New Articles

Why In-Person Interaction Remains Critical In The Age Of Remote Work

remote

Why In-Person Interaction Remains Critical In The Age Of Remote Work

Not long after the COVID-19 pandemic forced a shift to remote work, the internet security research firm Twingate conducted a national survey to find out what workers missed most about going to the office.

Heading the list: “Social connections,” followed closely by “human contact in general.”

Those answers aren’t surprising to Phil Kelley Jr. (www.philkelleyjr.com), author of Presence and Profitability: Understanding the Value of Authentic Communications in the Age of Hyper-Connectivity.

“Interactions with other people are essential to human beings and those interactions significantly affect our state of mind,” says Kelley, who is also president and CEO of Salem One, a company that specializes in direct marketing, packaging, printing and logistics. “We were built to interact, to socialize, to gather and sort ourselves into social groups.”

Kelley understands the need and advantages of flexible remote-work schedules. He just worries that if remote work isn’t handled correctly – and if trends continue such as hot-desking policies where no one is assigned a permanent workspace at the office – the big loser will be corporate culture. And when culture suffers, so does the entire enterprise.

“It’s well established that a great organizational culture – one where people feel engaged, connected, purposeful – helps achieve financial success,” Kelley says. “This is because the attitudes of the people in an organization ultimately reach and affect customers. To put it simply, satisfied employees tend to foster satisfied customers.”

Developing A True Connection

That’s why it’s important to promote the development of authentic connections and good relationships within a company, he says.

“Unfortunately, building and maintaining good internal relationships gets more difficult when those relationships are mediated by technology via email, texts, phone calls or video calls,” Kelley says.

While some communication is better than none, what’s ultimately important is making a true connection, he says. For that purpose, a phone call is better than an email, a video chat is better than a phone call, and in-person is best of all.

“If working from home is done in such a way that eliminates employee interaction, then you will lower the quality of your culture,” Kelley says. “That will in turn lower employee satisfaction and increase turnover.”

He says it all goes back to a saying popularized by writer and management consultant Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Kelley says, “because strategy is about abstract ideas and culture is about the connection between human beings. The more business people are attuned to the human need for making connections, the more successful they will be, because the need for connection is one of the most basic human needs.”

Making An Appearance

In that regard, Kelley recommends that ambitious employees make appearances at the office as much as possible, even if they routinely work remotely.

“If you are the sort of person who wants to advance, wants to sit in that big corner office, or even if you simply want the next promotion or raise, it is always best to take the path of highest relational value,” Kelley says. “Go into the office if given the choice of doing that or working from home. Go in person to that group meeting if they will let you in the door.”

He also suggests businesses make the effort to connect their brand to community-focused initiatives. That enhances corporate culture while helping the company connect in a different way with the customers it serves.

“Having your employees working alongside impassioned community volunteers and leaders for the betterment of all should be on the top of every brand promotion list,” Kelley says. “Engage your company with industry trade organizations, civic and church projects, charities, educational events, and so on. These kinds of activities are communication-value multipliers.

“Relationships are so important to people that any company that makes a real connection with a customer can win that customer’s loyalty for life.”

_____________________________________________________________________

Phil Kelley Jr. (www.philkelleyjr.com) is the author of Presence and Profitability: Understanding the Value of Authentic Communications in the Age of Hyper-Connectivity. He also is president and CEO of Salem One, which specializes in direct marketing, packaging, printing and logistics. Kelley holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Tech as well as an MBA from Clemson University. He has served on the boards of directors of multiple nonprofit and for-profit organizations. Kelley has been an active voice in the print industry, refocusing industry success definitions within the rapidly developing world of corporate communications. 

conversions

Boosting Checkout Conversion Rates: Tips for Businesses Chasing E-Commerce Success

A customer clicking “pay” means the sale is pretty much a done deal, right? Not so fast. What if that final step isn’t actually a leap towards revenue? What if that transaction stumbles at a final hurdle? In this increasingly global landscape, the lack of payment method options is causing exactly that misstep for e-commerce players.

The general theory is that e-tailers expect checkout conversion rates greater than 80% once a consumer has selected the product or service, entered all their personal details, remained on the site, and then try and pay. In reality, nearly 50% of online shoppers say they will abandon a purchase at checkout if their preferred option is not available. This means that the actual conversion – and therefore revenue rate – is far less than 80%.

