It’s essential that startups and SMBs invest in their businesses early, making use of various small business growth channels.  That way, they can grow and develop in the best way as soon as possible. This prevents stagnation and the scourge that causes many young businesses to falter.

There are a plethora of choices when it comes to different small business growth channels, so which are right for your business? Take a look at the different options below and build your own strategy which suits your business. 

1. Market Penetration

Chances are that your startup has gone to market serving one particular segment in one particular way. An obvious route to growth is to increase your market share using your existing product or service or to shake things up with a new or related product. This is where startups move from being a newly conceived entity to a growing SMB.

Within this, you’ll be able to do things like bundling products together and offering packages. You can also lure in bigger orders with large order discounts. Remember to always keep your eye on competitors.

2. Social Media Development

It’s imperative that you grow and refine your social media presence if you want any hope of growth in the digital world. Indeed, of all the small business growth channels available to you, social media is perhaps the most imperative. Identify the channels which are best for you and then ensure you are using them expertly. 

Every social media network suits different purposes and should be approached as a unique channel for brand awareness and growth, depending on your client’s core business. Here are some social media facts that can help you to pick the best platform for your business. #SocialMedia pic.twitter.com/kEvYOEf1DF

— Campaign Masters (@MastersCampaign) June 16, 2021

For example, learn how to monitor Facebook ads comments using a tool like Napoleon Cat, ensuring you retain control over discussions evolving about your product. Or uncover what influencer marketing can do for you.

3. Develop Your Market

Developing your market differs slightly from penetration and represents another of the available growth channels. Your onus here is on taking existing products or services and offering them to a wider reach, usually geographically. This gives you a larger customer base, enabling you to grow your SMB, enabling profits to expand, by exploiting new areas.

This is particularly useful if you have saturated one area, or need time to develop your next product line. Startups need to quickly move beyond their starting block.

4. Know What You’re Doing with Content Marketing

Content marketing for small businesses can be particularly powerful and is one of the easiest growth channels to capitalize on. It enables you to develop your brand personality and carve a place as an industry authority. Your audience’s loyalty expands, and for relatively low cost and low effort input, you can ensure your SMB competes on a more level playing field with the big guns.

Content marketing isn’t about short-term gains. It’s a long-term commitment that drives your brand awareness and business growth through customer relationships.

“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.”

: Quote by Andrew Davis pic.twitter.com/ampm4RDmxo

— EQ Digital Agency Naperville (@eqagency) March 16, 2022

Learning about effective content marketing and how it can be used should be one of the main endeavors for startups and SMBs. It can be expanded as time and resources allow, and it goes on giving long after the investment has been made.

5. Uncover New Small Business Growth Channels

How do you sell right now today? What’s limiting you to that single growth channel? For example, if you are selling only through one digital platform, what’s stopping you from using Instagram or Facebook for selling? Or even, what is stopping your startup from opening a physical store? Easy channels to open up and use include email marketing, your own business website, and social media.

At the end of the day, potential customers will expect to be able to find and interact with you in multiple different ways and places and this is an excellent argument for different growth channels. Additionally, they will experience multiple touchpoints with your business before buying. So create multiple small business growth channels for them so that you are right where they are. 

If you’re unsure where to start, creating a new website is always an excellent starting point. Find out how to choose a team of web development experts. It’s worth getting the experts on board from the beginning so that you can scale your site with ease over time.

6. Expand Product Lines

One great product or one limited service will only go so far. To grow, you need to expand your product line. For some businesses, in reality, this may be adding new features. For example, many SaaS startups and SMBs start with a great idea and good functionality. Then, they expand this out with smarter features as time goes on.

As you do this, you’ll attract greater numbers of interested buyers, and encourage loyalty in the ones you’ve already won. Moreover, make sure to update your website pages to include your new products. You can look at some SaaS examples from top companies for some inspiration.

7. Learn About Your Audience and Customers

Where many startups and SMBs overlook potential knowledge to help them grow is in terms of uncovering insights into what’s going well, what’s not, and why. Without insight into your business, how can you know which are the best growth channels for your business? 

The good news is that in the digital space, gaining business insights has never been easier. It’s possible, with so much data, to be overwhelmed. Hence, it’s worth knowing which are the most actionable and useful insights and working with these.

8. Events and Networking

As we begin to emerge into a new ‘sort-of-normal’ post-pandemic world, startups and SMBs are now able to consider using events and face-to-face networking. That can do that in that way that they haven’t been able to up until this point, opening up another of the available growth channels, once more. 

