Your EnterQuest Bulletin - 08 March 2006

In this week's issue:

• Why you need to become your own customer
• Using your local library for market research
• €uros and your business
• The new breed of mobile handsets
• The British Franchise Association website reviewed

Small business answers

If you have any questions about your business idea or target market, or need help tracking down a grant, subsidy or business support in your local area, then send an e-mail with your query to the EnterQuest information team and we'll do our best to help.

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To access over 800 factsheets, guides and small business reports, go to www.scavenger.net.

Weekly stir

Why you need to become your own customer

Whenever you walk down a high street crammed with shops, restaurants, boutiques and other specialist stores, have you ever noticed that there is usually a certain business, a particular restaurant or a particular store that is nearly always full or has a queue of people waiting to get in?

Why is it that in certain restaurants it's impossible to book a table unless you do so days or weeks in advance, and certain shops and stores are so popular that they can't keep up with demand from their customers?

What is it that makes these small businesses so popular and special, while others around them always appear empty or never seem to have the same buzz associated with customers clamouring to buy their products and services?

The thing that sets these businesses apart is almost certainly down to one factor: they offer a standard of service that is totally customer-focused.

In other words, they offer a service that is efficient, convenient and completely satisfying, or they offer an enjoyable experience. A business encounter so pleasurable that their customers will go there over and over again, and will urge all their friends and acquaintances to do the same.

The big mistake made by small business owners who do not satisfy their customers to this level is that they fail to look at their enterprises in the same way that their customers do.

It never occurs to them that they should regularly put themselves in their customers' shoes and look for ways to improve their service - and hence improve their sales.

If you genuinely want to maximise your customer sales potential, you regularly need to look at your business as if you were a customer.

How should you do this?

As a small business owner, there are a few simple ways that you can experience what it's like to be a customer of your own. For example:

• You could talk to your staff about your products and services.
• You could send away for your own information.
• You could buy your own product from your online store.
• You could visit and download pages from your own website.
• You could walk into your own shop or restaurant as if you were a visitor, and try to see things as they would see them.

By doing this, you will spot ways that your standards of service could be improved.

If you operate in a highly competitive business sector (well, who doesn't?), the more you can improve your service and make it a pleasant experience for customers to do business with you, the more they will take out their wallets in your premises or store.

Here are a few quickfire questions and pointers to consider that will help any small business improve the standard of its service.

• Are all your staff knowledgeable and helpful to your customers?
• Do your staff understand how to listen to your customers' needs?
• Do your staff understand what they are selling?
• Do your staff and your business appear to be an authority on what they are selling?
• Is your reception area tidy and well-organised?
• Do your customers ever have to wait an unreasonable amount of time to be served or to have their enquiry dealt with?
• Do the employees who answer the phone do so in a professional, friendly and consistent manner?
• Are your premises, or the parts of your premises that customers visit, impeccably clean at all times?
• Do you, your business and all your staff operate a 'service culture' that will go that extra mile to help, please and astound your customers?

Give this a try by putting yourself in your customers' shoes for a day. You'll almost certainly be surprised by what you see.

Read more tips for building customer loyalty in our helpful factsheet, and check out this comprehensive guide to dealing with customer complaints effectively and professionally.

Marketing tip

Using your local library for market research

Knowing how to find and access the range of business information available from your local library can be really useful for business owners for the following reasons:

• Libraries have copies of market reports and trade publications that are expensive to buy or subscribe to.
• Librarians are experienced at finding business information and will know exactly what sources are relevant for your sector, saving you hours of trawling time.
• Libraries usually offer Internet access, so you can do your own research online with the benefit of guidance from library staff.

The type of information resources you might find in your local library include:

• The Directory of British Associations, which you can use to find the relevant trade associations for your chosen business sector.
• Company reports and profiles, which enable you to research information about your competitors and other businesses operating in your market, in terms of turnover, number of employees and other key details.
• Government statistics, which can be useful when building up a profile of your target customers in terms of age, income, education, gender and ethnicity.
• Trade journals, which provide topical news and articles about your business sector, as well as enabling you to research competitors and locate useful contacts.
• Worldwide trade information, which is useful if you plan to export goods or services overseas, and can give you a broader picture of how your sector is faring internationally.

It's worth visiting the website of the British Library in London - it has a comprehensive, searchable online directory of its business information collection, and you can often borrow items from this through your local library.

Legal tip

€uros and your business

Many UK businesses believe that they must trade only in pounds sterling. This can lead to confusion when dealing with overseas customers and suppliers.

In fact, the rules surrounding trading in foreign currency are covered in the Price Marking Order 2004, and turn out to be quite flexible:

• Prices offered to business customers may be given in any currency you choose, and you're entitled to price your goods or services exclusively in euros if you are trading with European businesses.
• Retail prices offered to consumers must be given in pounds sterling, although a euro equivalent (or any other currency) may be listed, too. This is a useful option if you often deal with overseas visitors and tourists, or sell goods by mail order or over the Internet.
• If listing prices in a foreign currency seems too complicated, you could include a link to a currency converter to enable your customers to convert your prices into local currency themselves.

