Are Customers Important to Business? Of course they are. No customers, no business. Yet why are businesses deliberately driving customers away? It’s ridiculous isn’t it?

It’s The Business Owner’s Fault That’s right. The person who owns business is one who’s responsible for way their clients/customers are treated.

They are usually too busy working in business and have not allocated time to working on their business. They’re often very disorganised and have no idea what is really going on.

Call it what you want…personal productivity, time management, personal organisation are crucial skills everyone needs to know and apply to their daily lives. Otherwise you run around filling your day with activity, most of which doesn’t help you achieve your goals.

Five Ways to Improve Customer Service and Increase Profits If you own or run a business, here’s what you can do:

Treat your prospects and clients like royalty. Make every contact they have with you an enjoyable and memorable experience. Be proactive with your clients. Stay in touch. It is up to you to contact them regularly. Not just wait and react when they have a problem.

Look after your own staff. If you look after your own people they in turn will look after business. Praise, reward, and invest in their on-going development. Send them off to various courses and seminars on communicating, sales, time management etc. Even if you have your own internal people who do training, it’s important that your team hear from outside experts who are specialists in their field. They know what they are talking about.

Continually invest time and energy into yourself. Lead from front. Keep developing yourself.

Get regular feedback. Ask questions. Ask your clients/ customers what they like about your products, services and people. Find out what they dislike.

Get regular feedback internally from your people. Find out what works well, what doesn’t, how can things be improved.

The Final Word Of course to take action on these ideas, you have to plan for it to happen. So pull out your diary now and plan to make sure that your business continues to stay in business and becomes more profitable.

Lorraine specialises in working with businesspeople showing them how to dramatically boost their productivity, reduce the stress and the mess in their lives and have more time for enjoying their life.

As time passes, you will learn what works and what doesn’t. As you gain this knowledge, you should be making adjustments to your budget to reflect reality.

This is made much easier by careful record keeping. You can use a simple spreadsheet or a small business software package. You can even use paper and pencil if you can’t afford software.

If you track cost of your materials, costs of marketing your products and actual income you receive, you will know if your budget is on track, if you can afford new tool you want or if you should stock up on more inventory. You will also be able to decide if you should branch out or change direction.

The bottom line is that you cannot afford to throw money at your business. You must try to work around obstacles in a cost efficient manner. While your budget may reflect a short period of losses at very beginning, losses cannot be allowed to go on unchecked.

Careful, consistent tracking and a dynamic budget, one that reflects reality, should be major tools that you use constantly in your decision making processes.

If you use them, you should be able to avoid fate most small businesses face today - failure.

For more articles on business of crafting and how to get started selling your crafts, please visit The Artful Crafter - Your Craft Business Guide.

BY: Eileen Bergen The Artful Crafter www.theartfulcrafter.com