Interiors Blog 2013 - Karine Kong

KARINE KONG, RETAILER Last December, I highlighted that while the lack of financial and human resources may not be easy for small businesses to achieve great customer service, it's not impossible and I hope that by implementing the few changes I mentioned, you've already seen a bit of a difference in your day-to-day work if not, now is the time to action things. For the past 15 years, I have been using January as the key month to reflect on life, goals I set to myself and those I want to achieve.

Small or big, I've always felt that writing my goals down make them more real and train the brain to be ready when the right opportunity comes, so you jump on it rather than freak out.

In my twenties, I read a lot of books on personal development. My favourite ones are by far:

-  The 7 Habits of Highly effective People by Stephen Covey,

- Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki which made me understood, why, although very tempting, I should still wait before treating myself with liabilities like a vintage MG to cruise the streets of London or a Mehari for our holiday home in France

- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, which is more a fiction book but taught me a lot about vision and integrity.

- A last one that I have purchased but not read yet and which was highly recommended by Nathalie Massenet, Founder of Net-A-Porter, is Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain

On my list of past goals - now achieved - was leaving France to move to London, having a bilingual child, giving up smoking, being in a happy relationship, be successful at work and being featured in Living Etc or Elle Decoration. So far, everything on the personal side has been achieved and having a full page dedicated to My Interiors Life in Living Etc (January issue) was well beyond my expectations but prove my point...there isn't such a thing as a small dream.

So if you have not done your list yet, take an afternoon off this month to list all your goals from small ones, easy to achieve to BIG, OUT OF THIS WORLD ones.

Since I have launched BODIE and FOU, I have applied the same method to the business and use January & February to reflect on the past year and on what we have achieved as a business.

For instance, we successfully launched our first mail order catalogue and have a small Summer brochure on the way (which you can request here). We reached 4000 fans on Facebook last week while our goal was 3000 by end of year 2011, increased our turnover, profit margin, average order value and customer base and we still achieved 95% positive feedback on our customer service and product range.

Once you have drawn conclusions on your past year of trading, list the goals you want to achieve for your business.

If your busiest trading time is Christmas like us, my advice is to focus on making changes and improving your ways of working during the first 6 months so that you can focus on making the Christmas campaign a successful one from June onwards.

On my list of things to achieve this year is improving our systems to work smarter rather than harder, sorting out our IT system and stock system, improving the navigation of our website (which is something you should constantly improve) and be focused on what we know works for us to get better at it.

Karine

PS: You can join me on Facebook, Twitter and read about my creative projects and things that inspire me on the BODIE and FOU Blog. Until next time!

KARINE KONG, RETAILER

Hello again!

By the time you will read this, I will be in New Zealand, spending time with my family, learning how to surf and making a baby...well at least trying for one! If I'm lucky, I’ll look like a whale again in 2012.

In my last post, I mentioned that we went through a very tough time (bailiffs knocked on our door in 2008) but, despite our troubles, we always made sure that we provided the best customer service we could.

While a lack of financial and human resources doesn't make it easy for small businesses to achieve top notch customer service, it's not impossible. For me, providing an amazing, friendly service to our customers was – and still is – very high on the top of my priorities list. When you get the kind of generous, heartfelt feedback we get on a daily basis it makes it all worthwhile.

Christmas is a time when everybody should be embracing a cheery festive spirit, but, in terms of customer service, this is the most challenging month. It's the end of the year. Most people are tired, moody and impatient. Customers won't care that you've been working long hours, seven days a week for two months because you can't afford more overheads. They don’t know that you haven't spent any quality time with your kids and you forgot your husband's birthday because all you can think about is how many customers you need to contact about the status of their orders. 

All customers want is their orders, quickly and in time for Christmas.

So, when the Christmas madness is over, start to think ahead for Christmas 2012. Use the first 10 months to make changes and provide a better customer service while achieving a better balance in your personal life, too.

Here are my top tips:

Manage your customers' expectations:

- Put as much useful information on your product pages to help shoppers make a decision that is right for them.

- Display deliveries and returns information clearly on your website.

- Set up automated emails so that customers know when their order is being approved, when it’s in preparation and when it’s been dispatched.

- Set up an auto-responder on your customer service email with useful information so customers know within a few minutes when they can expect to hear back from you or what procedure to follow if their order arrived damaged or if they want to return something.

- Put the customer’s mind at rest.

- Help them.

- Be true to your word: If you say that you are going to call a customer back later on in the day, do it or don't commit in the first place.

- Use the services of an independent merchant review company such as Feefo to gather feedback from genuine customers to build brand awareness, increase sales and improve Search Engine Optimisation.

