Businesses cannot operate at their highest level of performance without well-orchestrated systems and processes, and tools should be a primary priority. This technique ensures that your associates have up-to-date technology and state-of-the-art tools that help them do their work in the easiest and most efficient manner. This is important so that they can spend more time focused on creating customer loyalty!

Technology Check-Up – The best companies are not afraid to invest proactively in up-to-date technology and systems that are leading edge. State of the art tools will ensure that you will have a better chance at keeping all the data where you need it to make the best-informed decisions. These tools also ensure that you have all of your business applications synchronized so that operations can approach a seamless, straightforward ease. Your company needs to ensure that you use compatible industry leading applications to run the business and make it easy to do the right things in serving your customers. Some of these applications are CRM, Tax Management, Expense Accounting, Payroll, B2B, ERP, Manufacturing, Human Resources & Management Systems and social media management.

Manual Labor – You can tell a company is serious about leading the pack when they have clearly identified and documented their company’s essential functions in a company operations manual. Nothing helps people do the right things faster or easier than a documented process that clearly identifies what to do and how to do it, and where to go when you need help!

Best Practices Make Perfect – When a company cares enough about their team to equip them with systems that have been fully implemented and allows the team to exploit all of the productivity capabilities of those systems by employing Best Practices in implementing them, magic happens for customers. When things are occasionally out of whack, exceptions can be immediately escalated to leadership and management because they stick out as an exception. Being able to escalate problems immediately for remedial action is a great competitive advantage you can leverage when your systems are finely tuned and call out exceptions and problems quickly.

Results Regularity – When an organization is regularly reviewing their business applications and systems to ensure that they have maximized the efficiency and effectiveness of those systems in helping the people to deliver results, the improvement is continuous and becomes a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, too many companies scrimp and try to do the job without making a firm commitment to making automation and workflow systematization part of the DNA of the company, and results suffer. Continuous focus on improving your game by fine tuning processes, systems, reporting and tools pays off handsomely. Developing a culture of consistently overachieving against expectations and delivering results becomes a competitive differentiator for those few companies that make it a point to execute better than their competitors. Distinguish your organization by paying attention to the IT and Operational disciplines that will get your team into the Hall of Fame with your customers.

Feedback Into Features – Extraordinary companies consistently survey their prospects, customers, associates, vendors and business partners and listen intently to their feedback about how the company and the team are performing. Doing so uncovers opportunities to improve on the company’s processes, systems and tools. Improving those tools allows everyone in the value chain to perfect systems, tools, reports and processes, enabling a higher level of performance for customers and co-workers alike. This builds a culture of excellence. The brightest companies ask the right questions, listen to the answers and turn feedback into differentiating features and leap ahead of their competition.

When your people have the greatest tools and are well trained on how to use them to the greatest advantage, the likelihood that customers will receive game-changing experiences is greatly increased, and loyalty grows. Employee morale grows alongside the customer loyalty and a solid differentiation in business applications and operational excellence can become a key competitive advantage in the marketplace today. It’s yours for the asking at a reasonable cost more often than not. Will you take it?