SMA understands that networking in-person matters. Putting a face and personality to the fine print on your resume and testimonials on LinkedIn allows you to really build relationships with professionals. We are excited about our first in-person event post-pandemic on March 25th. pic.twitter.com/eU8i5VNx8I

— Schulich Marketing Association (@SchulichSMA) March 22, 2022

Getting your product and name out there is possible again, and it’s a chance for you to discover what your business can do away from the digital space. It’s really exciting watching businesses born behind closed doors of the pandemic discover that entirely new opportunities exist for them outside of the digital landscape.

9. Reviewing Business Structure and Models

Sometimes the best and most sustainable growth comes from realizing that what’s worked so far won’t continue to work in the long term. This is often the point at which startups and SMBs open their minds to partnerships, working alongside other businesses to get greater success for everyone.

This can lead to things you need like extra resources or manpower, or safer risk mitigation. The idea is to find complementary and non-competing businesses that enable you both to gain access to each other’s customer base and market.

10. Advertising

Once you’re off the ground, you’ll need to shake up your advertising approach. Making new decisions within digital and offline arenas, you should be able to make better decisions with your advertising because you’ve now got more data to run tests with and see what works and what doesn’t. Advertising takes effort, and it takes a constantly renewed approach as the business grows.

Finding the Best Small Business Growth Channel for Your Business

Injecting new life into your business in multiple different ways is how to ensure it grows right when you need it too. There are many different growth channels available to startups and SMBS. Using startup loans to rapidly take advantage of new opportunities ensures that your business can scale and grow with ease and with success. 

There will be some trial and error involved: not every business is the same. But knowing that you can invest in the business to exploit new growth channels is vital. In this way you’ll grow your customer base and audience and develop the brand, priming it for long-term success, putting you ahead of the competition.   

The post The Best Growth Channels for Startups appeared first on LiveHelpNow.

 “A fulfilling job experience is a significant part of employee motivation.” – Shep Hyken

To prevent agent turnover, directors and managers of customer service and contact center operations should invest in improving staff experiences.

Employee motivation and other activities must be a part of the plan to enhance the agent turnover rate. 

Ways to Prevent Agent Turnover

1. From the Start, Clarify Job Requirements and Motivate Agents

Ensure that job descriptions are comprehensive enough during the hiring process so that there are no surprises when your agents come for their first day of work. This in turn ensures that agent turnover does not happen. 

A day-in-the-life scenario can help agents understand that their job entails much more than merely replying to clients by phone, email, or chat. While this may appear frivolous, it is critical to communicate the seriousness of the work to new support agents. 

Have you ever wondered what it really means to work in #CustomerService? Hear from Amy about a day in the life at our Solihull office in our customer service team: https://t.co/O1mcdnWmYW#Jobs #JobsSolihull pic.twitter.com/QAstPEVH3A

— BNP Paribas PF UK (@bnpparibaspfUK) February 4, 2022

Your agents are not only ambassadors for your company. They are also repositories of important customer data that can be used in a variety of business areas, including marketing, customer insights, and sales. Hence, your staff will feel more significant in their roles if they believe they can benefit a client or the company as a whole.

2. Assign the Appropriate Customer to the Appropriate Agent

Agent satisfaction skyrockets when they believe they can be useful to clients and can handle consumer calls. Your agents may feel burnt-out, frustrated, and helpless if they are linked to consumers who have queries or difficulties that are outside of their expertise, which can ultimately lead to agent turnover.

Remember that updating your routing, whether for efficiency or to better consumer experiences, will also improve the agent’s experience & help prevent agent turnover. Customers will have a more favorable experience and are more likely to be pleasant to deal with if they believe they were directed to the proper agent the first time, thanks to intelligent routing, and that individual can help them without being passed off to someone else. 

Customers are generally willing to wait a bit longer to reach the appropriate person, but only a little longer. The expectation nowadays is that anybody I speak with will be able to manage my request. 

Transferring client calls is considered a strike against a corporation, although it still occurs frequently. Routing presents a general difficulty in terms of gathering sufficient information about the consumer as well as any context or personalization. 

3. Centralized Customer Data

It is incredibly inefficient for agents to waste time searching for customer information across several systems and screens. The process of addressing consumer inquiries is made difficult by a maze of old systems. 

The average representative spends 15% of his or her time seeking information across these separate systems to answer client inquiries. CRM, billing, and payment systems, as well as knowledge management system, are all available.

Agent turnover can be caused by the frustration of trying to traverse all of these systems efficiently. Agents that have easy-to-use, unified technology are more effective and efficient, which boosts morale and improves the employee experience. 

