We’re not talking about donning an apron and brandishing a feather duster, although the first day of Spring is of course as good a time as any to tackle that teetering pile of dusty filing.

How about spring cleaning your entire business model?

Start with the obvious. Get filing and paperwork in order. Don’t forget electronic files too.

Does your office space work for you? Could it be time for a refit? Are you using the space as efficiently as you can? Make a floor plan and see where you could save space. Make sure your teams are placed to work together effectively.

Review your business as a whole. Take a step back and look critically at your business operations and practices. Try and stay as dispassionate as possible. If you can’t, ask for outside help. Document all processes.

Once you’ve taken a good look at how your business functions on a daily basis it should be easy to identify any problem areas. Look for areas of duplication of effort and bottlenecks. Streamline your processes accordingly.

Can you cut costs? Take a good look at internal and external costs to see where savings could be made. Now is a great time to renegotiate long term contracts if this isn’t being done regularly. Make sure you target any cost saving initiatives on areas where true savings can be made. Making small savings at the expense of customer satisfaction or staff morale might be a false economy, especially if it takes up a great deal of your valuable time. Look for the big wins.

Think about time management. Try keeping a log of your activity for a week to see what your biggest time drains are. You might be surprised.

When did you last review your approach to customer services? Do you have effective systems in place for communicating with your customers before any problems occur? Do you do this effectively across your email, telephone and social media channels? How do you maximise customer retention?

Consider outsourcing. Could your business from some assistance with telephone answering during peak times or outside office hours to avoid missed sales opportunities? How about some help with order taking or diary management when you’re not contactable because you’re out on the road or in meetings?

For help with any of the above why not call CSnotepad?

Our highly trained Virtual Receptionists will spring into action to represent your business professionally at a fraction of the cost of full time staff.

Letting the phone ring could mean just waving goodbye to your latest sale.

Whether you’re on the move, away on holiday or just plain busy, having to stop what you’re doing to answer the phone can sometimes seem like an annoyance. But it’s still very important. Even if your business has fully embraced ecommerce, you may find that your customers need to speak to somebody about a product or service before they buy.

There’s more to answering services these days than simply passing on messages – a good service will also provide diary management, and order taking. An answering machine service might be good enough for simply ensuring that no important communications or enquiries fall between the cracks, but investing in a full telephone answering service is the logical choice for businesses which need to provide effective customer services.

Answering services come in a range of shapes and sizes, and services available can include reception services, virtual address services for mail, order taking, diary management, call patching, voicemail services and virtual phone numbers, to suit the needs of busy individuals or large businesses. The services required ultimately depend on the business in question and its needs, and options can be tailored to suit all budgets.

To decide whether you should consider investing in telephone answering services, just estimate the amount of time that you are currently unavailable to your customers by landline or mobile phone. If you can think of a single situation where your customers or potential customers might require immediate answers when you are unavailable, then this alone is a good reason to invest in an answering service.

On the other hand, you might be concerned that your office staff are spending too much of their time on telephone answering and that their capacity for other work is suffering. Alternatively you could be looking for an out-of-hours phone answering service for your customers, which either deals with urgent messages or routes calls to an alternate phone number.

All businesses and professionals can benefit from answering services. A virtual receptionist from CSnotepad can screen your calls and messages, prioritise and forward them as instructed by you, organise your diary and even take orders – helping you to make more efficient use of your time.

In the current economic climate your customers have less money to spend. They want to buy the cheapest products and services. Unfortunately, for the majority of businesses, overall costs and overheads are increasing and so freezing or even cutting prices to compete is not an option. If your increased costs are not passed on to customers, your profits are reduced.

In addition, consumers are becoming more demanding, and so businesses that wish to remain competitive in 2012 will have to reduce costs while keeping service levels high.

Luckily, the majority of customers are still prepared to pay for good service. It’s proven that happy and satisfied customers have increased brand loyalty and are also less price sensitive. So rather than thinking about slashing prices, you should be aiming to differentiate from your competitors by providing better service.

One of the easiest ways to improve customer services is simply to be available when they need you.

From the very start of the sales process, potential clients will expect you to be reachable. If they phone you and get a recorded message, or even worse, no answer at all, they will probably go elsewhere. For the customer, every penny counts these days, and when they choose to spend it with your company they will want to believe that they are getting value for money from you. Even for long term ‘loyal’ customers, there is nothing like the pressure of a tightening budget and an unanswered phone to encourage them to check out the competition.

If you’re often away from your phone, or even if you just want your customers to hear a real human voice when you’re out of the office, call handling solutions from CSnotepad could be the answer.

Our highly trained Virtual Receptionists pride themselves on providing outstanding levels of service to our customers and your customers. We’ll even provide you with a dedicated Account Manager to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Leaving you free to do the same for your business.

A new year means a great opportunity for making new plans for your business. But this is also the perfect time of year to organise your workplace, meaning that you really can make a fresh start in 2012.

Here’s the CSnotepad guide to getting your workplace in order:

The key to getting your workspace organised for the year ahead is to break the job down into smaller tasks. It won’t take any longer but will seem a lot less overwhelming.

Start by clearing your desktop. There’s nothing more disheartening on a Monday morning than a teetering pile of paperwork. File any important papers and recycle or shred anything that doesn’t need to be kept. Allocate folders or box files for things like receipts that have be kept to hand, (you don’t have to organise them at this stage if you’re short of time, but you will always know exactly where they are). If you don’t have any files, just use large, clearly marked envelopes.

If you already have a filing system, now is the perfect time to go through and remove anything that really doesn’t need to be kept any longer. And remember, your filing system exists to help you to do your job. Don’t be afraid to amend it to suit your business and the space available to you.

Don’t forget to clean up your computer desktop too! Remove old programs and make sure that your virus protection is up to date. Remember to do the same with your mobile phone too. Make sure that the information on both devices is backed up safely.

Take that pile of dusty business cards and put the contact details into your phone or computer. Then recycle them!

Clear out your email inbox– delete them or deal with them – and put any that need to be kept into clearly labelled folders. If you work with others, ask them to use a similar system so that electronic mail can always be easily found. And while you’re at it, unsubscribe from all those unwanted mailing lists to reduce inbox clutter next year.

Start your 2012 diary, whether paper or electronic. Remember to transfer anything you need over from last year’s diary. Get recurring appointments set up in your calendars.

Don’t forget walls and notice boards! Take down anything that’s out of date and no longer relevant.

If storage is a problem now’s the time to think about sorting out drawers and cupboards. You might find that a quick clear up frees up a lot of space and means that you don’t have to splash out on new office furniture to stay organised.

Finally, take a long hard look at old office equipment. If you’re not using it, recycle or donate it to charity.

But if after all this you still don’t have enough room, why not consider virtual office or call handling services from CSnotepad. All the benefits of an office and fully trained staff, without taking up any of the space.

Happy New Year!