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Talent, Tech, or Agility? What’s Most Important for a Startup.

Remaining flexible and agile was the clear winner. That’s not surprising, considering the fact that small businesses need to pounce on every new opportunity as it presents itself, or risk losing out to its competitors. With that in mind, here are a few tips on how to keep your small business flexible and agile, ready to tackle anything.

Set growth goals

Many small businesses want to grow, but have you actually set a growth goal for the business? How are you measuring growth success? And, if you’re aiming to grow and already have some measurements in place, have you communicated this with your team? To stay productive and agile, it’s best to have everyone understand exactly what they’re working towards. Whether your growth is measured in revenue, new customers, or new products, it’s your job as a leader to make sure everyone is working efficiently to crush the goal.

Even if you’re a small company, bureaucracy can still occur, slowing down the business when it needs to pivot. However, small businesses have the advantage of implementing changes much more quickly to eliminate inflexibility. Leaders should keep reviewing their training practices, workflow processes, employee tools, and how they hire candidates to ensure an optimized organization that can respond to shifts quickly.

Opportunities crop up all the time, whether it’s an acquisition, product expansion, or new geographical market. If these growth opportunities fall outside of your core business model, you need to be ready to shift gears. Share your vision with your team to get buy-in and support for growth. Cloud computing, which is naturally adaptive and agile, can be a big boon when facing change.

Encourage collaboration, cross-training, and job shadowing; not only do employees gain new skills, but they can also bring a new perspective and fresh ideas to the table. By fostering a change culture and having a flexible business model, your team is at the ready when opportunity knocks.

Prioritize communication

Small businesses and startups often have the ideal structures for communicating and collaborating. With fewer employees, tight-knit groups all working towards the same goal can supercharge productivity. Create an open atmosphere for employees to share ideas and thoughts, and keep everyone in the loop regarding new or upcoming plans, successes, failures, and any decisions impacting them.

When you work at a small business, there are always not enough hours in the day to do all the things that need to get done. It can be tempting to stick to the status quo, or what currently works to speed things along, but you’ll never grow that way. New products, better service, and smarter marketing often result from trying new things out. When you’re a flexible and agile small business, you’re better equipped to take these chances and try new things out than enterprise companies. If you fail, you can fail fast, learn from the mistakes and move on. But if you succeed, you continue to move forward.

Using Slack bots to be more productive with Desk.com

Many of our Desk.com customers use Slack to help with internal communications. One of the advantages of Slack is that it lets you use (and even build your own) bots, or automated programs that run and perform a variety of automated tasks to enable and empower your team.

There are hundreds of available pre-built bots you can install from the Slack App Directory.  But at Desk.com, we had some needs that didn’t quite fit into an existing bot, so we took it upon ourselves to build some custom ones for our own support team. We wanted to share with you some of our favorite ones, which may inspire you to build some into your own Desk account.

 

Team bot

One of our biggest needs is for our entire support team to know when one of us is in a meeting, logged out of our phone system to handle something other than phone calls, or unavailable for any other reason. Due to some limitations of our phone system, it’s not possible for everyone to just *see* that, so we created a bot to let the team know.

Once invited to a channel, anyone can tell the bot they’re going unavailable with a simple “@teambot brb” or “@teambot meeting.” That kicks off a set of processes, including pushing a message to our support channel to the effect of “Mike has gone unavailable, do not go away until Mike is back.” The message repeats every 5 minutes until Mike is back. When Mike returns, he simply types “@teambot back” to turn off the push message.

In the code, we do some more complex things as well, such as:

  • We don’t allow anyone else to try “@teambot brb.” This way only one person can be gone at a time.
  • We don’t allow anyone to try “@teambot back” if they’re not the person who’s away, so people don’t set someone else as back so they can leave.
  • We log the timestamps when people go away and come back, so we can report on it and make sure nobody is unavailable for too long.
  • A built-in override for management and senior members of our team lets them “@teambot back” for anyone, or “@teambot Set Tom away” if Tom forgets to set himself as unavailable.

This bot helps us keep track of our team at all times across all locations, and ensures we’ve got the resources available for our customers at all appropriate times.

System Status Bot

When there’s any sort of problem with the Desk.com service, we run System Status Bot to remind us, at set intervals, to provide updates to our customers across all of our channels; our System Statussite, our phone system messaging, the message at the top of the Desk websites, etc.

It posts to our support channel and reminds us when it’s time to update that messaging and has proven incredibly beneficial to our customers in getting them the most up to date information when there’s any sort of issue with the service.

CSAT Bot

When we get a positive or negative CSAT rating, it gets posted to a number of our channels. This way we can recognize people’s great work or review the case and look for ways to improve and reach back out to the customer to try and turn their experience around. We also post our current overall CSAT score on a daily basis to track how we are doing.

We’ve found it’s equally important to share the _good_ experiences, too. This helps our team stay motivated to keep doing great work. At the same time, the bot gives us better visibility and insight into how we can improve and work on making every experience great.  Both approaches have really helped us drive our goal of consistently increasing our customers’ satisfaction.

 

Quiz Bot

After we complete an internal training of any part of our service, the trainer builds a quiz around it to ensure team members retain knowledge from the training.

The quiz runs in a generalize channel and makes a game (complete with a score and trophy for the winner) out of it. First person to get the answer right wins the point(s).