Amid a pandemic-induced shift to online transactions, consumers now have a stronger sense of what they want in terms of ease-of-use, customer experience, communications, site aesthetics, fulfillment, and everything in between. Consumers expect their e-commerce experience to have been tailored specifically for them.

Accessibility to locally preferred payment methods (LPMs) forms is just one component of this, albeit an important one. E-tailers, as well as payment companies servicing e-tailers, need to ensure that all aspects impacting the customer experience are optimized if they are to truly capitalize on the global e-commerce opportunity in front of them.

The conversion rate conundrum

While it is clear that the user experience is having a direct impact on cart abandonment, it seems that this isn’t translating into action. According to statistics, the global average cart abandonment rates are between 60% and 80%. In fact, companies looking to sell to consumers from different regions across the globe can miss out on 77% of their potential business if they don’t accept LPMs, as more than three-quarters of all global e-commerce purchases are made using them.

At first glance, this is obviously a concerning rate of abandonment. But in the context of the wider e-commerce landscape, it’s potentially disastrous. When COVID-19 hit, e-commerce in the US alone experienced 10 years’ worth of growth in just three months. In Europe e-commerce revenues saw an increase of US$71bn year-on-year, leading to predictions that 2021 would see another revenue jump of 30%. That’s not to mention Asia, which now accounts for nearly 60% of the world’s retail sales online.

With 53% of people surveyed by UNCTAD saying that they intend to continue shopping online after the pandemic ends, this initial shift is now a long-term proposition and those initially lost conversions i.e. sales, reflect the possibility of a much longer-term problem – especially if your competitors have reacted quicker to these trends and demands.

How can businesses increase sales in any market?

To begin with, there needs to be an intention to understand and acknowledge the new consumer climate and what they expect in the post-pandemic world. From a global perspective, LPMs form a large component of this demand.

However, it is critical to keep your global offering locally relevant. For example – don’t offer US preferred payment methods to Asian customers or UK preferred payment methods to Indian customers. Ensure that an LPM is relevant for the market and customer base and where relevant, give them a couple of choices. More than that, showcase those accepted payment types. Old payment method logos could lead to mistrust. And on that same issue of ‘trust’, instilling confidence early on by informing customers how they can pay before they actually reach the payment page, will lead to increased conversion and basket sizes.

Additional tips for fostering a better consumer relationship and ensuring improved conversion rates include aligning the language on the payment method page to the language your customer has been shopping in; providing small information bubbles for each payment method option so customers can make a more informed choice; and make sure to show your trading name on the payment method, as customers won’t necessarily be familiar with your legal name.

Plugging in and partnering, not going it alone

These small and simple gestures may seem insignificant, but they can make or break trust with a consumer. However, what is not simple, is the level of digital transformation required to bring these value-add propositions to the table. With ‘transformation’ being the keyword.

Integrating – and then managing – local payment methods are costly, complex, and time-consuming – often taking as long as a year and can cost more than $1 million to integrate a single LPM to existing infrastructure.

Embedding the tips highlighted above requires a quality, multi-faceted infrastructure. Each LPM brings with it unique funds flow, compounded by numerous operational, regulatory, and legal complexities. That is why many brands are leveraging partnerships to expedite their speed to market and reduce costs versus building in-house.

By outsourcing a local payments infrastructure, businesses can integrate LPMs faster, which addresses the customer’s needs more rapidly hence increasing revenue and could also provide a competitive advantage. Partnering with a dedicated provider of LPMs will also enable deeper and more expansive access to consumers in different markets; the option of the provider managing the entire funds flow for each LPM on behalf of the business tapping into it, and additional monitoring and optimization services to get the best conversion rates for each LPM.

Businesses that leverage a local payments infrastructure can rapidly and cost-effectively tap into the global audience that awaits.

By putting this service into your basket, consumers are more likely to pay for what they’ve put in theirs.

_____________________________________________________________

Claire Gates is the Chief Commercial Officer at PPRO

buy a business

With Jobs Eliminated Daily, is Now the Right Time to Buy A Business?

The economy and job market have been on a roller coaster since the pandemic hit in the early part of 2020.

First, the stock market took a nosedive and reached some all-time lows, only to rebound to all-time highs. The same has occurred in the job market. First, we were experiencing the lowest unemployment in years, only to be followed by the highest unemployment since the Great Depression of 1929.

Presently the stock market is rising, but there is still unemployment, and daily you read about major companies that are either laying off or eliminating jobs by the thousands.

