Financial Tips that will help you establish yourself and ensure that you will achieve your Goals
First of all, congratulations! You graduated from high school and you are ready to begin a new chapter in your life. Whether you have decided to attend college and work part-time, or work full-time for a year after high school, these financial tips will help you to establish yourself and ensure that you will achieve your goals.
1. Develop a positive relationship with money. That may sound really strange, but you need to realize that money itself is simply neutral. It’s how you handle it that determines whether money is going to serve you or you are going to serve it. The way to develop this positive relationship is to make sure that you are always in control of your money. The key to staying in control is to never spend more than you earn and to get into the habit of saving wisely.
2. Think before you spend. You are now on your own. No one is looking over your shoulder and asking you how you are spending your money. It is up to you to be responsible with your money and only buy the things you really need. Sure, you can treat yourself once in a while, but remember, only spend money you actually have, and never buy things on credit that you can’t afford to pay back.
3. Start saving regularly and automatically. The best way to save is to think about what you want to save for. You will never be motivated to save until you have a definite purpose for saving. Once you have a goal in mind, the next step is to set up a savings account or a Tax Free Savings Account and set up pre-authorized payments into the account. This way you don’t even have to think about saving, it will literally happen automatically.
4. Apply for a credit card to build your credit. In Canada, it is very important that you build your credit. If you don’t have any credit history it is very difficult to be approved for a loan or mortgage down the road. The best way to build a good credit history is to get a credit card with a low limit. Use it once or twice a month for a small purchase, and then pay off the full balance every month. This way it won’t cost you anything in interest but you are showing the Credit Bureau that you can handle credit responsibly. Note: Just simply getting a credit card and not using it will not help you build credit. Note #2: Carrying a balance very close to your limit is not a good idea either.
5. Ask people you trust for advice. Not everyone has a good financial role model. Sometimes parents can teach you bad habits rather than good ones. Seek advice from someone you trust who you know is financially responsible. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes instead of having to learn from your own, so don’t be afraid to ask for guidance.
If you can follow these tips, you will be well on your way to becoming a financially responsible adult, and you will be far more likely to achieve your goals, whatever they may be. Good luck!
Delivering Value and Individualized Customer Service
By: Ray Whitehouse, Co-Owner & Agent at Johnson-Pohlmann Insurance
When it comes to delivering the best customer service and value for your customers, you always want to put your best foot forward. Every interaction you have with a customer gives them an impression of your company. Are your customers happy with their decision to give you their business? Are they having some regrets? Check in from time to time to see how clients are doing and gauge how satisfied they are with your agency.
At Johnson Pohlmann, we try to ensure that our customer service representatives know as much information as possible about the customers that are calling to ask about their policy. Many of our local Kentucky residents will call in with questions about their policy. We believe that our CSRs should be able to answer any questions our clients may have regarding their Kentucky auto insurance, home owners, boat, life or any other policy that a customer may have.
If you are not already, you should be using these tactics to improve the service you are offering your customers.
Take the Temperature of Your Customers:
Say Ahh! When you have established a relationship with your customers ask them to fill out a customer survey to give you direct feedback on how they perceive their individual level of customer service. Take the information and find out where you can improve. As an independent insurance agency, your customers do business with you because you can offer them a better customer service experience than large carriers. Make sure you are delivering what your customers are looking for on your end. A short survey with numerical values rating your performance is a simple way to get some informative feedback.
Use Metrics to Drive Your Service:
You are spending time gathering information from your customers so why not use it to improve your overall customer service strategies? Collecting data is an aimless task if you do not ultimately apply it to improving your business. Keep statistical data on everything from the average time spent with a customer on the phone, common questions and concerns, and the overall customer satisfaction numbers. How many customers gave you high service ratings?
Try Harder to Understand Your Customers:
Many times it can be easy to forget where a customer is coming from when they call you to ask a question regarding their policy. Typically when someone calls customer service they are looking for a brief to the point answer to their question. The last thing they want to do is sit on hold for 10 minutes to get a simple answer to their question. Ask yourself, how can you streamline this process? Do you notice any bottlenecks in the process? If several customers contact your CSRs with very similar questions, maybe you should add something to your Facebook page, or website answering the question on a Frequently Asked Questions page.
A few factors to consider in choosing Business Analytics System
Data increasingly plays a pivotal role in any business’s day to day activities, and it takes effective business intelligence solutions to be able to manage it. Not only does the data need to be accurate, but it needs to be conveyed and shown in a way that is understandable, that lets you see the relationship between data sets and the story they tell. Choosing a business analytics system is no easy task, as there are many factors to consider.
What is Business Analytics Software?
Business intelligence solutions allow companies to perform reporting and in depth analysis of detailed information across every reach of their organization. They access data from various applications, systems and data bases, format it and present it to end users in an understandable format. Often, they use color graphs and charts to show the relationships between various factors. They allow managers more effective decision making by providing core data that clearly explains the relationship or a problem and what solutions might be available.
