Do Business Well

Going to a workshop may seem attractive. Yes, you can pick up some skills. But it’s difficult to transfer these skills to your work environment. The so-called university model of training (sending employees to outside educational institutions) has proven relatively ineffective. On the average, you can expect to see the transfer of no more than 5 to 20 percent of the desired skills two years after the training program. Continue Reading »

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Most of the suggestions offered to the manager/chairperson are aplicable to you as a group member. You just can’t be as directive.

1. First, be a good group member. One positive, helpful person in a meeting can do a lot of good. You can offer process suggestions to your group like “Why don’t we figure out how we are going to deal with this issue before we rush off in different directions?”

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Yet today most companies organize their inbound and outbound functions separately. To avoid this, the engaged organization must organize all its marketing, customer service, and support functions into one department. This way, customers visiting the company’s website or receiving email see a single company and a single brand.

There are two primary reasons why it makes sense to combine customer service support and marketing into one department. First, organizing different functions under the same department lets you align their goals and measures of success. When the goal is to build and nurture lasting relationships by engaging customers in an ongoing dialogue, it makes intuitive sense that the inbound and outbound parts of that dialogue come from the same place. Continue Reading »

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If you want your customers to have a consistent experience and develop a loyal relationship with your brand, you must clearly define your organization’s communications and relationship management responsibilities. Normally, marketing is responsible for managing an email direct marketing program, but it is not the only part of your organization that will engage with customers. Customer service, support, sales, and perhaps even e-commerce groups may also communicate with your customers independently.

To avoid any confusion, I propose that if your company is communicating with thousands, perhaps even millions, of customers, you put your marketing department in charge of managing and coordinating all customer communication, regardless of where it originates, and that the “relationship czar” discussed earlier be responsible for this initiative. Marketing’s role in the engaged organization is to ensure that your company’s email communication have a consistent voice, that they are focused on servicing the customer and effectively coordinated across all points of contact. To do this requires the following: Continue Reading »

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Every organization, large or small, can use email to establish a dialogue and build loyalty among its prospects, members, and customers. And every organization, regardless of size, needs to follow the guidelines and principles. But size does matter when it comes to the investment a company can make in infrastructure and the number of people it can commit to developing and operating a program. Don’t worry, though. Even small businesses with limited resources have plenty of ways to use email to communicate with their customers.

If your company has only a small number of customers or clients, you may still be able to use your regular email software to send out messages, announcements, and newsletters. This type of program ends up looking a lot like the regular email dialogue you would have with your customers or clients. Continue Reading »

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When an electronic products company started its email marketing program, it quickly discovered that it had a lingering problem with dissatisfied customers. The company had promised a free giveaway as an incentive to get customers to register their product. But due to a problem with the fulfillment house, the gifts were not sent out on a regular basis. A number of customers who were annoyed that they hadn’t received their free gift began taking advantage of email to talk back to the company. The company had had no previous direct contact with these—or any other—customers and didn’t even know that the problem existed. Needless to say, the company now pays careful attention to its inbound email and also runs frequent surveys as ways to listen and learn from its customers. Continue Reading »

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The Internet ties all information systems together regardless of their physical location. In effect, it has enabled a company’s internal computer network, its local area network (LAN), to extend its reach on a global scale. Organizations are therefore no longer constrained by the information systems they can build or buy and install on their own physical premises. Every computer is connected to every other computer on the Internet. This simple truth changes everything. What used to be “internal computing resources” at a company have now become external resources that the engaged organization makes available to all its constituents. The reality of the Internet is that everybody is connected to you and you are connected to everyone else: your customers, your vendors, your suppliers—even your competitors. It doesn’t matter where a particular network function is physically located or who operates it, just as long as it’s secure and reliable and provides the right functionality to solve a particular problem. Continue Reading »

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Since the pioneering work of Burns and Stalker (1961), it has been accepted that unpredictable market and technological environments may require ‘organic‘ organizational structures rather than the more traditional ‘mechanistic’ forms best suited to more stable conditions.

• An example of a ‘mechanistic’ structure would be the hierarchical and functionally divided arrangements still common in long-established organizations such as banks.
• An example of an ‘organic‘ structure would be the creation of flexible cross-functional project teams within a firm to develop specific new products as the occasion demands.

The assumption is that organic structures can generate a high degree of ‘fit’ between the external environment and the internal organizational form. However, the scenario of organic structures enabling ‘matching’ to take place with changing external conditions is increasingly problematic for several reasons:

• The capacity to ‘read’ the requirements of the external environment is seen as relatively straightforward.
• The boundary between the external environment and the organization is assumed to be clear and distinct.
• The achievement of optimum ‘fit’ is regarded as a stable and sustainable configuration.

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