Budgeting and customer satisfaction don’t always seem to have a lot to do with one another. For businesses, budgeting is generally an inward-looking exercise, concerned with things like employee compensation, profits and losses, and operational expenses.

Customer service, on the other hand, is of course an outward-looking exercise. Customer service departments work with customers, vendors, and/or suppliers almost more than they do with their own colleagues.

And yet your budgeting and forecasting process can have a direct impact on your customer’s overall satisfaction. Here are a few ways your business can budget for improved customer satisfaction.

Shift your focus: stop seeing the budget as a simple financial planning exercise, and start seeing it as a chance to better understand your business drivers.

For many businesses, the budget is seen as an obligatory financial planning exercise and little more. While financial planning is extremely important for any organization, a good budget can offer you a lot more than just numbers on a page.

For example, maybe you have a good idea of how much your sales will bring in each month. However, what if you need to hire new employees this year? How will that affect your sales profit? And how might that grow your sales numbers?

Or let’s say shipping costs go up. What will that do to the rest of your numbers?

When you view the budget as a document that can give you a better picture of how your business works, what your business drivers are, and how those drivers will affect your overall success, you gain a clearer picture of what factors will affect your customer satisfaction.

Using a budgeting and forecasting solution like True Sky can give you this context. True Sky allows your team to include attachments and comments in their entries, so you can view the reasoning behind the numbers.

Shorten the amount of time it takes to compile, review, and approve departmental budgets.

Every department has to submit a budget, including customer service. In the typical annual budget process, departments may begin putting together their budgets about 90 to 120 days out from when the budget is finalized and completed.

Then the entries have to be reviewed, merged, reviewed again, etc. before finally coming to a completed and approved budget. By this time, the data that your departments have input could very well be outdated.

True Sky can help you greatly shorten and simplify the annual budgeting process, which can have a real impact on your customer service department. What if they’re requesting an update of their CRM? Or what if they need to hire new customer service representatives to handle a greater volume of customer interactions?

Any delay in getting these expenses approved means that your customer service department is operating at less than its optimal potential. And that means that your customers aren’t getting the best possible service.

Offer templates tailored to your departments and/or users.

Often, financial departments will provide just one generic budget template without taking into account the different needs of various departments. This can have several negative consequences:

• Departmental personnel modify the template themselves, which can make merging the spreadsheets a complicated.
• Departments take longer to fill them out than they would normally, adding time to the data input stage.
• Inaccuracies are increased because the template doesn’t work well for the department’s needs.

All of these things can mean that staff are tied up in the budgeting process for a longer time, which can have a poor impact on your customer satisfaction.

True Sky offers the ability to easily create your own custom templates and reuse them again and again – or modify them, if you need to. This way, users in your various departments are able to use templates that are both easy to understand and truly useful for them. That will help both shorten the departmental budgeting process and increase users’ ability to gain actionable insight from the budgets they put together.

Want to learn more about how using budgeting best practices can impact your business overall? Read our e-book, Best Practices for Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting.