Hi all and happy New Year!

  by  Creativity103

I read a good article today about things fast-growing professional services firms need to keep in mind as the expand.  The bottom line is that it is easy to move beyond paper, pencil and Excel into a world of processes and procedures that aren’t scalable and that will eventually hinder a firm’s growth.  The author’s did a great job listing the various functions that bog down earliest:

• resource utilization
• invoicing
• project estimation and delivery
• maintaining a resource database
• sales and marketing
• reporting and analytics

Everyone is talking about cloud computing – heck I’ve written a good bit about it myself.  How do you know if your small business is ready?

First off, I’d argue that making any large technology change requires readiness – not just moving to the cloud.  So keep the following in mind when you consider any major infrastructure or application change.

  by  zolierdos

What Business Need Does it Fill?

What are you trying to accomplish by making a change?  Save money?  Open up new revenue opportunities?  Allow your staff or customers new functionality?  Improve processes and inefficiencies?  Any of these could be good drivers for making a technology change but be sure you know which it is and that you can clearly articulate why you want to make the change.  First of all, you want to make sure you aren’t chasing the latest bright, shiny object.  Second, any change will something your company will have to work through – it is never magic – so you want to make sure you can clearly articulate the business benefits.  Finally, going through the cost/benefit exercise, even if informally, will help you determine whether the benefits are worth the costs, both in hard dollars and in internal change costs.

Does it Support Business Processes?

Does the new toy support existing business processes?  How ingrained and mature are these processes?  On one hand if they are mature processes, it is easy to define those processes and map them to what will need to be done in the new environment.  On the other hand, if they are mature processes and don’t map well to the new functionality, your level of complexity in the change management arena just went up – a lot.  The same goes if you have no existing business processes or if they are ill-defined or ill-understood.  Things just got harder.

Here are some examples:  Let’s say you want to bring in a CRM tool.  Do you have a sales process?  A support process?  Are you going to try to teach your staff a new tool AND a new process?   Or is your current process inefficient and the tool will help streamline it?

Do Your Employees (and You!)  Have the Skill Sets They Will Need?

How tech savvy are you guys anyway?  I’ve found that many of the new applications are fairly easy to learn if a) you understand the underlying business process and b) you are reasonable comfortable with most common business tools (Word, Excel, email, etc.).  If even these basic tools are difficult to use then once again your level of difficulty score has gone up.  You’ll have to add time and effort to training and support.  Do you have an IT staff?  If so, are THEY comfortable with the new architectures and environments?  How much training and support will they need as well?

Don’t go into any big technology change without thinking about these three factors.  It is worth getting help from a professional to do a simple readiness assessment so you know the true cost of the change you are contemplating.

I read an interesting article on CMSWire today called In the Cloud, the Role of IT Changes.  The opening argument was that now most companies, large and small, outsource things like wiring, copier support, phone support and the other “crawl on the floor to connect wires” type of IT work.  Now that they are also starting to move applications away from their premise and to the cloud, what role is there for IT in a small or medium sized organization.

I agree with the conclusion that IT will not go away.   The activities that IT folks do will change from installing, supporting and monitoring applications in house to choosing and managing vendors and external applications and making sure any integration work.  IT resources will be aligned more tightly with the business and focus on how the business uses the software and how the software might be configured to be most efficient.

In fact, as technology becomes more strategic for companies, the IT roles becomes more strategic and less “cost of doing business”.  How can your business best leverage emerging technologies?  What is your level of risk in various circumstances and how can you mitigate that risk?  Are you signed up for the appropriate level of service for your company?  Have you negotiated the best possible deal?

The points in the article are all good but how does this apply to small business?  I think it leads to a number of questions that each business owner has to address:

• do I have the time and knowledge to make technology decisions?
• do I have the time and knowledge to choose, negotiate with and manage any number of vendors?
• do I have the time and knowledge to integrate the solutions my business needs?

  by  philcampbell 

  by  alexanderdrachmann

I read an article yesterday, part of which really grabbed my attention.  In Accounting Today Daniel Burress has an post titled Three Technology Trends Your Firm Can’t Ignore.  It is his third trend that had me saying “amen!”.

In this last point he describes how it isn’t enough to ask people in a small business what they want – most of the time they will ask for features or capabilities that only slightly make them more efficient or productive.  Why?  Because most of them have no idea of what is possible, what can be done with today’s software applications.  To truly apply technology to a business in a way transforms it, the questions have to go deeper, closely investigating the current work flows.  What do people do day to day?  Why do they do those things?  Do those activities have business value?  Would the business be better, faster or stronger if no one had to perform those activities?  Or if they could perform those tasks more easily and more often?  What would the business be like if that work flow was automated or wholly changed?  These questions apply to any kind of business, not just accounting firms.

