dawdling.

Change is good, but it can also wreak havoc on an organization if not managed with thought and careful planning. Here are seven steps to managing change in any organization, efficiently. Assuage fears upfront. Top fears include being replaced, not being able to keep up with new skills, not having enough time/resources to adapt, and loss of quality.

A great starting place for identifying inefficiencies in your business is to take baseline measurements across your organization, which you can then use like a road map to your inefficiencies. Working backward from each measurement, ask (or research) what contributes to that figure. Customer satisfaction scores, IT expenses, employee benefits, hours spent in meetings — every figure is worth investigating and reassessing.

An effective strategy for implementing change in your business means making the choices and adopting the tools and processes that generate the best results at the least cost for your business or organization. Cost here refers not to just dollars and cents, but also impacts on all other resources, including time and employee happiness.

When you plan a business efficiency project, you need to know what you’d like to measure and how you’d like to go about measuring it — but where does all that data go, exactly? Depending on your business, you may need a single data repository, or, more likely, a few. Choosing the right place to post your data can have long-term ramifications on how easily you can access and manipulate your data in the future.

Technological resources can help any business or organization become more effective. There are some overarching resources that most any business can use to increase productivity and decrease waste, including: A content management system (CMS): Gone are the days when you need to pay a Web developer an hour’s wage to swap out a sentence on your company website or bold some text.