How to Use Customer Service as a Competitive Advantage for Small Businesses?

Customer service is the provision of service being provided by the seller to customers before, during and after a purchase of any product. A customer is a person who buys products (goods or services) from a shop or a business organization. Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction — that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation. It is also the process of assisting another person or persons who buys goods and services from a shop. In order to make the organization effective and productive, all the employees need to develop a positive service attitude towards customers. The goal of quality customer service in any organization is to send a positive message with a good attitude to the customers to make them more loyal and happy thereby. Such a message must focus on addressing the needs Continue reading

Project Life Cycle

A project is a sequence of activities that has a definite start and finish, an identifiable goal and an integrated system of complex but interdependent relationships. Project Life Cycle consists of sequential phases through which projects undergo. Phases  of a  Project Life Cycle The phases are important in planning a project since they provide a framework for budgeting, manpower, resource allocation, scheduling project milestones, project reviews etc. All projects go through the following stages whether big or small. 1. Project Idea /Conception An idea regarding intervention in a specific area to address and identify a problem is developed or formed. Sources of ideas include Market demand where one may be facing increasing demand thus becoming a problem Technological changes- this forces an organization to change in order to make use of the new technology Natural calamities like fire, floods, landslides, drought etc. Resource availability- makes use of the available resources Continue reading

Project Organization Structure

Project organization structure is used to complete a project or task.   The project manager has people from several functional departments such as production, finance, marketing and so on.   Specialists are drawn to perform their respective roles in the total project.   The project organization structure is derived not from some principles but from the job requirements.  Project organization structure brings together people of different expertise for the completion of the project.   As soon as the project is completed, the experts are returned to their original departments in the head office.   For example, in a bridge construction project, the engineers, financial manager, human resources people and other related people are brought to the sit of the project where project organization, the structure and process, is developed.   The people are organized and allocated specialized jobs by the Project manager who will be the top person managing the Continue reading

Organizational Goals – Meaning and Definition

Organizational goals can be defined as broad statements of what the organization wants to achieve in the long run, or on a permanent basis. Goals are broad objectives. Goals are fairly timeless statements. Goals and objectives are properly defined. If they are vague or ill-defined, it may not be possible to measure the performance of the organization. The clarity of goals and objectives is quite often more evident to the initial employers and promoters of institutions. With expansion of activities and joining of new member, goals and objectives as perceived by participants tend to get diffused. Different key managers may have different perceptions about goals and objectives. It is because of this that organizations insist on proper induction of new entrants to the philosophy of the organization. External pressures, sometimes political in nature, may force an enterprise to alter its goals and objectives, particularly in the case of public institutions, Continue reading

Business Analysis – Role of Business Analyst in Modern Organizations

What is Business Analysis? Business Analysis can be defined as the regulation of classifying business needs and shaping results to the business problems. The solutions frequently consist of a system improvement factor, and may also include process development, directorial change or tactical scheduling and procedure development. Someone who brings out this job or task is known as a business analyst (BA). The Business Analyst who labor exclusively on increasing system software can be called Information Technology Business Analysts, Technical Business Analysts, Online Business or System Analysts. Business analysis can also be defined as the position of assignment and techniques which are used to operate as a connection among stakeholders so as to understand the constitution, rules, and operations of a society and to suggest solutions that make possible the society to accomplish its aims. Business Analysts make active business functions a reality by increasing the swiftness at which business functions Continue reading

Case Study: Google’s Competitive Advantage

The rise of Google, now a $6.1 billion company, has been fast and fierce. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met in 1995 as Stanford University graduate students. They created a search engine that combined the technologies of Page’s PageRank system, which evaluates a page’s importance based on the external links to it, and Brin’s Web crawler, which visits Web sites and records a summary of their content. Because Google was so effective, it quickly became the search engine of choice for Web users. Today, Google handles nearly 50 percent of Web searches. Google stopped displaying the number of Web pages it indexed after the number surpassed 8 billion in 2005, but some estimates now place the number at 25 billion. Google’s index also includes one billion images and one billion Usenet newsgroup messages. In addition to searching for Web pages, Google users can search for PDF, PostScript, text, Microsoft Continue reading