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10 Tips for having effective boards
Customer Advisory Boards are a great source of information about your market and your business. Their advice is more valuable than any management consultant's. They provide real world counsel on what you are doing right, what you are doing wrong, and most important -how to stay competitive. After all, they're the customer. They're the one's who buy your stuff. Here's how to use your Customer Advisory Board for best results.
Make it win-win.
As much as they might like to, your customers are probably too busy to be on your board as a favor. Let them know, if they haven't figured it out already, that participating on your board influences your organization to provide better product and service to theirs.
Choose the right members for the right reasons.
Select your board members for qualities and values they bring. Benefit from their insight, perceptions, motivations, and ability to communicate - perhaps even their contrarian view. Avoid figureheads picked for their visibility or high positions - they are likely to skip meetings, and when they show they'll have little to contribute.
Prepare your members.
Apprise members ahead of time of agenda items and provide detailed backgrounders. Prompt their thinking with questions for their consideration. When germane, ask selected advisors to prepare briefings.
Don't sell to the group.
Use your advisory board for their advice. Customers will see through transparent plans to generate more sales. Increased sales will happen anyway - don't prompt for them.
Your board members are special. Treat them that way.
Provide them with quality transportation, hotels, meals, refreshments, and meeting space. Make them feel highly appreciated without the sense you are wasting company money. Have your CEO or outside owners participate whenever appropriate. Acknowledge them publicly and often, and especially in print.
Reward their participation.
They are giving you their time and knowledge gained from experience. What are you giving them? Dinner and theatre or sports tickets, spouse travel, club memberships, small gifts, and product or service discounts are all appropriate.
Fewer meetings the better.
Keep the meetings to two or three per year. Make each meeting count with a full agenda of important issues. Have additional meetings only if you are in a crisis.
Use information technology.
Members cannot make every board meeting. Use videoconferencing for virtual meetings. Teleconferencing is effective for briefer, interim meetings. Use web-conferencing tools like Webex or Placeware. Use email questionnaires to get and provide feedback. You survey tools like Zoomerang.com.
Run top-notch meetings.
Appoint an effective leader, begin and end on schedule, keep to a strong agenda, review past actions and commitments, encourage total participation, keep communications open, log action items, avoid side conversations, summarize meeting results.
Act on their advice.
Your advisory board will give you their best only when you act on their recommendations. That's why you got them in the first place.
Paul Lemberg, author of Faster Than the Speed of
Change, troubleshoots companies and helps them increase
cash, build repeat customers and invent a secure future. Paul is a business leadership coach and public speaker. He is also the President of Quantum Growth Coaching, the world's first fully systemized business coaching program designed to create More Profits and More Life for entrepreneurs. Guaranteed.
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Article Source:
ezinearticles.comService management software has given a new dimension to business management and is being widely used due to its incredible benefits. It helps to effectively manage in-house management operations in various departments and mitigate business risks. Service management software facilitates decision-making by making analysis of complex data easier and simpler. This article discusses how service management software not only maximizes your return on investments but also accelerates business growth.
Customer Call Management: Service management software helps in handling volumes of calls involving minimum manpower. It displays complete call history that includes customer ID, customer name, issues to be resolved, preventive maintenance due and other past records. This decreases call-taking times and costs, improves the customer experience and reduces the risk of call backs. And since the dispatcher knows what preventative maintenance is due, it can be scheduled at the same time, increasing efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Finance and Accounting: Finance and accounting is one of the most crucial tasks and needs to be managed properly to maximize the financial health of the organization. There’s no need to switch accounting packages. Service management software that works with your existing accounting software will eliminate the extra cost and time needed to learn and implement a new accounting program.
Service management software sends invoices, PO's, customer lists, inventory directly to your accounting program, eliminating the cost of double-entry and the risk of errors.
Inventory Control: Stock needs to be maintained for smooth functioning of an organization. Service management software keeps track of items in the inventory and which equipment has been assigned to whom. Track both serialized and non-serialized inventory. Reduce your inventory carrying costs with min/max settings, dead stock reporting, alternate suppliers catalogues, superseded items, vehicle inventory levels and parts usage reports. Identify defective, outdated or unnecessary parts to drive quality and reduce costs. Plus, you can identify your most cost-effective spare parts, as well as items that may be adding unnecessary costs to your operations.
Report Generation: Service management software helps to generate more than 100 reports based on customers, sales, service, supplier, inventory and contract records. These reports can be further customized for use in specific business requirements. The managers can examine day to day operations and easily identify the
profit and loss areas based on these reports.
Service management software gives businesses an edge over their competitors by making operations swift and effective resulting in better performance and higher profits. For more information on service management software, please visit
www.miracleservice.com
Article author: Robert Sombach
In the database management service, there exists a collection of interrelated files and a set of application programs to access and modify these files. The details of data storage, the way of storing data and its maintenance are safely hidden from the users. The database management services allow not only a single user, but it can be accessed by multiple users at the same time. This feature of multiple usages is allowed by almost every database management service provider.
A database management does not involve the problem of data redundancy or inconsistency. Its design is such that it provides the security mechanism to prevent unwanted users from accessing certain parts or whole of the database. For example, tellers in a bank see only that part of database that has information on customer accounts. They cannot access information about salaries of employees. It has many advantages over the file processing system, which stores the permanent records in various files. In this system the problem of redundancy prevails, as files and application programs are created by different programmers over a long period of time.
Besides keeping a tight control over data redundancy, efficient database management services also ensure the following:
Enforce user defined rules to ensure the integrity of data in table form.
Has a centralized data dictionary for the storage of information pertaining to data fields and data manipulation.
Database management ensures that data can be shared across all applications. It enforces data access authorization.
Database management service has an automatic, intelligent backup and recovery procedure of data.
A database management service also has its share of overheads. To begin with, its initial cost is very high, as it requires setting up of hardware, software and training, as well as, provision of security, concurrency control, and recovery and integrity functions.
Further on the down side, Database management service provides a generalized approach for defining and processing data. On the other hand, file processing system provides well defined database and applications that are simple and are not expected to change.
Smit Mathur is an expert for writting Articles and is currently working for Broadwayinfotech. For more information related to
database management, Ecommerce Business Solution, Software Development, Web Application Development please visit:
http://www.broadwayinfotech.com.auArticle author: Smit Mathur