Improve things constantly:

- Take customer comments on board and fine tune your services and information. Perhaps some extra detail needs to be added onto a product page or maybe you need to introduce an option for customers to receive an email when the item they want is back in stock?

- Customers feedback is the most insightful. They are the ones using your website so your site has to work for them.

- If a product fails to meet several customers’ expectations, consider removing it from your range.

- Communicate regularly with your suppliers, secure delivery times (especially around Christmas). Make them accountable too. Work together.

- Make sure you work with suppliers who care about customer service as much as you do. If a customer receives a faulty product, sending a replacement to them should be straight-forward. If a supplier makes life more difficult when it comes to breakage on stock delivered or faulty products, have a conversation with them. If nothing changes, stop working with them. There are plenty of good suppliers out there and you won’t have time to deal with suppliers who just make your life more complicated.

- Get everything into place by the Summer. Once the Christmas rush starts, you won’t have time to get anything done.

How to diffuse an angry email:

- Apologise. Don't take it personally.

- Apologise. Put their mind at rest.

- Apologise. Reply with positive words.

- A customer who takes the time to write an angry email is a frustrated, disappointed customer. Understand this, show empathy and try to come up with a solution that would make things better for them.

- If you get worked up by the content of an email and take things very personally (and you should to a point because it is your business), leave it for a day and respond to the email when you have cooled down. If you have set-up an auto-responder, the customer will already know that they will be hearing from you within 48 hours.

I'm French (not Parisian or arrogant - all French aren't from Paris and all French aren't the same!) and passionate so, while I encourage you not to take things personally, I do take things personally to an extent when we receive an angry email because it's my business. It's my reputation on the line, and I care about it.

To be perfectly honest, once or twice in the past, I have shown signs of impatience to customers who, whatever we tried to do to help them, just kept complaining. That didn't go down well - hence my advice to respond to an email when you've cooled down or pass on the difficult customer to someone in your team who will handle them better.

No matter how hard you work to achieve the best customer service, you will always get some people who complain about everything. That's just life. All you can do is apologise for not meeting a customer's expectations – even if their expectations were unrealistic – and focus on pleasing the ones who appreciate your work and effort.

Have a fantastic Christmas with your family and friends.

Karine

PS: You can join me on Facebook, Twitter and read about my creative projects and things that inspire me on the BODIE and FOU Blog. Until next time!

KARINE KONG, RETAILER

Hello! I'm your retail blogger, Karine Kong. I’m co-founder and Creative Director of BODIE and FOU, a lifestyle concept store, which my sister Elodie and I launched back in 2005. Over the next few months, I will share with you some of my insights as a business owner. My posts will cover topics such as how to build up awareness of your brand, how to use social media to connect with your customer base, how to achieve excellent customer service, and how to get featured regularly in the UK and international press.

However, before you get all excited, I would like to highlight that a lot of my advice isn’t made up of 'magic solutions'. Sorry! Most of my tips are based on common sense, expertise, hard work, drive, cashflow, passion and multi-tasking.

I started multi-tasking very early....

We launched our business two weeks before I gave birth. I spent these last two weeks before our website went live, waiting for my daughter Mila to arrive, sending press releases, getting everything sorted with our fulfilment house, our suppliers, finalising the site with our web designer in Portugal and doing some DIY in our house....and then my waters broke while I was on top of a ladder painting the kitchen!

Over the past six years, a lot of days have been filled with multi-tasking and the ability to wear a lot of different caps has been essential. I’ve been IT expert, accountant, Managing Director, Art Director, Product Buyer, Human Resources – when you run a small retail company, you have to be everything!

Without wanting to sound sexist, I think that multi-tasking is something most women do very well. So, if you're a woman and you are about to start a retail business or have just started one, relax... you have got this on your side!

I mentioned cash flow above because it is VERY important and if you take only one thing from this post, please let it be this one. Cash flow is crucial because no matter how successful your company is becoming, or how many sales you're making, if you run out of cash in the bank, you will not be able to pay your staff, get new stock or pay for marketing to grow your company. 

In 2008, we learnt a very hard lesson.

From 2005 to 2008, we were using a secure payment system (Worldpay) which was transferring cash from our online sales onto our bank account four weeks later. It was not ideal, but cash was coming through eventually and we were coping. Unfortunately, the economic downturn hit the country that Summer 2008 and suddenly every news story was about people losing their jobs, not having any money, the economic crisis – doom and gloom.

Everybody was worrying about the future and our online shop was fast becoming a no man's land. Having such a secure payment system at the time and cash flow issues put a huge amount of pressure on the business and eventually we had to let go of staff, say hello to the bailiffs sent by our landlord, negotiate payment terms with our landlord and move the business quickly from Bristol back to London. 

