In service-oriented businesses, every additional level of complexity drives up costs. Often these unnecessary dollars are overlooked in the day-to-day upkeep of dealing with customers, employees, vendors, workflows, supplies and merchandise.
Complexity can be the reult of attempts to meet the challenges of local competition or customer preference and demand. Business owners often rush to add costly complexities without considering the hard-to-see soft costs which can easily wipe out any advantages.
Take a look at these five reasons that complexities that you may have inadvertently built into your business – and why they are also costly.
ONE | Employee training is cheaper.
Employee training is difficult enough without making it worse with hard-to-learn payment, discount and enrollment policies. Details that are easy to learn shorten the training period, taking new staff from beginner to full-fledged, fully-trained team member in less time.
Simplicity saves you money because it shortens employee training time.
TWO | Less staff time explaining details to customers.
Quickly and easily describing your enrollment process to customers should always be the goal. Having all your programs operate in similar ways with similar discount structures and session terminology makes things simpler.
Simplicity means more customers can be helped in less time.
THREE | Reduce chance of customer frustration.
After a phone call or visit, customers should have a good understanding of how things work. Complexity prevents this from happening. Misunderstandings about policies is a chief source of customer dissatisfaction across all industries.
Simplicity reduces customer misunderstanding and increases satisfaction.
FOUR | Reduce account errors.
Errors on customer accounts are inevitable but reducing their frequency and customer impact leads to better understanding of how to do business with you and eliminates customer annoyance when rare errors occur. It is true that it takes longer to fix a mistake than to do it right the first time. What the oft-said adage is missing is that making those mistakes also adds complexity and costs.
Simplicity reduces the chance that costly account mistakes will happen.
FIVE | Increase customer satisfaction and encourage recommendations.
Highly satisfied customers can be ambassadors who tell their friends and neighbors about their experience with you. Their recommendations are even more powerful if your satisfied customers can easily explain how your enrollment and payment system works and why doing business with you might be better than with competitors.
Simplicity creates satisfied customers and enthusiastic ambassadors.
One way to simplify your business is to put class management software to work for you with features that quickly address each of the five reasons for complexities we’ve detailed.