In this post, we’re going to talk about something that tends to go unnoticed by a lot of small or new business owners. As the title suggests, the topic is speed. Specifically, why is it so important in business?
For starters, speed refers to how quickly your business does things. It refers to the speed with which you reply to customer service queries, carry out services, ship out products, and so on. A lot of people believe that speed doesn’t matter that much and that as long as you produce things of a high quality – that’s all that matters.
However, this isn’t strictly true. Yes, quality is incredibly important, and your business must ensure that everything is done to the highest quality possible. This guarantees your clients are happy with what they receive as it’s very good quality. But, you still need to focus on speed as well, to keep your customers happy, which leads us nicely onto this first point:
Speed And Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction and speed are directly correlated to one another. If your business does things quickly, then customer satisfaction goes up and up. If you do things slowly, guess where their satisfaction goes? That’s right, down the pan.
The fact is, customers, don’t like to wait around for anything. They pay you for a service/product, and they want it as quickly as can be. If you drag things out and waste their time, they’re only ever going to be annoyed.
If your business wants a lot of happy clients, then you need to take steps to speed things up for their benefit. Use things like collaborative file sharing to instantly provide clients with important documents and files that they need, rather than posting physical copies that can take days. Other things like automated customer service methods ensure you respond to queries instantly rather than making your customers wait for hours before you’re free. There are loads of things you can do to speed up your business processes and ensure your customers are left satisfied at all times.
Speed And Business Output
It’s a simple concept, the quicker your business is, the more you can get done, which increases your output. Why is this important? With more output, you can service more customers meaning more money can be made.
The easiest way to explain this is by looking at sales. Imagine a sales team is quite slow and takes a long time to close sales. By the end of the week, only 20 sales have been closed. However, if they were quicker at what they do, they could close more sales in a day, leading to more sales in a week. As a result, the business brings in more money and starts gaining more customers. Or, imagine you run a small business, and you offer services but can only take on one client at a time. If you’re too slow, it means you spend too much time with one client before moving to a new one. In that same space of time, you could’ve finished work with your first client, moved on to the new one, and be ready for a third client instead!
You need to look at ways you can speed up your business to increase your output. This involves looking for things that help you be more productive and get more work done in the same period. Is there some sort of software that can help you speed things up? Do you need to assess how people are working to boost your output? There are many questions you should ask, but you’re really looking at ways to increase business productivity and efficiency.
Speed And Your Rivals
Finally, speed is important in business as you need it to get ahead of your rivals. The business world is almost like one massive race. Everyone is looking to get out in front of their competitors and lead the way.
Having said that, speed is a very important factor in the modern world. The technology boom has made it possible for companies to operate quickly, and customers expect this. It’s seen as the norm to be fast and offer a fast service nowadays.
So, if you’re not fast enough, your rivals will speed on by and leave you lingering behind. Likewise, if you’re quick at everything and run a fast business, you will speed up ahead of everyone else.
Don’t take speed for granted when running your business. It’s highly important, and you need to ensure your company is doing things quickly to maximize its potential.