I have never been so scared in my life.

The amount of pressure and the responsibilities I felt towards our staff, suppliers, and customers was unbearable and there was not a day I didn't feel physically sick.

To make matters worse, at the time, my husband Steve had moved back to London to his new job and I was in Bristol alone during the week with a three-year old child but when you are a small business, you can change things quickly and we did.

We re-located the business to London, found a more affordable warehouse than in Bristol (and I have to admit, I didn't think that was possible) and then spent the following months re-building the business to make it secure again.

While we were struggling, we ensured that the BODIE and FOU customer service was still the most amazing people could find and that our customers did not suffer from the situation we were in. I'm glad to say that Christmas 2008 was our best Christmas since the launch of our company and a real turn-around point for us.

So, the moral of this story is: Things get worse before they get better. A lot of entrepreneurs often don't realise how many challenges they will have to deal with when they start a business because you just don't know what you don't know and, frankly, the list is so long that if you knew it all, you would probably be put off from starting a business in the first place!

Needless to say, we are now managing our cash flow a lot better and this has allowed us to grow the business without a loan from the bank or private investors. I thank my husband, who is a Finance Director by trade, for always stopping me from getting a bank loan on the basis that if you don't know what you're doing at the start of the business, getting a loan from the bank will only make your mistakes more costly and you will make mistakes at the beginning. Everybody does, even those who run successful companies, but the difference is that if you have little money to work with, it will push you to be more creative, resourceful and careful.

So, be a squirrel. Be frugal. Learn to negotiate. Learn a lot of new things so you can do them yourself and save money to invest in marketing.

This quarter has been a really exciting one for us. We have just launched our first mail order catalogue – you can order it now or view the digital version on Issuu here.

We are also working with Pilkington Bedwell on the BODIE and FOU catalogue App version for iPad which will be launched at the end of this month. This is all very exciting, and I will cover this topic another time...

You can join me on Facebook, Twitter and read about my creative projects and things that inspire me on the BODIE and FOU Blog. Until next time!

Karine x

KARINE KONG, RETAILER Yesterday, I attended a conference and it  was interesting to notice that some retailers had not heard of Pinterest. Of course, as a professional blogger, a fan and active user of social media, I'm already pinning things like crazy!  I used Pinterest as a big, virtual moodboards to keep track of creative ideas for our next mail order catalogue (which has just been nominated for the ECMOD Awards), promote designs and new arrivals from BODIE and FOU, my work as a stylist, share photos of our home in London (useful to send to journalists), etc..

However, if you have not heard of Pinterest at all, here is a little intro....

What's Pinterest?

Pinterest is the latest new kid on the social network block. It is basically an online pinboard that you can use to collect together images and content and share it with customers, friends and likeminded people. So rather than saving an image onto your laptop and cluttering your memory with thousands of images, you can simply pin anything you see on other websites, blogs, etc and file the images onto your own boards.

So let's say you love this new Do What You Think is Right art print, you can either repin this image from our Pinterest board onto a board you have created (i.e. Things for the home) or directly from the product page on our site.

Why should you join Pinterest? 

Pinterest is already two years old, still small compared to Facebook and Twitter, but it is growing fast! The traffic on Pinterest has increased more than fourfold between September 2011 and December 2011, bringing in 7.51 million unique visitors in December alone (Source: Compete, Graphic below: Monetate) and in the UK alone, the total minutes spent on the site have increased by more than 3140%. It is becoming one of the top referrers and it is why as an online retailer, you should now be thinking about how to use it.

What are the benefits for your brand?

Pinterest offers a way to visually associate your brand with things that fit with your values in a way no other platform can do. Therefore it is perfect to develop closer relationships with consumers that share those values.

If you are an online retailer like us, it is a very visual and very simple platform to not only showcase your products, but also lifestyles, values and trends associated with your brand which is why I'm happy to share on various boards what goes on in my busy mind from inspiring interiors to creative, decorative projects, moodboards and overall what makes BODIE and FOU the lifestyle brand that it is.

However, like all social media platforms, the key thing is to find your voice and let your personality shine through. There is no point replicating what others do if it does not fit your brand image or collection so think carefully about what your shop and brand are about , what your customers love about your shop, what they would find useful to see and start pinning things that are relevant. As much as they love you, sharing family pics under your shop name won't be useful for your business. 

As a conclusion, I also invite you to read this article which will have you Pinteresting as a Pro.

Happy pinning!

Karine

PS: You can join me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and read about my creative projects and things that inspire me on the BODIE and FOU Blog. Until next time