If you have lost your job and find it difficult to find another job in an area of your expertise, then you may want to consider taking control of your future and buying a business. By owning your own business, you have more control of your future. You are allowed to use the talents you were using at your old job and apply them to a vocation that will allow you more flexibility and income.

The pandemic has created chaos in all areas of our daily lives and business, but it has also created lots of opportunities, too. Remember, overall nothing has really changed. People still need to eat, shop, communicate with each other, travel, vacation, read, sleep, etc. The only thing that has changed is how we will do these things after the pandemic is over, and it will be over eventually. Our world will be different just as travel and security have changed since 9/11, but we will still continue to live and thrive, and life will go on.

Buying a business is the quickest and least risky way to get into business, because when you buy a business that is already operating with employees and customers you have a cash flow from day one. If you can’t or don’t want to buy a business, you can start a new business. And in today’s world, if you want to reduce your risk, you may want to consider buying a franchise. A franchise is a business with a proven track record in the industry of which the franchise specializes, and all you have to do is follow the business formula the franchisor provides to you.

If you are really passionate about a certain business idea or concept, then you can start your new business from scratch. Either way, whatever option you choose you will be in control of your future more so than what you would be if you were to get another job – if another job is available.

As I was taught many years ago and live by today: “If it is to be, it is up to me.” Maybe there is a business calling your name now.

___________________________________________________________________

Terry Monroe (www.terrymonroe.com) is the president and founder of American Business Brokers & Advisors. The author of four books, he most recently published Hidden Wealth: The Secret to Getting Top Dollar for Your Business, with ForbesBooks. Monroe is a professional intermediary, consultant, and market maker for privately-held companies and has been involved in the sale of more than 800 businesses. In his 35-plus years of service, he has owned and operated more than 40 different businesses. At American Business Brokers & Advisors, he serves as a consultant for business buyers and sellers throughout the nation. As an expert source he has been written about and featured in The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur magazine, CNN Money, USA Today, CEOWORLD, and Forbes.

supplier

How Do Electronic Payment Solutions Fulfill Supplier Needs?

Paying all your suppliers electronically makes sense—in theory. At a high level, doing so is a simple enough task—you enable your AP team to make all their payments through electronic means. Then you have yourself a cost-generating solution. But to your AP team—the people at ground level—there’s much more behind the process than sending payments. They also must track sent payments, follow up on uncashed checks, handle fraudulent cases, and work with suppliers who are missing payments for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, most electronic payment businesses that tout themselves as solutions only find value at the high-level glance, which is a detriment to your team. For example, while banks and card networks move money electronically, they don’t provide much supplier support, which is often needed to take payments across the finish line. In the end, that task often falls to your employees once again.

AP also tends to use the oldest equipment of any team in most companies. They’re still running error-prone manual processes, with stacks of checks and invoices on their desks in need of circulation on foot. Process exceptions and one-off requests torment them. Suppliers are calling and emailing, looking for payment. At the same time, AP handles other issues like lost or erroneous invoices, payments landing in the wrong accounts, or which otherwise need attention.

The whole operation is like a house of cards. Even if you know you need to change, nobody wants to touch a single card for fear that the entire thing will fall apart. Asking them to enable suppliers for electronic payments is extra work, and not usually in anybody’s job description. It’s hard enough to get the regular work done; heaven forbid somebody on the team gets ill, goes out on leave, or quits. They’re really under a lot of pressure.

A new generation of payment service providers automates payments in the cloud and offloads much of the support work that AP usually handles instead of focusing on higher-value initiatives. When your process was held together with duct tape and string, it can be hard to imagine confidently handing the work to a service provider. To understand what’s possible today, let’s look at what payment support services look like at scale here at Nvoicepay.

Supplier Enablement

When our customers sign on with Nvoicepay, our implementation team goes right to work with their AP staff to get supplier lists and instructions for reaching out to them. If any suppliers require special arrangements due to prior agreements with them, we take those into account.

Our customers often pay many of the same suppliers. Because Nvoicepay maintains an extensive network of suppliers—about 800,000 of them—many suppliers are instantly payable without additional work. When suppliers aren’t already in our system, we campaign to get them electronically payable in a fashion that meets their individual needs. We prioritize Mastercard due to the ease of payment for all parties involved. As time goes on, the Nvoicepay team maintains supplier data, keeping up with changes on behalf of our customers.

