标签存档： barenews

WHO WILL BE GETTING YOUR ‘LIKES’ THIS HOLIDAY SEASON?

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Holiday shopping season is here… but who will getting your business and social feedback?

The key to a profitable and joyful holiday retail season is ensuring exceptional customer service across all channels where customer interactions and feedback occur. Social media is increasingly becoming the most popular choice of ways to complain. Over 1 MILLION people view Tweets alone about customer service – a staggering 80% of those are negative. (Source: Touch Agency) So how do you avoid falling in the bottomless pit of bad social media reviews by disgruntled customers?

Before you open your doors to the last-minute frenzied shoppers, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Are all your employees clear on your company goals?
  2. Are your employees portraying a positive and friendly interaction as the shopper enters the store?
  3. Are you treating your employees the way you want them to treat your customers?
  4. Is your customer service department and contact center is ready for this influx of calls and customer requests?

It’s not just brick and mortar stores that need to take note… did you know that during the upcoming Holiday Shopping Season you can expect up to 80% more live chats online? In order to turn these chats into sales, you’ll need to streamline your online customer service. Get the Live Chat Cheat Sheet here.

Every 2 minutes, a BARE evaluation or audit is completed by our field force of more than 500,000 evaluators. Using calls, clicks or in-person visits, the common thread of our services is always revealing the moment of truth when your customers interact with your brand.

Through mystery shopping, social media monitoring and more, BARE International’s service offerings can finally reveal the true nature of your business. Contact us today to find out more.

WHAT IS INCIDENT MANAGEMENT AND HOW CAN DIGITAL CHECKLISTS HELP?

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A five-hour computer outage cost Delta Airlines $150 million in 2017. Similarly, companies lose an average of $300,000 per hour in revenue, staff productivity, and maintenance costs due to system outages. 

Major disruptions can significantly outweigh such expenses. The reason behind this is simple: customers who are unable to pay their bills, participate in a video conference or purchase a plane ticket are eager to switch to a competitor.

 

Moreover, such incidents can disrupt the organization’s processes and make them highly critical to its future. Therefore, incident management is vital to ensure smooth business operations and to avoid such incidents in the future. 

WHAT EXACTLY IS INCIDENT MANAGEMENT?

Businesses use dozens of technological packages in the forms of software and hardware to increase productivity. But like other systems, these IT systems too are vulnerable to breakdowns and stutters or can malfunction from time to time.

One incident could be all it takes to break your business practices, and it can throw your entire organization in flux. This is mainly because the incident occurs out of nowhere, and no one is prepared for it.

Incident management refers to a certain set of IT practices and preparations that your team or organization would carry out to measure KPI (Key Performance Indicators) and detect and solve problems or an “incident” in the business. 

Incident management ensures that your IT team can resolve technical malfunctions at the earliest, to reduce damage and even your reputation in the long run. For instance, you don’t want your website to stop running amidst a big sale, for it may repel customers indefinitely.

BENEFITS OF INCIDENT MANAGEMENT

A good incident management software will give KPIs to help the concerned team dramatically reduce incident response time.

However, it must be noted that KPIs themselves will not solve your problems. Still, they will assist you in identifying the source of the problem and directing your efforts toward digging more profound in the appropriate areas.

Here are some benefits of incident management:

  • Deriving vital KPIs for current and future use.
  • Prevention of incidents and risks.
  • Reduction and elimination of downtime.
  • Securing confidential data.
  • Improving customer service.
  • Better efficiency by identifying areas of improvement.
  • Mitigating spontaneous labor and costs.

HOW CAN A DIGITAL CHECKLIST HELP?

Manually conducting safety auditing, inspection management, and meeting compliance standards can be tedious.

But harnessing digital checklists, businesses can streamline incident management and make it more accessible.

All industries have a unique set of challenges they face during operations. Digital checklists simplify these processes, making it much easier to tackle challenges while maintaining an organized workplace.

Digital checklists can prove your team with some critical KPIs like timestamps, uptime, SLOs (Service Level Objectives), SLAs (Service Level Agreements), MTTR (mean time to repair, resolve, respond, or recovery), On-call time, MTTD (mean time to detect), and MTTA (mean time to acknowledge). 

Furthermore, you can use digital checklists for incident management to do the following:

  • Log all incidents.
  • Determine the location and sensitivity of the incident at hand.
  • Isolate the incident to ensure it doesn’t affect other resources.
  • Identify regulatory measures for the incident.
  • Assign duties throughout your team according to various factors for faster issue resolution. This can be done according to the category, location, and effectiveness.
  • Eradicate malfunctioned or compromised data.
  • Develop a list for forensics and hardware replacement if needed.
  • Analyze data to study why the problem arose and how you can avoid recurrence in the future.
  • Create an incident report that logs which areas of the organization were most affected.
  • Track and monitor all incidents to ensure accountability as well as faster resolution of incidents.
  • Improve security measures.

As you can see, digital checklists can be beneficial in the case of incident management.

HOW CAN BARE HELP?

BARE-IFY is an iAuditor alternative that helps you create digital checklists and carry out vital functions that support your organization to run smoothly and effectively.

BARE provides businesses with KPIs for incident management to identify and diagnose problems with processes and systems, provide benchmarks and realistic targets for the team to work toward, and serve as a springboard for more extensive inquiries.

Additionally, BARE has a user-friendly mobile app that operates offline, gathering data for you to inspect and analyze easily. A simple dashboard displays real-time results that are easy to gauge.

The BARE-IFY mobile audit application is easy to use and super practical. Revolutionize your business practices, meet standard compliances, and rise to the top.

