Discarding bad customers may cost you badly….

So, I hope your business is going good and great. You have a long list of your high valued customers. It’s great. You should be, and would be maintaining a good customer-relationship with them. So what is it that bothers you the most while dealing with your customers’ issue?
At times, identifying loyal (high-value) and worst (low-value) customers can be the reason to all your problems. While low-valued customers are the one who hardly spend on your services or products and cost you more money than they ever provide, you might just think of casting them out. And why not? What need are they when they can’t source you the profits? Many companies and entrepreneurs think this way. And it is this phase when they make the biggest mistakes in their businesses. How???
It goes this way… When you discard your low-valued or ‘worst’ customers, you leave yourself open to your competitors for a successful hunting as they can now easily ascertain who your potential high-valued customers are? And so they would now incorporate plans and techniques to take away your remaining ‘high valued’ customers.
So the thing is how to manage your good and bad customers and make your business a success at the same time. It is not as hard as it may sound. Just integrate some good ideas to improve the quality of your high-end customers, but at the same time you should leverage to find out and incorporate ways to manage your low-value customers such as offering them discounts and other benefits.
Giving a thought to discard your worst customers is not a bad idea and does make sense, as long as you have a monopoly. While this sounds very unreal in today’s world of competition, you can still make your idea work only at your own risks.

Posted in Current Trends, customer retention | No Comments »

Lead your way to becoming Money Smart

While with an increase in the income levels, the standard of living has increased as well and people with higher disposable incomes like to splurge their money at anything. But you see, it’s not possible for anyone and everyone to do the same. Yes, each one us waits for that chosen day when we’ll be awarded with a bonus for our work well done so that we can travel to our dream destination, buy new gadgets for our kids, and make a lot of investments here and there make our materialistic wishes come true. No, I am not saying it’s bad, but what the use of all this when at the end of the day we are again left with managing our tight monthly budgets and thinking of ways to escape our I-T. I thought of sharing some smart money saving tips to you such that involving them in your daily financial life can help you become Money Smart.
Plan out your monthly budget- To save yourself from living an extravagant life, it becomes imperative on your part to plan out a smart monthly budget keeping in mind all your financial needs. This way you would not have to shop your groceries with your credit card too and you can also plan to save a bit every month for your rainy day.
Try to stick to your monthly budget- Now that you have planned out your monthly budget, try to stick to it. Do away with all your sudden temptations to buy expensive things that are not so important and makes your budget a mess. You can also tell about this to your friends and family so that they remind you each time you spend extra.
Keep account of your investments- Try to keep a regular account of all your investments in mutual funds and stocks. Keep track of all your bank accounts as well. It would be wise on your part to regularly get your bank’s passbook updated.
Don’t envy your associate’s money- At times your associate or neighbour may invest a lot in small shares and benefit from it. You may be envious of friend’s sudden profits in the share market. But do you know something? We all feel that the grass is greener on the other side. A sudden fall down in the share markets world over speaks it all that aggressive buying can be harmful sometimes.
Don’t take personal loans for spending- Today most people take plastic (credit cards) as a new mode of transactions. Schemes such as ‘buy now, pay later’ had invoked people to buy as much they like without any need for paying. Unlike home loans that results in assets, personal loans for spending can land you in a world of problems later on.
Sticking to these small but useful facts can help you out a lot while dealing with anything in your financial life and you can lead your way to becoming money smart without any obstacles. I hope I might have helped you guys in some way or the other. Any comments, criticism or queries regarding this post are most welcome.

Posted in Financial Planning | 2 Comments »

Emerging innovative R&D hub

With India being the country representing the emerging economic sectors for a decade now, it is now going to witness a change in the ever-evolving R&D (Research and Development) sector. No doubt, the country is now converting into a prominent business hub with incorporating various innovative R&D technologies for international as well as Indian manufacturing industries. This effort will take into consideration all the business sectors like energy, environment, automobiles, packaging, automation, agro and food processing, pharma and bio-technology. Well! this could mark as a new start towards a country that is creating more employment opportunities for the highly skilled professionals. This could also result into something like providing talented researchers and technologists, with the freedom or “exemption” to continuously experiment with their own genius and skills and come up with unprecedented solutions and discovering technologies for various sectors.

Posted in Current Trends, R&D | No Comments »

New boom sectors for employment

Over the past few years, as the number of people with higher disposable incomes has risen considerably in India. This has in turn had a ripple effect and led to boom time in sectors like aviation  and real estate. More and more people are traveling by air and the sudden spurt in air ticketing websites, the ad wars between the travel portals and price wars between the airlines bear testimony to the baits being used to get more and more people into the loop. Similarly, with real estate prices appreciating heavily in the last 4-5 years, real estate investment has become a very lucrative option.

The above factors have ensured a sharp increase in the requirement of pilots and civil engineers and others associated with these sectors. And again paucity of professionals with relevant skill sets is causing salary levels of these professionals to rise to double-triple of the values before the boom. Compared with the manufacturing sector, the salary levels are said to be as high as four to five times. Definitely worth considering and keeping in mind for youngsters thinking of making a career choice. But like all good things, it comes with a caveat too. Take up a career for the love of it…not only for the pay packets being offered.

Posted in Current Trends | 1 Comment »

Hot Searches and Hot Trends

Google has this wonderful tool to search for trends in searches, which I tend to check out every once in a while to kinda get a hang of whats going on in the Web World. You can look up the search trends for US as well as your home country. Try it out here -

For US - http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X

and for India -
http://www.google.co.in/ig/adde?moduleurl=http%3A//www.google.co.in/ig/modules/india_hot_trends.xml

Irrespective of when you look up these results, you would notice that TV shows, Celebs and Sports realted searches top the charts for both countries. However, you would very often notice atleast one exam or career related hot search in the Indian result. Am yet to spot a similar hot search in the US results. Any thoughts on why this difference here? For one it might signify the Indian obsession with exams, results and degrees… Again it could be that while Internet is still ‘new’ here, people tend to use it more often for a “purpose” than for just fun related searches.