Suppliers that still need to receive physical checks can do so. Even if they do, the process remains electronic on the AP side so that customers can issue check payments in the same batch as other electronic payments. Supplier questions are routed to our in-house support team, alleviating another large responsibility from AP.

Training and Implementation

While suppliers are being enabled, our technical support team trains the accounts payable group that will be using the software in a succinct, one-hour meeting. We know that AP turnover can be high, so we offer additional training by request to ensure that the customer’s entire team remains up-to-speed.

Our technical support team also works with the implementation team to ensure that the initial configuration caters to each company’s specific needs.

Making Payments

In the life of a manual process, AP teams need to fill out bank forms for each ACH batch or access their bank website to make wire payments. Payment automation consolidates those tasks—and more—into a single file from their ERP, which contains all the invoices the company wants to be paid. Nvoicepay disperses those payments based on each suppliers’ preferred payment type, set up in the enablement step, and continuously maintained.

On the back end, customers have total visibility into how those suppliers are getting paid, when checks cleared, and when Mastercard payments were issued. They can also track unprocessed Mastercard payments.

Payment Modification

Nvoicepay guarantees every payment, and as such, the phone number listed on the remittances is ours. If there’s an issue with a payment, your suppliers call our payment support team directly, and we work through any questions they may have. Our software also includes a form that alerts our Payment Modification team of the need to resolve errors, refunds, reissues, or stop-payments. We turn those requests around quickly, as quickly as a customer could call their bank and do it themselves. We take as good care of our customers’ suppliers as they would. No matter where an error occurs, we work to resolve it and to keep our customers informed throughout the process.

If a supplier reaches out to their customer directly, the customers also have visibility into our system. They can handle those one-off events without trouble.

Card Retention

Many AP groups have dealt with card programs that promised significant rebates but didn’t deliver. Making as many payments as you can by card is what helps you maximize rebates. To aid this, another faction of our operations team—the supplier services group—reaches out to suppliers who haven’t processed their cards after a set time. The team works with suppliers to answer any questions they have about the payment, and to support the processing of as many cards as possible.

Within the supplier services team is a retention group, which assists suppliers who may want to stop accepting card payment. That’s the most beneficial payment method due to the rebate. Still, there can be various issues on the supplier end, such as card fees, or challenges with remittance or reconciliation. The retention group learns what the supplier objections are to card. If we can’t work through them, we enable a different payment type.

While most suppliers can process virtual cards through their terminal once they receive the remittance, others have set requirements or separate terminals that require specialized processes. In those cases, our group called AP Concierge will either call the supplier directly to make payments or pay through their terminal. Our internal goal is to have less than three percent of unprocessed cards monthly. After 60 days, unprocessed payments must be refunded to the customer, which creates unnecessary work.

Embracing True Support

Why don’t companies pay all of their suppliers electronically? Because it takes a village to do all the work around making payments! Nvoicepay’s dedicated teams support every piece of the payment process because we know that’s what it takes. It’s a rare AP team that can handle these pieces on top of getting payments out the door, let alone have special teams devoted to each area.

AP teams have been laboring under manual work and partially automated processes for so long; it’s hard to imagine someone taking all that work off their plate. But that’s precisely what we do.

And sometimes, it’s hard to imagine what AP jobs will look like when the payment process becomes automated. We don’t often see companies cut staff when they bring in Nvoicepay. Instead, we have found that companies reduce their staff growth rate, and that existing staff moves onto higher-value work.

_______________________________________________________________________

Angela Anastasakis is the SVP of Operations and Customer Success for Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR company. She has more than 30 years of leadership experience in operations and product support. At Nvoicepay, Angela has been instrumental in leading Operations through rapid growth, while maintaining our 98% support satisfaction rating through outstanding service.

Does Your Tech Company Need a Brand? The answer is “Absolutely.”

We all know that many companies, especially tech companies and companies with technology-enabled value propositions, have a hard time getting their branding right. They have rebrand after rebrand, but their message never seems to hit home with customers. It seems helpless. After working with hundreds of companies in this exact situation, I’m confident to say that it isn’t helpless.

They’re just making one fatal mistake:

These companies are focusing on the output of branding before adequately understanding and bonding emotionally with their customers.

Many technology companies see branding as writing the perfect copy, choosing the perfect color scheme, and writing up a perfect competitive sales message. The often treat messaging as branding. They get lost in a sea of bits and bytes and focus on speeds, feeds, throughputs and proprietary technology, never getting to a message that bonds so strongly with customers that they’d feel they were cheating on the brand were they to choose a competitor.   