“The key is to go to the next level and give people the ability to do what they currently can’t do, but would want to do, if they only knew they could. After all, people really didn’t ask for an iPhone or a BlackBerry. The hidden need was the ability to access their email and Internet without being tied to their desktop or laptop.”  This simple quote from the article says it all – don’t ask them what they want to do but can’t.  Find out what they could do and see if that changes how they work.

So who asks these questions and creatively applies technology to your business?  Chances are, no one.  That is a shame.  If you are interested in creatively applying new technology to your business or even utilizing what you already have in a deeper way, get some help.  When you need to understand the new tax changes you talk to your CPA, right?  And you consult your insurance person about the affect of health care reform on the benefits you provide your employees, don’t you?  So think about getting help with your technology too – consult your technical advisor and I’ll bet you’ll be surprised by what you learn.

I have spent a number of hours over the past few weeks, bringing air and light to the far recesses of my son’s bedroom and removing a winter’s supply of mud, bugs, dust and pollen from my screen porch.  So that makes it time for my second annual post about spring cleaning your technology.

The Current Clean Up List

To get us started I’ll refer you to my previous posts on the topic – every year you should look at your website to see if needs to be refreshed (and it probably does!).  There are more great tips for cleaning up your website in this post from Moreover Technologies. You should also clean out your old emails or at least archive them out of your mailbox.  Finally, I’ll add here my continued plea to put your fax machine of its misery.

Read more »

It has been almost a year since I wrote my last blog post on cloud computing and tons has been written about it since – and yet I think the recent article on CMSWire.com that claims that small and medium sized businesses are still confused is right on the money.  So in honor of the one year anniversary of my last post I’ll take another run on the subject.

The simplest definition is still this:  if you use technology in your business without buying software and installing on your own hardware you are using cloud computing.    But what does that mean to a small or medium sized business?

More Technology is Available for Your Business

Think about all the technology you use or could use in your business – email, calendars, accounting and CRM software.  Once upon a time only large companies could afford applications like these.  If you wanted this functionality you had to buy the software, buy the hardware and maintain both, at considerable expense.  Today any size company can utilize these applications for a monthly subscription (or sometimes it is even free!).  This allows small and medium sized businesses to be more nimble and more strategic than ever before.

You Can Save Money

Not only can your business take advantage of the technology the big guys use, you can do it for a lot less money.  Since you are essentially sharing the application with others your cost is much lower.  Even better though is you don’t have to buy or support the hardware infrastructure these applications often require.  In fact, businesses that have already invested in servers and have to pay employees or service providers to support them can often reduce those costs or eliminate them altogether by moving to cloud applications.  Maybe your business requires some specialized software that isn’t available in the cloud – you may still be able to reduce your over all technology costs by running that application on servers in the cloud.  Amazon, Rackspace and others provide on-demand computing services and bandwidth which means you don’t need your own servers.  Companies like these are staffed by experienced folks dedicated to keeping the machines up, running and secure.

It Isn’t Magic

Cloud computing opens up a wealth of opportunities for today’s businesses.  Like anything else though, it is not a magic bullet.  There are costs involved and every business needs to look at their needs and make decisions to “go to the cloud” on a case by case basis.  There are access and security risks to consider and data integration challenges to address.  Talk to an experienced technology advisor about the opportunities for YOUR business.

by  Arbron

Don’t act innocent, you know what I mean.  Spreadsheet software is oh so easy to use and so inexpensive (or even free).  You can use it to keep your company books, to keep your budget and forecast, to keep lists of customers, to create invoices, to create sales orders, reporting and analytics, inventory…the list goes on and on.

It is time for a spreadsheet intervention!

Following are the top 10 reasons you should stop and reconsider the use of spreadsheets in your business:

1. Sometimes the creator of the spreadsheet doesn’t know what they are doing and the calculations are incorrect.
2. If you make changes to values on a spreadsheet and save it you no longer know what the original value was.  Unless you saved a version off first, creating yet another spreadsheet.
3. If you have lots of versions, on hard drives, in email, on various computers you have no single version of the truth – whose spreadsheet is right?
4. Often the creator of the spreadsheet leaves it on the hard drive of the computer.  And often that hard drive isn’t backed up.
5. While we are on the subject of security risks, what do you think happens to all those spreadsheets you mail around?  Any idea where they go?
6. As you put more and more stuff into your spreadsheet the more unwieldy it becomes.
7. As you put more and more stuff into your spreadsheet and make multiple copies because of versioning you are now eating up disk space.  Every day.
8. They waste time.  If you pay someone to do a repetitive task in a spreadsheet, add up how much time they spend on it each week.  Then find out how much it would cost to automate that task.  The numbers are usually enlightening.
9. The second you save the spreadsheet the data is old.  Inventory is not up to date, customer contact information isn’t accurate, accounts are stale.
10. It isn’t scalable.  You can’t continue to use spreadsheets as an integral part of your business for very long without running into roadblocks from bad or inaccurate data or the sheer manhours required to keep up with them.  Your company will grow, I’m sure of it, and if you rely heavily on spreadsheets you will get mired in the muck at some point.
11. You can’t easily integrate the data from one spreadsheet to another.  So you copy and paste date, duplicating it and opening it up to errors or staleness.

See I couldn’t stop at 10.  I could go on even further but I think I’ve made my point.

Today’s business owners are fortunate – there are software solutions for most business needs and small businesses can get great functionality for free or low-cost.  CRM systems to keep up with customers, accounting systems for your numbers, inventory application and the rest are plentiful, have great functionality and have been tested to ensure the data and information they produce is correct.

I am not a spreadsheet hater – I think there are good uses for spreadsheets.  One time financial or what-if analysis.  As a front-end to a database for more detailed analysis and reporting.  For lists.  But not as an integral part of running a business of any size.  Its just not good business.

Retail and food service businesses probably don’t have this problem but service companies that are growing know exactly what I am talking about.  After identifying a customer, engaging in a protracted sales process, and wrangling over the fine details of the contract you are ready to begin providing services to your new customer, and better yet, start invoicing them.  But when you talk to the various parts of your company you realize it is all a lot harder than you thought.  Why is that and why does it take so long?

To answer that let’s look at a typical set-up a medium-sized company might have:

• Your customer is hopefully already set up in your CRM system, at least as far as your sales folks are concerned.  You will want to make sure your customer service folks have them set up for their needs too.
• You will want the new customer set up in your accounting system…
• And your billing system..
• And in whatever operational system(s) you use (consulting firms might have project management systems, shipping companies might have logistics systems, wireless carriers will have network systems).

Even if you don’t have individual applications for these functions, you still have people who have to know about the new customer and to adapt their internal processes to accommodate them.

So why would doing this take a long time?  If you are a smallish company it might not be too bad – you may have to update your various applications, spreadsheets or lists yourself or holler over to the guy in the next chair.  As your company gets bigger, however, you’ll likely start dividing the work functionally – you may have an accounting group or department, another for billing, another for sales, one for customer service and another one for the operational aspects.  Suddenly getting everyone on the same page, and better yet, with the same information, becomes a challenge.  As you become more successful and grow you may find that your automation has become fractured – some groups have grownup applications, some use spreadsheets or their own databases.  This uneven growth and lack of integration across the organization becomes more and more difficult to manage.  Which leads to increases in your cost to onboard a customer.  And, because every group updated their processes and systems manually you may have played “telephone” with important information like customer name, addresses, contact info, etc.  This in turn will lead to issues down the road doing analytical reporting about things like the profitability of a customer.

The good news is this not a new problem – millions of companies face this all the time.  Think of it as a good sign, a growing pain for a successful company.  It is a legitimate problem though and if left to get out of hand can bog a company down, making your organization a modern day Tower of Babel.  Here are some of the symptoms:

• You have  ”bad data” – which is, generally in this situation, inconsistent data.
• You miss key dates – for example your contact stipulates an SLA period for follow up on issues that never made it to customer service.
• You notice frequent miscommunications with customers.  Or about customers.
• You experience more the than usual instances of over or under billing.
• Or your numbers aren’t what you expect but you don’t know why.

What can you do?  Here are some thoughts:

• When you start to see these symptoms force yourself to take the time to stop and take a look around.  If you are still small you may be able to institute some policies and procedures that govern how new customers are set up.  Something as simple as a check sheet can go a long way to staving off problems.  Collaborating with lists and spreadsheets in the cloud might help as well.  Look at Google Docs, Zoho, Dropbox or the like.
• Listen to your employees carefully for statements that indicate the symptoms such as “We’re doing business with ABC in two different offices and it is so hard to keep it straight.  Sure would help if they were set up the same in both places!”.  When you hear this ask probing questions to figure out why.
• Take the time to document your processes.  Then review them and look for inefficiencies and opportunities to automate processes or integrate processes for which you already have applications.  As a bonus you’ll have training material for onboarding new employees!
• Review the processes regularly, at least annually, as input into your technology plan and budget for next year.

