Something that gets mentioned in our daily dealings with other businesses in the SME sector, is the fact that the larger businesses seem to be trying different approaches to limit the impact of the current economic crisis.
The effect of which is that some businesses are seeing competition from the big fishes, where traditionally there was only small  fishes.

So, how do we compete with a company who has much more resources than us?
The answer is simple: We don’t have to! 

The thing to take into consideration is that as a small enterprise we have a direct control on the quality of the products and services we offer – that is exactly where we win out.
Basically there are too many people working there, who can’t or don’t care about the level of service that they are giving their customers.

As an example – I went to Debenhams recently, in my GFs attempt to buy a new top for an impending party.
Whilst there I perused the mensware department and found a shirt I liked – off to the counter we go…
Waits about 5 minutes at an unmanned till…
Waits another few minutes at this till…
After catching the eye of one of the three shop assistants – who were having a loud conversation on the shop floor – for the third time I marched over.
“is it possible one of you could please interrupt your most important conversation to serve please?” ← Me
“I’ll go and find someone” ← One of them
From nowhere a rather sheepish girl appears and apologised for my wait. I asked to see a supervisor and waited again…
Amazingly one of the three extremely busy shop assistants – now engaged in an equally important conversation – says in a loud voice “I think we’ve had more complaints than business this week!”
I made a very polite and diplomatic complaint about the ‘service’ – she said she’d inform the department head.

Now you see why I think we don’t have to compete?
They are not even on the same page!

 

 

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Google, in their infinite wisdom, have commissioned a survey which has found that the Internet accounts for 7.2% of the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP).

In monetary terms, that’s about £100Bn ~ or between £100,000,000,000 and £100,000,000,000,000 depending on whether you use a UK or US billion.
I believe the Yorkshire term for this is a ‘Boat load’

That makes the Internet bigger than the construction, transport and utilities industries.

Do you have an online presence?
If not you are missing out on potential clients left, right, centre, above and below!

Have a quick read of UK internet economy ‘worth billions’, and call us if you decide you are missing out!

08456 340 599

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In other news ~ a contact we know recently had to move his hosting after his previous supplier discontinued the service.

He went to an ‘Internet guru’ (this is the phrase used on the guys website!) who managed to completely screw up the emails – imagine a business, heavily marketing itself on the Internet not being able to email!

The hosting also is missing some vital components required for his website.

We stepped in and managed to get emails working within 2 hours of being asked to help.

We ARE good aren’t we?

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I have a question…
“Why do people PAY for bad service”?
More so, why do people CHOOSE bad service??

Let me give you an example and maybe the answer will just pop into your mind – personally I’m struggling with the concept!

Just the other day, we received a call from one of our longer term clients who had passed our details on to one of their clients.
This is usually a great way to gain business because we are already 2/3 of the way down the line when it comes to trusting us . A personal recommendation oils the wheels as it were…

So, this new potential client tells me of several MAJOR issues with their IT systems and that he’d like someone to come over and have a look as their current IT guy had told them that:

“[He] no longer wanted to look after their It system because it wasn’t worth his while” and ”That their systems weren’t up to scratch and that he decided that they were below his ‘requirements’”
The client continued saying that this guy was a one-man-band and prone to “blow hot and cold on a whim”

Interesting attitude for a ‘supplier’ you may think? Time to tell this IT idiot where to get off??

So we offer to go over, as requested, get a date in the diary and await the day…
The following day the new potential client calls us to cancel the appointment because he’s decided that their current IT guy will fix it after all.

Once I’d picked myself off the floor (a subtle combination of gravity and shock having dislodged me from my comfy seat) and thought about it for a while I was a little confused and not a little shocked that someone would even let this guy back on site, given his comments.

This is no way to run a business ~ especially one that relies on the IT systems within it (as this guys does).

I’m just waiting for the call that this guy is charging an extortionate amount for something trivial, can we come out immediately, and walking in to a huge bag of spanners…

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It’s sometimes the little problems clients have that make you take stock of just how good (or bad) you are at something.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been advising a client about his Internet site.
In this case he’s purchased a templated website from an “Internet Guru”

As soon as we heard this our panic stations alarms went mad ~ oh how surprised we were when things weren’t quite as advertised!

The guru basically said that copy sells. It does usually, but only when used in a structured way. NOT, as was stated, producing a page of text, inter spaced with one or two images.
The template used simply had one, extremely long, column of text, with a little ‘Buy now’ link at the bottom.

YUCK!

Suffice to say the other components of the site were not up to scratch either.

The product could easily have been downloaded for free ~ simply by cancelling the order at the payment page (which coincidentally had a title relating to prostrate cancer ~ nothing to do with the product AT ALL!!), you were redirected to the thank you page with a link to download the product! A MAJOR programming error.
This being the worst of the problems relating to the site.

We are in process of correcting the errors and producing a better design…

This highlighted the issue of trust for me ~ once the issue was noted, we informed the client and asked him what he wanted to do. There was no thought given to the fact we had the clients full product free of charge, they simply trusted us to do the right thing and delete it (which we did, BEFORE the client even knew we’d found the error).

As IT geeks we also have full and free access in to our client data.
Something else which is taken on trust.

All in all it kinda humbles me to think that all our clients trust us that much, and dismays me that somebody is selling a product which is really NOTHING like as advertised

THANKS GUYS!

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On a more personal note…
We had a ‘who has the biggest belly’ competition in the office today.
I won
Whats worse is Tor is nine months pregnant!!

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I know it’s a bit of a risqué image but it serves a two fold purpose.

Today, Tor got a call from a long standing client of ours. We’ve looked after their Internet and website hosting for years.
These are the only services we give them though ~ they have actively refused our offers of support and we are happy with the status quo (they seem to have no interest in investing in their IT systems either ~ suffice to say their systems are OLD!).

Today’s call was about an iPhone. :evil:
Something we have configured from time to time, as people seem to like “pretty pretty” toys with no regard to their technical merit (cynical iPhone hater here). It works fine with our email systems though.
Apparently, the support engineer who the client chooses to use can’t get the iPhone working with our SMTP server.

Why oh why the client thought we’d sort this out is beyond me..!
We provide email services for sure, but the configuration of the iPhone is a little outside this methinks.
The best/worst of it was it’s the PAID engineer who can’t get it working and it was he who called us!!

This the same engineer who couldn’t restore the clients server without our help either (on that occasion we pointed him in the right direction ‘cos it was causing the client lots of pain).

Tor told him where to get off ~ politely of course.

It’s a strangely amusing world out there..!

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