Solving Problems - The Path to Creating Value on Services

What is the best way to achieve your goals in your company? The answer is: To solve daily problems and provide value to your customer in the process.

What does “solve daily problems” mean?

It means what it is supposed to mean. As a business owner, you stumble upon an issue that needs to be taken care of. You tackle it and make it disappear as fast as you can. If you do it consistently, you create a habit. That habit brings your clients results, and they will return for more.

Big Example:

Say you run a small restaurant. This restaurant has 16 tables, and it is free seating. What this means is that the moment a patron comes in, they may choose where they want to sit. Now, this is what it would look like if customers were allowed to select their seats:

​A patron comes in, and seeing decides to sit on the opposite side of your staff, right at the end of the restaurant. Another customer comes in and sits on the opposite side of the first customer. And that repeats for two more parties that enter the restaurant.

​What would be the consequence of this free seating policy?

If you are working with a tight crew, they have a higher chance of getting tired faster. They would also be running on the floor randomly (based on the order of the clients’ arrival), and when they put a ticket to the kitchen, they have a higher chance of missing it.

The kitchen runs based on the flow of orders. If they come in on a random orderly fashion, you will experience customers getting their food later, or maybe a table getting their food partially, etc.

Is this a problem? I believe it is.

How to solve it?

Look at the map below.

​If we can organize the tables in sections, and we place a greeter or host in the entrance of the restaurant to escort the patrons to their table, we can organize the space of the floor and thus the inflow of orders and food.

How could we fix this issue?

On the map, we divided the same number of tables in 3 sections. When the first customer comes in, we will direct him to table 1.

When the second customer comes in, we’ll place them on table 2, the third to table 3, and so forth. We will only allow a customer to go to table 7 if the original six are full.

So when you deal with the seating issue, you can focus all your waiters’ efforts in one area of the restaurant. Your service will be faster, food will arrive on time, and you will help the kitchen by being organized.

In this case, by organizing the flow of customers, you can provide better service to them! That is efficiency in solving problems.

In our company, we cater mostly to small businesses, which means deal directly we the business owners, talking strategy, and discussing what to do and not. What we notice in dealing with them is that if we can give them more than they are expecting and get the results they want, their satisfaction improves, and they will gladly refer you to new clients.

What does this mean?

Usually, this is how you hire an online marketing agency: give them the scope of the project, they will provide a detailed blueprint of what they can do, and they can’t do, you agree with the terms and start working together.

It’s not uncommon that unpredicted issues in the scope determined by agency surfaces and needs to be dealt with to achieve the results you had in mind when you hired that very agency. Most of the agencies (this is also from my personal experience as a client) will say: “I can’t do this” or “That’s not within our scope” or “We need to hire someone else to do it.”

Now bear with me, I am not talking about new software implementation, or something massive as adding a new social media in a super-specific language like Mandarin, for instance. I am talking about…” hey, something interesting just happened in the neighborhood, can we talk about it on our social media within the hour? Can you please create a post about it?”

These types of things.

Those agencies often neglect them because they were not in the scope, but as I see it, this agency is not solving the clients’ problem.

​I have learned over the past years as a business owner that my best service partners are the ones that were doing extra without me requesting or knowing it. And that is fantastic because I never feel like IO have to bug these partners for little things, which puts a strain on the working relationship. I don’t even bother to bug those partners, which I would if results were not happening, and I noticed they were not proactive in their role.

​Of course, there’s a gray area. It’s not fair to online marketing agencies to expect their work to deviate so drastically from what they planned just so the customer can get a load of free services. However, it’s also not smart to see a strategy not going through when you know that if you add a few things or two to your daily activities, it can improve the results of your work.

As SEO experts, we learned how to reverse engineer websites, data, and social media channels so we can funnel the traffic to our client’s business online. Looking at the big picture, it makes sense to reverse engineer the approach on Customer Service! How we cater service practices should be “everything in your power to bring those customers to the client”!

Examples: Work on Sundays, overnight, add that paid feature to your client, write content when your client can’t give you, add that extra post on his social media channel, he is not giving you the material to finish your assignment? Figure out a way to help you in this regard, don’t just wait!

MAKE THINGS HAPPEN! For your client and the sake of a prosper partnership!

​In the long term, you are continually solving their problems, you are generating value to their business, and you become an essential partner for their success! It pays off!!!

Leo
Written by Leo Ang @ Ingols Digital Business!
Partner at Ingols Digital @ingolsdigital and Ingols Imports.