I talk a lot about how to market your small business so that it grows, but what happens if that actually works? Expanding small businesses can experience growing pains, from scaling up production to managing a larger workforce. And on the marketing side, you may find yourself with a rapidly-expanding budget and a new set of directives. While it's great to have these kinds of problems, it's also important to remember that you have to retain existing customers and continually make them happy. 

Customer support can be a tough, unrewarding role due to angry callers and stressful work expectations. A Wired article about efforts to improve customer service call center performance recently caught my eye, as it raised some interesting questions about how leaders can motivate employees who may be dealing with frustrated callers all day long.

According to the article, many companies are implementing gamification into contact center and customer management software. Gamification applies familiar elements from electronic games to everyday processes, so, for instance, employees might complete tasks to earn points that then turn into rewards or prizes. While this approach can generate an adrenaline rush and encourage employees to rack up points for good performance, it may be distracting from the original purpose. In fact, a recent Gartner report showed that, by 2014, 80 percent of gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives.

Some experts such as game designer Kathy Sierra have noted that gamification replaces an intrinsic reward (i.e. the satisfaction of helping a customer solve a problem) with an extrinsic one (earning points). The problem with gamification, in the case of customer service at least, is that you risk incentivizing an end result rather than the behavior that metric may have originally been intended to track. For this reason, Sierra recommended avoiding incentive tactics such as a performance leaderboard.

"It brings in that part of the brain that - subconsciously - says this is why I do this: for the leaderboard status," she told Wired.

Gamification can be more useful, she explained, for rote tasks that are not intrinsically rewarding, such as memorizing policies. However, for customer service, managers should instead focus on developing ways to make the process itself more engaging for employees.

Wired noted that some companies, such as Zappos, have improved their customer service by giving employees more discretion in the decision-making process. The publication also highlighted a Stanford study showing that employees in a Chinese call center were happier and more productive when they were allowed to work from home.

The bottom line is that business leaders need to focus on giving customer service employees tools to make their job easier, not on coming up with incentives designed to goad staff into hitting some metric of end results. Unified communications tools such as real-time presence, chat, click-to-call, and screen share give customer service representatives the tools they need to make decisions faster. Need to collaborate with someone in a different department, collaboration tools make that easy to do, and it helps to serve the customer faster. By improving the customer support process and the focusing on the motivations that underlie it, organizations will create the results they want organically.

Cultivating meaningful channels of communication with business partners and clients is key to building and maintaining a robust consumer base and building your company's value over time. Contact centers are at the focal point of this initiative and business phone systems are necessary to anchor operations. We also live in a time of heightened expectations - consumers drive markets, and the perspectives of customers and business users are increasingly merging. The consumerization trend is exciting - it gives forward-thinking organizations the opportunity to show clients and customers that they believe in forging strong relationships based on meaningful interactions. Social media offers more visibility for companies to interact directly with their customer base, and many organizations have forged extremely positive reputations by being consistently receptive to customer insight and zealously pursuing increased transparency.

Some small businesses are afraid of online marketing. Instead, they turn to tried and true methods: Newspapers, local magazines, fliers in mailboxes and maybe an occasional email. But, guess what? Most of our lives are now online. If your business isn't online, you probably aren't going to reach your customers (or you're much less likely to).

Business leaders are constantly in presentation mode, whether we are communicating with employees internally or with clients and investors externally. And with the expansion of tools such as videoconferencing and screen share, which offer new avenues for presenting information, there's always a need for leaders to re-evaluate their approach to delivering a presentation. I recently wrote about communicating simply; a good presentation requires clear communication, but it also involves a more thorough consideration of intent.

A recent Fast Company blog post offered some interesting tips taken from public speaking coach Achim Nowak's book, Infectious. Nowak explained that public speakers can draw on the techniques of actors, who are trained to approach each part of a scene with an objective for their characters. An objective should be an action verb, it should have a strong effect on the actor (or presenter) and it should describe the impact that the actor (or presenter) hopes to have on the audience.

"Action verbs matter because they unleash forward-moving velocity," Nowak wrote. "They propel us toward the other person. More important, however, is this: An objective needs to be 'a turn-on' in the brain … Good objectives stimulate my brain, strike my fancy, spark my imagination."

Presenters who clearly define a verb of intent, such as "to motivate," "to entertain" or "to provoke," will bring more clarity to their presentations, Nowak said. While a presentation can have different objectives during different sections, leaders should reduce each portion to one objective to avoid rambling and muddling their message.

In a blog post for the Harvard Business Review, presentation consultant Nancy Duarte outlined some considerations that are particularly useful for accomplishing one objective many presenters tend to share: to disarm opposition to an idea. If a leader has a clear intent to dismantle objections by anticipating audience reactions, his or her presentations are more likely to be effective, Duarte explained.

"If you've made a sincere effort to look at the world through their eyes, it will show when you speak," she wrote. "You'll feel more warmly toward them, so you'll take on a conversational tone. You'll sound - and be - authentic when you address their concerns. As a result, you'll disarm them, and they'll be more likely to accept your message."

Virtual presentations pose unique challenges. It can be difficult to recreate the feeling of live presence remotely. Technology has made this much better. Video conferencing allows viewers to see and hear the presenter as if they were physically present.  Screen sharing ensures that all participants are viewing the same part of a presentation at the same time, which is an improvement over the old approach of emailing a presentation to review over conference call. So while there is nothing quite like being there, these technologies make virtual presentations go much more smoothly.

Do you know whether your phone system is making it easy for customers to do business with you? Are they never getting a busy signal, experiencing multiple transfers, or leaving several messages before getting a response?

Many companies talk about "customer experience management." This is because businesses want to make sure that their customers have a positive and consistent experience, whether it's with a product, a service or a customer service rep. Marketing messaging should also be consistent across platforms, from the website all the way through to the contact center customer service experience.

One of the oldest adages in business is that the customer is always right. Although adhering to this dogma can be frustrating at times, making sure that your organization is primed to meet customer needs is paramount for ensuring future success.

The new Fonality.com is here.

As you may already know, May is National Small Business Month, established to celebrate new, established and yet-to-be-formed small businesses and the people who keep them going. And the good news is that U.S. small businesses show signs of bouncing back from this sluggish economy, as SMB optimism rose in April to a six-month high!