Posted in Current Trends | No Comments »

Employee Absenteeism

Recently, there were a couple of posts at an online HR network(Go Hire, Get Hired) prompting discussions on No-shows at the time of interviews and No-shows on the date of joining. Understandably, it is frustrating and irritating when people first show interest in your job offer but later don’t show up for interview or don’t join if recruited. The situation is made worse when these ‘professionals’ do not show enough professionalism to pen down a letter or email stating their inability to join.

That apart, what do you do when No-shows become commonplace after an employee joins? Employee absenteeism is increasingly becoming a big issue, affecting both productivity and quality of output. One of my friends forwarded this article to  me - http://www.employer-employee.com/absent.html that lays forth the possible reasons for employee absenteeism. But when we cross-checked with a couple of our team members and some of other HR managers, we found that more often than not, the reasons lay somewhere else. Do you think employee absenteeism is a problem in your organization? What do you think is causing it? How are you trying to deal with it?

Posted in Employee Management | 1 Comment »

Sample Non Disclosure Agreements

As a manager or sub-contractor, you need to ensure the safety of your and your client’s data and other confidential information. The first thing to do therefore is to enter into a Non Disclosure Agreement with your employees and/or the party you are sub-contracting work to. The internet today has made it easier than ever to draft such agreements. Just search on google for “sample nda” and you are bound to get something that exactly fits your needs rightaway or needs only minor alterations. Docstoc.com is another place where you can find such agreements. Check out http://www.docstoc.com/search/nda/ for various types of NDAs and take your pick.

Posted in Data Protection & NDA | No Comments »

Developer breaches security and shares confidential company data

In a shocking and bizarre case, a woman software engineer in Pune has been arrested following reports of her allegedly sharing confidential information of her past employer and the source code of their product to her husband and some others. Incidentally, the woman had resigned shortly after the breach. I wonder how the company figured the security breach but now that it has, it is pressing for damages to the tune of $13 million.

Its one of the things that can happen anywhere and it makes one wonder if there are checks that one can put in place to avoid such gross breaches.  Ofcourse legal contracts, like NDAs are used as a deterrent but are they effective enough? How do you ensure that employees keep confidential information confidential? How does one ensure that the source code that your seemingly dedicated development team is working on, will not be emailed to relatives, friends, competitors?

Hopefully, this case might set a good precedent and act as a deterrent for others. But its time for organizations to sit up and take notice of such possibilities and frame concrete policies to tackle them. 

What incidents like these also bring to the fore is the big question - “Why are well-educated, well-paid employees doing this?” Where are we going as a society, as a nation? What is it that we seek? A developer is not meanly paid. So, what is it that pushes him or her to this near criminal behavior? 

Posted in Data Protection & NDA | No Comments »

Customer is King?

This old adage is still as valid as it was ages ago. With increasing competition in almost every sphere, it has become even more important to hang on to what you have (read clients). With little control over internal customers (read employee attrition), you have to be proactive and maximize your efforts towards retaining customers. It has been well researched and documented that its easier and cheaper to retain an existing customer than to find a new customer.

And perhaps also that a happy customer may not tell enough people about his experience with  your company. But you can be sure an unhappy customer would. So, folks shake your internal problems off and get focused on customer orientation.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

How to retain key employees

The importance of retaining key members of a team can-not be denied. Each organization has its own strategy to improve retention rates and reduce employee turnover. For large organizations, its easy to offer super-attractive compensation packages and other frills and benefits. Smaller organizations with limited budgets need to be more innovative in devising ways to retain employees. What are the things you do to reduce turnover in your organization? We asked a number of entrepreneurs and HR managers this question. Read on and you might find something that could work for you…

- First and foremost, hire the right people. Not just in terms of skill level or capability but also in terms of the personality fit with your organization. Its good to have the “right mix” of people but don’t go overboard and choose people with extremely different personalities to work together. Again, your key members should be able to relate to and “fit” into your organizational culture. Else you are asking for trouble.

- Some people need flexible working hours.  If the nature of your work allows it, offer people the flexibilty to choose their work hours. If their work doesn’t involve interacting with others in the office on a continuous basis, offer the flexibility to work from home.

- Mentor-mentee programs work well in building up an organizational culture and improve relations between the senior and junior members of the team.

- Everyone - no matter what their skill or experience level - is an expert at atleast one thing. Find out what an individual excels at and then include it in his/her job profile.

- Give the employees a say in the matters. Don’t make them dumb followers. Involve them. Share regular stuff with your people. Seek their inputs. How would they have done things differently? Ask!

- Give people an opportunity to share their ideas. Don’t ridicule even if the ideas are no-brainers. If the ideas are good, help them implement these or lead the effort or be a key part of the implementing team.

- Link compensation package to performance.

- When recruiting or deciding on compensation, think long-term. Who is the person who is most likely to stick around for a longer period of time? He may not be a star performer today but if he is likely to be with you for a long time to come, he could be a critical resource for a people-based business.

- Link employee growth to organizational growth.

- Provide opportunities for cross-division movement. Just because someone was recruited as a designer does not mean he has to work as a designer forever. If you find people performing below par, find out where else you could fit them. Cross train.

- Spend time with your people. Get to know them. Communicate your expectations clearly.

If you would like to share what has worked better with your set-up, feel free to drop a line here.

Posted in Employee Retention | 1 Comment »