Why Does Your Company Need Business Intelligence Solutions?
The challenge to manage enterprise data can be especially challenging for organizations simply because there has literally never been so much data at prior point in human history. Critical business data is scattered across a range of platforms that are just far too complicated to keep up on with the naked eye. Keeping up on every factor would require an extensive IT staff which most businesses simply can’t afford to do. Business analytics provides a much more cost effective system. Data is automatically entered and deciphered in the system. You get an instant report based on solid data, and can instantly see that data’s relationship in everything you do.
Features
There are several features offered in today’s business intelligence solutions, and if your business analytics does not include them, you’re getting short changed. One important aspect of today’s software is ad hoc reporting. This minimizes the burden on IT resources by ensuring that front line workers have immediate access to all the data they need to know in order to do their jobs. The best business analytics allow functional end users to build and run their own reports while shielding from the complexities of underlying data. This way, they have what they need to do their job without being overburdened by confusing data. This also helps add to the security of your data.
Flexible output formats are also key in any business intelligence solutions. Make sure your business analytics enables users to report data in a variety of formats, including spreadsheets, HTML, word processing documents and other mediums. The reporting of data takes many forms. Make sure you have a system that can handle them all.
Five Ways in which you can Benefit from the Services of a Financial Planner
There are at least five ways in which you can benefit from the services of a financial planner. As the name suggests, the financial planner is a professional who helps people identify/formulate their financial goals, and then make plans towards the attainment of those goals. Consequently, the five ways in which you can benefit from the services of a financial planner include where:
1. The planner helps you in making an accurate assessment of your current financial position: the truth of the matter is that many of us have no idea where we actually are, in our financial lives. We don’t have a clear picture with respect to what we own, in terms of assets, and what we owe in terms of liabilities. You will be surprised to learn that there are many people who don’t even have a clear picture on what they earn (from their various channels). The end result of all that is the situation where a person’s financial life runs on ‘autopilot.’ And that tends to lead to a situation where a person earns money, and somehow it ‘disappears,’ and somehow he or she doesn’t have an idea on where exactly the money went to. The financial planner helps you bring the whole situation under control, by helping you make an accurate assessment of your current financial situation. At this point, the planner may also help you identify the opportunities before you, as well as the threats staring at you, with respect to your financial life.
2. The financial planner helps you in financial goal formulation: having helped you make an accurate assessment of ‘where you are’ with respect to your financial life, they also help you work out where you want to go, again with respect to your financial life. That they do through the process of financial goal formulation. The planner won’t, of course, create the goals for you. You have to own the goals. What they do is help you in the process of goal formulation.
3. The financial planner helps you in the creation of financial plans: the formulation of financial goals is akin to the definition of ‘where you want to go’ financially. Just knowing where you want to go is typically not enough to get you there. You also need to know how exactly you are going to get there. This is through the creation of plan(s) toward the attainment of your financial goals. This is also where the bulk of the planner’s work comes from, hence the name of the profession.
4. The financial planner helps you by building ‘accountability’ into your financial life: whilst many of us may already have clearly defined financial goals and plans for their attainment, what keeps us from actually attaining them is our lack of accountability. In these types of matters, it helps to have someone (especially a non judgmental professional) you can be accountable to, and that is a way in which the financial planner can help you.
5. The planner helps you in the elimination of finance-related stress: the reason as to why people experience finance-related stress tends to be where they feel that their financial lives are ‘out of control.’ The financial planner, by helping you identify your current financial situation, create financial goals and come up with plans for their attainment can ultimately help you stop feeling as if your financial life is out of control. That way, they would also have helped you in the elimination of finance-related stress.
An Order Fulfillment Center Helps You Capitalize On Every Sale!
Do you know one of the biggest reasons why companies don’t meet their sales quotas? They have problems with order fulfillment. If you’re not in the loop, order fulfillment is simply the part where the product is actually prepared for shipment to the customer. However, for every business there is a different fulfillment process. A company that needs orders filled on the fly might need to have CDs automatically burned with data and then packaged in bubble mailers for shipment. Other companies might have a different setup. Either way, order fulfillment is a pretty big issue.
Just because this is something other companies stumble over doesn’t mean that you have to suffer the same fate through your company. You just need to make sure that you get the right tools and resources on your side. Not sure what to get first? Well, contracting the services of an order fulfillment center is definitely a step in the right direction.
You see, instead of having your best people worrying about order fulfillment, you are essentially contracting that task to a company that does nothing else except handle this facet of the sales process for its customers. This can let your best people focus their strengths elsewhere, which could drive sales even higher. Some small to medium businesses have some of their top talent handling both sales and fulfillment, which might not be the most effective way to use that talent. It’s a lot easier for a top salesperson to focus on sales than it would be for them to try to divide time between sales and order fulfillment.
An order fulfillment center can not only prepare your product for shipment, but make sure that your brand is in place as well. So, if you’re really looking for ways to maximize every sale, you will definitely want to think about turning over this key part of your business to a trusted outsourcer!