IS YOUR RESTAURANT’S PIE OF REPAIR COSTS INCREASING DAY BY DAY?

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Any business has to incur a mix of fixed and variable expenses. If you are running a restaurant business, you will have expenses like salaries and rent that you incur irrespective of the number of open days and customers’ footfall. Expenses on food item purchases, however, would vary on the scale of business. 

 

When it comes to repairs and maintenance, a certain amount of it is expected in any business. Items like your kitchen equipment and air-conditioning will go through regular wear and tear. However, when these expenses occur too frequently, you need to sit up and take notice.

You look into the expense trend, sift out the avoidable ones from the unavoidable ones, and look for ways to avoid them to the extent possible. Here is a coordinated approach that you can adopt to keep your restaurant repair cost within the tolerable limit:

BUDGET AND ANALYSIS

Excessive costs erode a business’s profitability, sometimes to an alarming degree. It is always worthwhile to update budget figures and take stock of the restaurant’s various expenses. Depending on the equipment’s age, warranties available, number of items that need repair, etc. an estimate of the repair costs can be made. A detailed list of all these items should be in place, along with the maintenance requirement against each of them. Some of these items would be under warranty; some covered under maintenance contracts while the rest would need one-time repairs. After that, a regular analysis of the expenses incurred and noticing deviations between budgeted and actual costs ensure prompt identification of unexpected expenses. The expertise of service providers like Pulse comes handy in such workflow management and helps increase the business’s profitability.

MAINTENANCE CONTRACTS

Repairs in a restaurant may be required for kitchen equipment, refrigeration, plumbing, and heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment. By entering into maintenance contracts for these items, you can successfully reduce your long-term operating costs. Inking annual maintenance contracts puts various scheduled maintenance in place, which prevents breakdowns and subsequent losses. These contracts help you avoid large expenses that you would otherwise have to incur. In order to manage these contracts, you can use Pulse’s “Track and Assign Actions” feature.

INDUSTRY STANDARDS

As a thumb rule, repairs of 1-3% of the overall budget is considered tolerable. However, depending on your location and industry, you should find out how your peers are doing for repair costs. This acts as a useful benchmark in understanding and budgeting your restaurant expenses. Probing into industry standards will also enlighten you about the restaurant’s best practices that can further streamline your day-to-day operations.

STAFF AWARENESS

It is not practical to remind employees of rising expenses without doing your homework. But with an updated budget in your hand, maintenance contracts in place, and knowledge of the industry, you are better equipped. The next step would be to sensitize your staff about the various practices that can reduce the need for repair. It could be by encouraging simple daily practices like avoiding unnecessary use of equipment, following standard operating procedures (SOP) while using them, and educating them about early warning signs of malfunctioning equipment. Notably, Pulse provides checklist-based inspection processes that can be customized and put in place in your restaurant operations.

OPTIMIZING LAYOUT

In a customer-facing service like a restaurant, the layout is important for various reasons. An attractive layout can woo more customers, improve the ambiance, simplify operations, and minimize expenses. Smart layouts can minimize air-conditioning, reduce the preparation time in the kitchen, and even reduce breakages. A congested layout, on the other hand, generally leads to more cutlery breakages, while a haphazard seating arrangement can increase the consumption of utilities and their wear and tear. Similarly, improving the kitchen set up can reduce the pressure on equipment and the workforce and improve efficiency.

CONCLUSION

With a focused approach towards your restaurant’s repair costs, you can keep better control over your restaurant expenses. And by adopting standardized processes and regularly monitoring and auditing the spending patterns, you can be better prepared to meet your restaurant’s repair and maintenance needs.

The BARE-IFY Audit App is an advanced safety compliance and auditing tool is an audit and inspection platform with robust incident reporting mechanisms and super user-centric UI. By making your company’s incident reporting process more straightforward, you’ll reduce the time your employees spend in reporting incidents and automatically cut back on opportunistic mistakes.

Pulse also offers ready-to-use checklists for multiple industries so that you can stay on the top of your compliance game and reduce the chances of incidents.

Go! China’s Dream Team!

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Last Friday, China office received a special gift from one of our clients, Kantar TNS, all the way from London, UK. It was a simple card saying “THANK YOU DREAM TEAM” and a “Thank-you” cake, but the meaning and sincerity behind this was neither simple nor easy.

Imagine searching for and finding a cake-delivery vendor in a country that you do not have much understanding of, in terms of culture or language. Well, that’s what our client – Kantar TNS – did, just to reward our efforts in the recent HSBC audit project in Hong Kong, China.

This is the first time BARE China partner with Kantar TNS UK directly, and the reason why the client wants to express their “thank-you” in such a touching way is also simple (but not easy to achieve) – we WOWed them.

For this pilot project planned to be finished in 5 weeks, our KAM – Lock Chen – devoted extra time and energy to finish it ahead of time in less than 4 weeks with good results. Throughout the project, Lock went above and beyond to try to provide solutions that exceeded the client’s expectations or requests. There were days when Lock left the office after 11pm, and also times when Lock and the Operations Director ST Chong frequently exchanged ideas even during vacations. For data quality checks, Kristen (DQ Team Leader) coordinated and Caroline (DQ Specialist) devoted extra time to ensure the reports were of tip top quality.

All these efforts have been remembered and rewarded. Not just from a cake and a card, but also from the understanding and cooperation of the whole team and the client.

There is still much work to be done before we are able to devote ourselves in providing services beyond the client’s expectations every single time, but this is a testament of our progress and we will take this as a motivation to continue to strive for excellence.