Like I said earlier, this isn’t the sign of a “bad” company, just one that has grown by focusing on getting the job done and not “how” the job gets done.  And as you can see, taking a look at the “how” now and again can help you continue to grow.

Has your company experienced this growing pain?

Wow, we are part 5 of the series on how to use technology to improve customer service with your small business.  No foolin!

Today I want to talk about online chat, also known as live chat or click-to-chat.    This is a feature you can add to your website that allows your customers or prospects to choose to communicate with your company real time, using text.  It can be implemented in a number of ways and can provide a variety of service-related benefits to your small business:

• Your customer service folks can be involved in multiple chats, allowing them to help more people at one time than they could on the phone.  Not only can your representatives have multiple chats going at once, you can “can” responses to frequently asked questions and your reps can use them by pressing a single button.   You can increase customer service while reducing operational costs!
• It allows your customer service people to engage in communication that is more conversation-like than asynchronous email.  The number of people that engage in live chat or instant messaging is on the rise so this a communication channel that many are very familiar with.  Finally, while it is real-time and comfortable, it allows for a level of anonymity that some people prefer.
• Customers or prospects that engage in online chat generally have a higher tolerance for waiting for service (but not too long!) – by definition they are online and can easily multitask while they are waiting for answers to their questions.  When they are on hold on the phone they are usually much less patient.
• Most, if not all, live chat implementations allow you to push content, via links, to the recipient.   You can provide FAQs or a how-to videos easily, for example.
• If you have an e-commerce site where you sell a product, most live chat vendors provide “shop with me” functionality that allows you to gently guide your customer thru your site and address any questions.
• You can set up live chat to proactively engage users if they spend a long time on a page or repeat actions that indicate they are having a problem.
• All of the chat conversations are logged and saved to a database.  You can use them identify frequent customer problems or diagnose customer-service issues.

Live chat can provide benefits beyond improved customer service.  Most of the vendors provide functionality that helps you better understand how users interact with your site and to optimize it.  You can proactively engage prospective customers at key place in your site, perhaps speeding up the acquisition or conversion process.

As with any new technology, there are a lot of best practices you can employ to improve your chances of success – just as there a lot of way to screw it up and annoy your customers and prospects.   This is definitely a place where you should get professional help to make sure you are doing the right thing for your business.

If you are interested in learning more about live chat, contact your technical advisor and see if live chat needs a place in your technology plan.

As a small business owner we want to help our customers personally, to meet with them face to face or talk to them on the phone so that we build a connection and a relationship. Unfortunately, sometimes our customers want to help themselves. When you allow customers to help themselves, where it makes sense, you empower them to get what they need when they need it. In the long run they are more likely to come back to you for additional products and services.   It doesn’t have to be an either/or scenario – why not allow them to choose between self-service or in-person service?

So what do I mean by self-service? It can mean different things to different companies:

• As I mentioned in an earlier post, services firms can allow their customers to set appointments online.  You can tell from this post I am a big fan of being able to set appointments online at my own convenience.  It may not always make sense but is something to consider.
• Companies that have a product can include product manuals and warranties online.  This one has become near and dear to my heart lately; I have a 10-year-old son and I probably don’t have to tell you that instructions and new toys/games/whatevers they belong to are soon parted.  Just last night I had to go online to find the instruction manual for the rock-tumbler he got for his birthday.  What a relief!
• Firms that share a lot of documents with their customers can set up portals to allow them access and share documents.  Tools vary in their sophistication and include (but are certainly not limited to) Dropbox, Box.net, Google Docs, Basecamp, et al.
• If you regularly do business with a customer why not present the invoices online?  Any then maybe even PAY online?  Cool, huh?  There are a lot of options for this and it is a topic worthy of its own post so we’ll leave it at that for now.
• Online ordering or online quote capabilities have been around a long time but it is surprising how many companies still don’t use them.  I think the mindset is that they want the prospect to all or come in so they can sell them in person.  Certainly some products and services are too complicated to handle online but, honestly, most aren’t.  I for one will likely look for another service provider if I can’t get at least a semblance of a quote online before I pick up the phone.

As you can see, there are a lot of ways for you to provide service to your customers online.  The additional benefit is that not only will you make your customer’s happy, you’ll reduce the customer service load on your employees, perhaps even freeing them up for other revenue generating task.  Sounds like a good deal all around to me!

Have you considered adding customer self-service to your small business technology plan?