Messages and marketing might be the output of branding, but branding is one thing: understanding – and bonding in a deeply emotional way with – your customer. I spend a lot of my time working with technology companies who categorically reject the notion that tech companies need to create deep emotional bonds with their customers. They believe that their tech’s special bells and whistles should be enough to sustainably differentiate them and give them a competitive advantage for their entire lifecycle.

That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

If your proprietary technology or whizz-bang features that give your tech more of what I call RASM (reliability, availability, scalability, manageability) are not directly imitable by a competitor, the high-level benefits those features provide are. Here’s what I mean. Your solution may have a feature that enables customers to do more processing faster, helping them focus on their core jobs. You might even create messages that are centered on the notion of “doing more with less.” Unfortunately, that’s a baseline requirement – and promise – of technology in general, right? If you market on the basis of something that’s a baseline expectation of an entire category of products (and in the case of technology, an entire industry) you’re doing it wrong. That would be like marketing ice cream on the basis of being made of milk and being cold and sweet.

If you are pointing your marketing towards a company or a nameless, faceless customer, you’re doing it wrong. Technology purchase influencers come in many shapes and sizes, not just demographically, but also attitudinally and psychographically. What I mean here is that if you’re a tech company with new, unproven but exciting technology behind it, your ideal customer might be someone who is not just willing to take a risk on new tech but wants to be seen as an innovator in her or his organization. When you know exactly at whom you’re pointing your tech brand, you can start to understand what’s important to them and target not only your brand, but your messages and marketing directly at that person’s values, beliefs and desired achievements.

Finally, take a look at your company’s website right now. Go ahead and do it. I’ll wait. Take note of the first words you see on your website’s main headline. If those words are either “we” or your company’s name, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re talking from the point of view of “we do this so you can …” or “we make blah, blah and blah…” you’re doing it wrong. The best technology brands in the world are those that focus on their customers’ life stories and what they, as individuals, are looking to achieve in life.

This is a challenge. There are thousands of ways you can understand your customers, and many companies are paralyzed by understanding where to start.

From my experience helping companies understand their customers, there are three core questions that really get to the root of how the brand and customer interact. If you can answer these three questions, you’ll be in a much better place to start your branding process.

1) What does your brand say about your customers?

The first question for brands to answer is what it says about a person that he or she uses this brand. What does it communicate both to the outside world and to the customer him or herself? This is important because, at its core, this is what a brand is. It’s a statement about the customer, and it’s crucial that, as a business, you know what that statement is. Answering this question requires you to really get inside your customers’ heads and understand what they want to achieve in their lives, how they measure their success in achieving those goals, what they care most deeply about, and, ultimately, how the brand must deliver.

2) What is the singular thing your brand delivers that customers can’t get from anyone else?

The second question to understand is what the singular thing is that a person using this brand gets from it that they can’t get from any other brand. In other words, what makes your brand singular and indispensable. What you’ll find, as you dig into this question, is that most of the answers aren’t tangible. It’s unlikely that your product has a feature that no competitors can provide. Instead, what commonly comes up are intangible benefits, like the ways the company makes them feel or the story it tells them about themselves.

3) How do you make your customer a hero in the story of his or her own life?

The third question requires an understanding of how your brand makes the customer a hero in his or her own life story. Everybody wants to be the hero in his or her own story. Everybody wants to be the protagonist. Some brands may achieve that in an obvious way (like a fashion brand making the customer stand out from the crowd), whereas others might be more subtle (like an IT brand making the purchasing manager look good in front of their colleagues). No matter what the case, if you can answer this question, you’ll have loyal customers for life.


At a very high level, everything we do in branding is about answering those three questions.

Before you do any copywriting, design, or other branding outputs, take some time to answer those three questions. If you have trouble getting to the bottom of them, don’t worry. Ask your customers for help, and keep digging until you really understand them. With this newfound understanding of who your customers are and how they want to interact with your brand, you’ll be on the path to defining a powerful brand strategy.

Deb Gabor is the author of Irrational Loyalty: Building a Brand That Thrives in Turbulent Times. She is the founder of Sol Marketing which has led brand strategy engagements for organizations ranging from international household names like Dell, Microsoft, and NBC Universal, to digital winners like Allrecipes, Cheezburger, HomeAway and RetailMeNot, and dozens of early-stage tech and digital media titans. For more information, please visit www.debgabor.com and connect with Deb on Twitter, @deb_sol.