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Recently, I experienced first-hand both ends of the customer service spectrum. I had a wonderful experience at a local Indian restaurant where the hospitality was first class. In contrast, I was on the receiving end of some particularly poor customer service at a main car dealership in Norwich.

Whilst I’ll certainly be returning to the Indian restaurant, and recommending it to my friends, the experience at the car dealership left me with a very sour taste in my mouth. Maybe I just caught them on a bad day? But really, there should be no excuse.

“Customer excellence” is one of the areas I spend a lot of time working on with my clients. The importance of it is often ignored within organisations, as targets and deadlines take precedence. But ignore it at your peril. Customer excellence is a vital ingredient in business growth.

What is customer excellence and why is it important?

In short, customer excellence is about being excellent in the eyes of your customer. A simple concept, but very important.

Customer excellence drives profitable growth. By putting your customer at the centre of everything the company does, you’ll ensure that you’re delivering the product or service that they need. Doing that will help you achieve long-term customer satisfaction which, in turn, means you’re better able to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. So, it’s not just about creating a warm, fuzzy feeling for your customers. It’s directly linked to the successful growth of your organisation.

But building a culture of customer excellence within your organisation relies on your team having the passion and commitment to delivering a positive customer experience time after time. How do you build that?

Here are my top 6 tips on how to bring customer excellence to your organisation

There are a number of key steps to building and sustaining customer excellence within your business:

1)     Be clear on what your customer needs

It’s a pretty fundamental concept for business success. But knowing exactly what your customer needs is vital. If you don’t know, find out. Conduct some market research and refine your proposition based on the findings. Understand their challenges so you are equipped to deal with them.

2)     Add value

Once you know what your customer needs from you at a most basic level, think about how you can add value to that through your customer service. How can you exceed expectations? What can you do to make them go ‘wow, that was great’ and go and tell their friends/colleagues about it.

3)     Communicate effectively

Be clear on your core values as a business and communicate these across the organisation. Keep everyone in the loop, both internally and, where relevant, externally, so they feel like an important part of the business.

4)     Empower your customer-facing staff

Make sure you give your customer-facing staff the training they need to do a great job. Remember that your customers are individuals. Give your staff the training and empowerment to treat them as such. And, just as importantly, allow them the time to deliver customer excellence rather than encouraging them to rush on to the next call.

5)     Listen and learn

Gather survey feedback from customers and act on it. Learn from complaints. Listen to your customer service staff. They are the ones speaking directly to your customers and can be a mine of useful information.

6)     Measure differently

Implement ways to measure customer excellence and the resulting customer loyalty. Yes, the number of customers serviced per hour might be a very important metric within your business, but delivering excellence is likely to be worth a lot more in the long run. Think about how you can measure these things and develop a continuous improvement plan to create customer loyalty and share success.

The effect of customer excellence

My recent experience perfectly illustrate the value of customer excellence. Whilst I’m looking forward to taking some friends along to my new favourite Indian restaurant, I’ll be advising people to steer clear of the car dealership. And yes, that’s based on one bad experience. But that’s all it takes.

So, I am on a mission to help businesses create a culture of customer excellence and reap the rewards. Don’t let your customers settle for anything less; give me a call on 07468 499131 to find out how.

Cyber security is a topic that is on everyone’s minds this month, and if you follow the news it will be obvious why (and if you don’t, see our previous blog posts!). On May 18th I attended the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce’s Cyber Security Conference, hosted by Paul Maskall. The itinerary included four very relevant talks from speakers Kitty Rosser, Peter Freeman, Andy Taylor, and Rahul Colaco.    On the 15th May 2018 a new legislation will be put into place, replacing the current Data Protection Act (DPA). This new law is called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Kitty Rosser explained how we can make sure that we are complying to this regulation before it comes into effect, protecting both ourselves and our customers. Below is a short summary of the key new aspects of this law:

• Accountability and transparency – ensure that you are absolutely clear about what you will be using their data for
• Data protection by design – build data protection into processing activities from the ground up
• Consent – a high standard of consent is required, and you will need to record how and when this consent was given
• Data subject rights –  the rights from the DPA will be carried over, with the addition of the right to transparency, portability and to erase personal data
• Data protection officer – this is a new mandatory role for businesses whose activities match certain criteria
• Data processors – records must be kept in writing and electronically for reference
• Fines – the maximum fine can be much higher (€20 million or 4% of global group turnover, whichever is highest)

Peter Freeman explained how managing your network can make all the difference when defending yourself from a security breach. Something I hadn’t considered before to refrain from giving your WIFI password to visitors, as you don’t know what is on their hardware that could affect your network, or even better – have a separate network for guests. For a similar reason, you should also change your wifi password at regular intervals, to keep it secure and harder to reach. There are several wireless encryption types that have been hacked and compromised too, so you should only use WPA2 with PSK or Enterprise. In essence, monitor who is on your network, and keep it as restricted as possible.    Andy Taylor was full of hard hitting statistics, and emphasised that hacking is often a business problem, not technical. Some of the figures that stood out most to me were:

• 99.9% of victims have anti-virus software 
• 99.9% of breaches include stolen credentials
• Attackers are on the network an average of 150 days before breaching
• 66% of malware is installed through corrupt email links

There are steps we can all take to ensure that we don’t inadvertently ‘invite’ hackers onto our network. You should therefore have in place day to day cyber essentials, including user access controls, malware protection, patching, and boundary wall configuration. It is also important to have risk management, so that if you are attacked you have all of the necessary components in place to recover quickly.    Rahul Colaco expanded on this, explaining that you need to have a plan on what to do if you are attacked, for “you are only as good as your security measures”. It may be that in response to a beach, the IT department needs to switch off, the legal department needs to discover what legal consequences there may be, whilst the rest of the business needs to operate as usual. This is no easy task, so pre-planning for the worst care scenario is the most effective way of managing the situation.    As Paul Maskall recapped, you need to look at the value and risk of the data you hold, and ask yourself the following question: what do you have in place should you be breached? Do you have an incident management policy? It is also key not to “fire and forget”, but instead keep your software up to date and check it regularly. At the end of the day, it is usually your client’s data that would be at risk and in order to deserve their trust, it is your moral duty to protect it.   Words by Emily

Contracts might seem like something only big business needs, and many small companies work without them, but if your work is important to you, it is vital to have a contract in place. A well put together contract can make a business relationship stronger and more successful, so it is worth investing some time and effort in getting a contract just right. When people think of contracts, they often seem daunting, filled with complicated language only solicitors understand, fine print made to confuse the signatory and seemingly endless clauses that only apply in the most unique of circumstances. Documents like this are off putting, and occasionally detrimental to the business process, especially at the beginning of a new working relationship. Contracts don’t need to be pages and pages long, or contain lots of legal jargon or penalties, the most important thing is that all parties understand the content of the contract and all are in agreement as to their own responsibilities. It is very important to make clear what is expected of each party and what will happen if either side fails to keep up their end of the agreement. Being clear on cost is essential too – what is included in the charge and, very importantly, what is not included. A good contract should only contain information relevant to that particular piece of work and should be written in simple, understandable language where possible. Having someone sign something they don’t understand is not a good way to begin! For general terms of business, applicable to every piece of work, a Master Service Agreement can prove useful to accompany each specific work contract and Naked Element agrees and signs an MSA with every client. This MSA does not oblige either party to work with each other, it merely details the quality of the service or product, each party’s availability throughout the business relationship and the responsibilities they have to each other. Only once a schedule is signed, does it become a binding contract. The MSA defines the confidentiality clauses, copyright details, intellectual property rights, payment terms and the scope of charges as well as liability from each party. These key details are indispensable for any business, whether the project is worth £500 or £5,000,000 as they are crucial if something were to go wrong. Contracts also shouldn’t be designed to catch someone out, or tie them down unnecessarily, they should be an agreement, put together for the benefit of all parties. Where possible, a clever business person should be open to discussing and amending a proposed contract before it is signed if the other party wishes to make changes. It is also often beneficial to include a clause allowing either party to revisit a contract for adjustment after a set period of time. Being flexible and open to future issues in this way increases trust between parties, making a successful business relationship more likely. A good contract should:

• Only include relevant information
• Use simple language
• Outline benefits of the contract to both parties
• Be negotiable
• Be adjustable where appropriate

With a proper contract the client will feel they can depend on the product or service they are paying for and can rely on the contract to ensure they will not be out of pocket if something goes awry. By the same token, the service provider is protected by the contract if a client should renege on something that was previously mutually agreed upon. A good contract, that has everyone’s interests covered equally, makes a business seem more trustworthy, as well as more professional, and if everything goes well, more likely to do business again. Click here to read the blog on our site.

I woke up at 1.30 on Friday morning and made the mistake of checking the first few results. I never got back to bed. Whatever your political persuasion it is hard to see the election as anything other than a bad result for Theresa May. I think it was the best of possible results for the UK.

Anyone who has read my ramblings over the past decade or so will have gathered that I believe austerity was the wrong policy at the wrong time and that the decision to leave the EU was hugely misguided. Unlike many, I think it was right that May sought the approval of the electorate before the true Brexit negotiations started – I am delighted that approval was withheld.

There are many positives to take from the results. My natural leaning is toward progressive policies but I was concerned that under Corbyn’s friendly geography teacher persona lay a hard-left core that would simply see organised labour replacing the ultra-wealthy as the principal beneficiaries of socio-economic policies – leaving the many with little change. I was heartened by his acceptance of manifesto promises that conflicted with his own long-held views – his belief in party democracy appearing to trump his personal convictions. The Labour party now has a short period to rebuild, embrace those who had distanced themselves from Corbyn, and hopefully emerge nearer the centre with a deliverable alternative to austerity.