Make your own

Here are some resources to help you get started building your own bots:

8 Quotes to Help You Build an Amazing Company Culture

1. “Be cognizant of your culture”

Karlgaard urges organizations to stop thinking about the size of their companies, or the number of people on their payrolls. “If companies today have to org chart every little decision, they’re not moving fast enough,” said Karlgaard. “Instead, be cognizant of your culture. Write it down and set a precedent. Rally your company around that.”

2. “Be cognizant regardless of your company size”

Karlgaard discussed the impact of today’s global economy, and urges businesses to be mindfully aware of the circumstances in which they live, where there are problems, and where there are opportunities. “Don’t panic or get stressed about it, but come together as a team to be able to pursue these opportunities or solve these problems,” said Karlgaard. The good news is that organizations can be “cognizant regardless of your company size.”

3. “Immune system things”

“My thesis is that the best model is living organisms. We have immune systems,” noted Karlgaard. “You have this immune system that takes care of you, but imagine what it would look like for an organization to have a really good immune system.” For Karlgaard, that gets to the culture of an organization. Companies with an immune system will have a high level of trust, great teamwork, great appreciation for diversity, and unique talents that their employees bring to the organization.

4. “Hope-balance characteristics”

Business to business is truly person to person. We work with human beings in business. If the goal is to obtain a customer, hold onto a customer, and satisfy a customer, then the rational and emotional side is crucial. “Customers think rationally, and they also think emotionally. So you better bring that into your product or service,” advised Karlgaard. The people delivering your product or service must have those “hope balance-characteristics.”

5. “Build whole-brain teams”

In order to create high levels of trust and personal empowerment within an organization, Karlgaard recommends developing teams that spontaneously form to solve a problem or to pursue an opportunity on a day-to-day basis. “Establish steering teams to create whole-brain teams, which means cognitive diversity, introverts, extroverts, left-brain thinkers, right-brain thinkers who can see the big picture. Analytical people, highly analytical people, and highly intuitive people,” Karlgaard recommended.

6. “Have a highly adaptive culture”

In today’s global economy, Karlgaard feels it’s crucial to have a “highly adaptive culture based around small autonomous teams where people love and respect each other and can therefore rise spontaneously to solve problems or pursue opportunities.” He goes on to share, “People who are happy and feel good about what they’re doing is going to matter. It improves how companies impact their customers.”

7. “A degree of paranoia is appropriate”

According to Karlgaard, it’s appropriate to be fearful, but it’s not appropriate to be paralyzed with fear. “Andy Grove of Intel, said ‘Only the paranoid survive,’ and I think that’s good,” said Karlgaard. “A useful amount of paranoia and fear is needed to think about the future, but also look at it in an optimistic way. ” Good managers will make sure that there is that balance, because according to Karlgaard, that’s the creative spur.

8. “Mobilize around trends”

Many companies are doing a great job of preparing for the short-term, but might not be looking five years ahead, according to Karlgaard. ‘The two-to-five year time frame is really critical,” said Karlgaard. “The global integrated economy has offered great opportunity for organizations to mobilize their companies around technology and other trends.” Focus on how to stay competitive as a company in an era where technology is evolving as fast as it is. “There are trillion dollar opportunities out there for companies to figure out based on these trends,” advised Karlgaard.

How One Company Achieves a 99% Retention Rate with Its Customers

No one knows the value of ease and efficiency like DUFL, which was founded to make life simpler for business travelers. The company cleans and stores the garments customers need for trips, and then ships a suitcase directly to specific destinations throughout Europe, Canada, and Asia. Busy customers have high expectations and meeting them is critical.

That’s why the company started using the Salesforce Customer Platform from the beginning. Unlike many other startups, DUFL didn’t jump from one fire to the next, winding up with a collection of disconnected point solutions, each designed to solve a specific problem. Founder and CEO Bill Rinehart knew Salesforce from a previous company and had experienced firsthand the value of a connected, scalable platform for a growing business.

“Delivering an amazing customer experience is our mantra,” Rinehart explains. “Salesforce lets us keep a complete record of each individual’s unique needs, so we can provide a customized experience and exceptional support at every touchpoint.”

DUFL customers register and create an account within the DUFL app and the company’s back-end systems. Account information is imported to Salesforce so externally-facing teams can access customer information quickly, in a user-friendly format. Rinehart says, “The ease of use, flexibility and transparency of Salesforce lets us focus on our core competencies and growing our business.”

The company uses Sales Cloud to manage accounts and track activity so it can win more customers. Fully integrated Service Cloud is the primary support interface for support agents who also take advantage of plug-ins like CTI and translation to keep customers happy. And Desk.com is used for internal trouble tickets and service operations.

Rinehart shares the story of a customer who ruined the heel of an expensive dress shoe and asked the company for help. DUFL’s Concierge Desk created a ticket and had her heel repaired by a local cobbler and the shoes were back in her DUFL closet and ready for the next trip within 48 hours. And, since the case was managed via Service Cloud, the company has a solution that can be referenced the next time a customer needs shoe repair (which has already happened).

Just as DUFL enables customers to travel more, and more easily, Salesforce has enabled the company  grow without growing pains. With just 25 employees the company can easily handle 10% month on month growth while maintaining a retention rate of 99.89%.

Rinehart says, “We pride ourselves on providing our customers with an exceptional experience, a white-glove service without the luxury price tag. Not only do we expect our trips to go off without a hitch, we also expect the customer service experience to be above par. We will always go the extra mile for our customers and Salesforce makes it possible for us to give our customers the excellent care and service they deserve.”