Using a unified agent desktop solution, you may consolidate all of your information and data from many platforms into a single view or screen. This can provide agents with a complete image of the consumer and eliminate the need for them to switch between several applications.

4. Repeated Processes Can be Automated

Attrition rates are high when there is a lot of monotony. As a result, empowerment is the most potent generator of organizational loyalty. As a result, some businesses are turning to automation to free up employees to do more satisfying work and reduce their agent turnover rate.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machines are increasingly capable of handling ordinary corporate procedures. This can result in increased efficiency and faster resolution times which further results in reduced support agent turnover. 

This way, agents can focus on tasks that provide tailored experiences for consumers by minimizing routine calls, data entry, report preparation, transaction details, system navigation, logs, and documentation.

5. Agents Should Be Able to Work Together to Complete Tasks

It is unrealistic to expect each agent to have all of the answers when it comes to resolving consumer difficulties. There’s nothing wrong with your agents working together to present your customers with the most useful information possible. Therefore, implementing effective communication tools can help with this. 

Invest in systems that focus on streamlining and integrating the workplace by seamlessly combining procedures, tasks, work management, and social collaboration. 

6. Allow for More Flexibility and Work-Life Balance to Avoid Agent Turnover

Allowing agents to choose their schedules, take small breaks throughout the day, or work from home would drastically improve their productivity and reduce their stress levels. 

While we are sitting in the back office, it’s easy to forget how demanding customer support work can be. Giving staff this independence demonstrates your faith in them. This can help boost long-term agent productivity and job happiness, both of which help to prevent agent turnover.

7. Mentor your Agents and Provide the Opportunity to Advance

Assisting and motivating your agents in pursuing a successful career path will improve their job handling abilities, knowledge, and overall job happiness. Create all-encompassing training guides or programs, and spend time with your agents to learn about their career objectives, motivations, dreams, and ambitions. These best practices can assist a contact center head in reducing his agent turnover rate.

Agents who believe they are respected and cared for by their employer are less likely to quit than those who believe they are unimportant. So, don’t simply provide your agents with the tools they need to accomplish their jobs. Have open discussions with them about where they see themselves in the organization, offer suggestions on how to advance, and create opportunities to advance within their contact center role. 

Related article: How to Motivate Contact Center Agents: Lessons From Kindergarten

8. Value Your Employees

It is true that if you truly want your team to perform well, it must begin from the top. It is, therefore,  the responsibility of management to create a secure working environment with open communication in which employees feel valued. 

Employees that feel valued are more likely to make decisions that benefit the organization and its consumers. They say it is the people they leave behind in a job and not the job. Hence, one way to prevent agent turnover is to be the leader your agents look up to. Be responsible for creating a safe, toxic-free work environment from the start.

9. Recognized and Rewarded High Performing Agents

Despite the natural desire for recognition, it is significantly less prevalent in contact centers than you may imagine. You don’t have to go out of your way to recognize your agents. 

Top achiever awards, experiences (such as tickets to a sporting event or concert), lunches outside the office with top-performing people or teams, simple discussions with staff to say thank you, and so on are all simple ways to acknowledge your contact center agents. 

Also, get feedback from your employees. Listening to your agents will boost their engagement and job satisfaction, which will help you reduce the agent turnover rate.

10. Inquire About Agents’ Job Experiences Directly

Asking employees directly or through an anonymous survey is the greatest approach to learn how to improve their experiences. When your agents are not face-to-face, they are more inclined to be candid about their experiences. Improving your work and engaging your employees is a long-term process, not a one-time event. As a result, total employee satisfaction will rise which ultimately will help in managing agent turnover. 

Reduce Agent Turnover by Keeping Support Agents Happy

A strong focus on agent satisfaction not only saves money, but it’s also essential for running a successful call center. Motivated agents who enjoy their jobs and have access to cutting-edge call center software like knowledge base software are more likely to improve customer happiness and contribute to the company’s objectives. 

[fullcontrol title=”Best Customer Support Software” subtitle=”Our Comprehensive Agent Workplace is Guaranteed to Keep Agents Happy ” linkurl=”https://www.livehelpnow.net/free-trial/” linktext=”See our new layout and functions”]

Therefore, it’s essential to devise strategies for keeping agents pleased and satisfied with the work they do and reduce the agent turnover rate. These ten strategies will make a huge difference in your company.

The post Top 10 Ways To Prevent Support Agent Turnover appeared first on LiveHelpNow.