The rise of Ruth Davidson in Scotland has been a breath of fresh air. Her swift and unequivocal condemnation of the more illiberal views of the DUP was welcome, as was her assertion that country was more important than party. This makes a hard Brexit less likely.

The young have started to engage in the political process. For too long people of my generation and older have had a disproportionate influence and it’s great to see this starting to reverse.

And finally, Theresa May’s weak and wobbly performance has demolished any semblance of steeliness – this is no Iron Lady. We can now move from the silly confrontational negotiating stance to one that seeks the best outcome for both us and our long-term European friends and allies. The best negotiations result in a win-win.

If I were a betting man my money would be on a Labour Government by Christmas, with a small majority, supported by a progressive alliance. I think the chances of us leaving the EU during my lifetime have receded considerably. The negotiating timetable was impossibly tight even before the election was called. In two years’ time we will enter an interim arrangement and there we will stay indefinitely or at least until everyone has long forgotten about Farage, Gove and the £350m a day.

So, if this prediction came to pass, what would it mean for investors?

Broadly, it’s hard to see Labour’s spending pledges as any less realistic than the Tory’s. They would have been more appropriate in 2010; the risk now, especially against a background of falling immigration, is that we have too little productive capacity in the economy to absorb the additional expenditure and so risk stoking inflation, but they are at least pointing in the right direction. It is a great shame that Osborne abandoned the concept of a mixed economy in favour of a politically-motivated desire to reduce the size of the State. His failure to step in after the financial crisis, when the private sector was unable to, lies at the core of many of the tensions we now face.

We can look to the US for recent examples of both parties’ economic policies in action. Nationally, Obama introduced a Keynesian stimulus in 2010 that was not a million miles away from Labour’s proposals. It was universally accepted as being successful – covering its costs over a five-year cycle and stimulating growth. At around the same time the State of Kansas introduced tax cuts with the expectation that these would spur economic growth – along the lines the Tories are proposing. The Kansas experiment has been roundly judged to have failed. It would be too simplistic to cite two examples and draw firm conclusions, other than the Labour route does not have to lead to economic disaster.

While I would like to claim it was down to our skill, the fact is that much of the exceptional investment gains we have seen over the last twelve months have been illusorily. The fall in the pound after the referendum has seen the nominal sterling value of overseas assets and income increase. The real value of these gains will be eroded by inflation. Much of the currency depreciation was in the expectation of a hard Brexit. Any Brexit is going to be costly but a soft Brexit will be less so.

The UK economy is in a pretty dire place already. Last year we found ourselves growing at the fastest pace in the G7; in the first quarter of this year it was the slowest. This is after a 13% fall in the value of our currency and while we still have the benefits of full EU membership. It does not auger well for the future. Even before we have introduced controls, skilled immigration has fallen – in part because repatriated pounds are worth less but equally because foreigners no longer feel welcome – an aspect that leaves me both sad and ashamed.

With so much political uncertainty around Brexit it is simply not credible to assume private sector investment will step up to the plate to fill the gap left by a schism with Europe. The time for a mixed economic response that sees Government expenditure alongside private capital is surely now if we are to dampen the negative effects of Brexit. Against this background, Labour’s tax and spending plans appear not simply plausible but timely and essential.

The housing market remains a concern and the election has not improved the outlook. The rise in the youth vote will mean all parties will shift their focus to improving the lot for this cohort – which boils down to fixing the housing market. There is no pain-free way forward. The failure by successive Governments to boost supply has led to housing becoming an over-priced asset while the growth of the buy-to-let sector has increased risks. An increase in supply coupled with reduced demand on the back of lower immigration will see prices fall. With luck this will be experienced as depressed future growth – history suggests it is more likely instead to be a dramatic correction. The housing market is key to consumer confidence. Although we cannot spend the value of our homes they nonetheless exert a strong psychological influence. If house prices are rising we feel more confident and are more likely to spend, and the opposite when they are falling.

Compared to global market capitalisations our core portfolios have a UK bias. The justification for this rests on the multinational nature of many UK listed firms and the perception of relatively low political and currency risks. Over coming weeks we will be looking carefully at the extent this bias remains justified and the degree to which our portfolios are exposed to the effects of a strengthening pound if the risks from a hard Brexit continue to diminish. We have a reasonable exposure to smaller and mid-cap UK companies. Although these reflect factors that are likely to see stronger returns over the long term they are also firms that will tend to be more dependent on the domestic economy. We will be considering whether the extent of our tilt towards these areas remains appropriate.

Overall, these are minor tweaks to our long-term strategy. We remain of the view that in these uncertain times diversification is the key to managing risk.

Keep calm and carry on!

If you’re interested in finding out more about how the Millennial generation is likely to change our world over the next decade then why not come to our Masterclass at the UEA on 18th July? Two of our Millennials, Radi and James, will be presenting their research on long-term socio-economic trends. Very interesting stuff with some surprising conclusions.

More details and book a place here: https://www.chadwicks.co.uk/seminar-registration/july-2017-new-generation-investing/