However, you should beware if you tend to take in small cash amounts in another currency. Banks are only obliged to accept notes for changing into sterling, so you risk ending up with large amounts of coins.

Handling foreign currency can be confusing, because euro notes have differing national designs. This Government guide to identifying euro banknotes and coins should help to clarify things.

IT tip

The new breed of mobile handsets

When mobile phones first came onto the market, the only real choice a business had to make was between the array of tariffs. But now that mobile phones are 'feature-rich mobile devices', the choice of handset has become much more important.

Fortunately, the handset manufacturers and network providers, such as Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2 and Orange, are now designing products specifically for the business user. We won't recommend individual offers, but here are some of the features of the new generation of devices and services a small business owner might want to look out for:

• Call handling will allow you to put callers on hold and take messages – particularly useful when your livelihood depends on never missing an incoming call.
• Conference calling is useful when your partners, suppliers and customers are based in different parts of the country.
• Handsets offering e-mail access are now ubiquitous and are essential for the highly mobile businessperson. Web access, or at least WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), may also be useful.
• Some business accounts offer useful shared services accessible by all users, such as a central contacts book, unlimited calls between phones within your business, and the possibility of integration with your existing switchboard.

New business idea

Each week we provide you with summaries of some popular or emerging business ideas in the UK.

Here is this week's idea:

• Organic Cosmetics Retailer

Just one word

Regularly improving your vocabulary is not just about learning a new word and its meaning. It will improve your general knowledge and make you feel and act smarter in all sorts of personal and business situations.

Do you know what 'circumspect' means?

a) limited or restricted
b) difficult or arduous
c) indirect or convoluted
d) cautious or wary

Website review

The British Franchise Association (BFA - www.thebfa.org)

This site claims to provide all the information you will need to help you make a decision about franchising. It's very vocal about not containing any advertising, and all the franchise opportunities listed have been vetted by the BFA's code of practice. But how user-friendly and accessible is the site?

• Navigation and presentation - with rolling text and a lot of confusing colours, the homepage is a bit overwhelming at first glance. There are section headings that look as though they should be clickable but aren't, and you have to scroll down quite a distance before arriving at news and other practical information boxes.

• Accessibility - there's a distinct lack of accessibility options here, with no opportunities to adjust text size, retrieve information in foreign languages or use access keys listed in the sitemap or on the homepage. A search on 'accessibility' in the site's free-text search box came up empty. Disappointing.

• Content and usefulness - this is where things get better, with a number of useful tools for anyone researching a franchise or thinking about franchising their business. There's practical how-to guidance on choosing a franchise, a directory of options and links, and plenty of detail about the relevant standards and legislation.

• Relevance - Newsline, the organisation's supposedly 'regular' newsletter, was still showing the edition from November 2005 at the time of publication. And the 'What the papers say' section oddly only covers mentions of franchising in the Express group newspapers. However, the events calendar is useful and up to date.

The surprisingly poor score for this well-known organisation's site is down to a complete lack of accessibility options, poor navigation and design, and a failure to keep its news sections fresh and topical. A shame, considering the useful tools and information resources provided.

Did you know?

Red tape costs £50 billion

Red tape has cost the UK over £50 billion since the current Government came to power, says the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC). Its annual survey of the costs to business of rules and regulations - known as the Burdens Barometer - points the finger at 69 major laws introduced since 1998, including the Working Time Regulations 1999, the Money Laundering Regulations 2003, and the Employment Relations Bill, implemented in January 2000.

DDA isn't too costly to comply with, says Government

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has published a guidance booklet for businesses to explain that compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995 may mean only simple adjustments to premises and services. The booklet is part of the DWP's 'Adjusting for Better Business' campaign, which aims to focus on simple, low-cost adjustments in an effort to make compliance with this law less worrisome for small firms.

Viruses cause over half of security breaches for firms

Worth a visit

Check your customers' payment records

Three business organisations have come together to offer small firms a free online tool that provides information about the payment records of large customers. Public limited companies are obliged to provide information about the length of time they take to pay after receipt of an invoice, and the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), the Credit Management Research Centre and the Better Payment Practice Group (BPPG) have created the PaymentScorer database to help small firms and put the spotlight on late payers.

VAT tips for e-commerce firms

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has published a series of tips to help small businesses that trade online ensure that they are complying with VAT requirements. The tips focus on finding a relevant VAT scheme, the rules for trading on auction sites, and how to calculate the VAT due on website income.

Free workplace health advice

Worth a read

Billing itself as the most comprehensive guide to consumer behaviour, attitudes and habits, this book explores European consumer values, popular culture, lifestyles and consumption trends. It also explains how to relate this information to your market research and customer profiling. A section on marketing opportunities and pitfalls illustrate examples of where consumer behaviour issues have been applied to business marketing strategies, and the book also contains information about e-marketing and e-business. Check out:

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Good luck

The EnterQuest Team

This information is meant as a starting point only. Whilst all reasonable efforts have been made, the publisher makes no warranties that the information is accurate and up-to-date and will not be responsible for any errors or omissions in the information nor any consequences of any errors or omissions. Professional advice should be sought where appropriate.