What Can Small Businesses Learn From McDonalds

It’s hard to imagine a high street without a McDonalds today, but I have to hold my hand up to remembering the first time that the Golden Arches appeared on our high Streets in the 1970’s. In particular I remember going up into Birmingham with my girlfriend at the time and as it came up to 1pm we went looking for somewhere to eat. We found a busy traditional café just off New Street so we went in and took a seat.

It was a busy day and the café was clearly short staffed ; plates remained on tables for a little too long, and it took an eternity for the waitress to come to take our order. After another 20 minutes any thoughts of lust I had for the one I was with had turned to thoughts of lunch that I was now desperate to eat but which had still not arrived, so we just left and headed off down New Street and into McDonalds. 

The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. We were greeted with smiles and the familiar “Can I help anyone?”, and within minutes I was gratefully tucking into my quarter pounder with cheese. Who knows if my order in the overstretched café ever saw the light of day!

Needless to say, the café on New Street that had so miserably failed my expectations is now long gone, but McDonalds  … well, we all know!

So what has all this got to do with IT Support, small businesses, or anything that could be relevant to you and me? The answer is simple. McDonalds hasn’t grown into the megacorporation that they are today by serving the tastiest burgers in town. They managed that by being the restaurant that served you fastest, wished you a nice day as they gave you your food, cleared the tables more quickly than anybody else, swept the floor more often than anyone else, and even cleaned up the pavement outside the restaurant more often than anyone else. They also know their market better than any other company on the planet. See, I didn’t mention what I thought of their food once!

It’s called customer service, and in the battle against big companies it’s the only competitive advantage that many of us have. If you are a small business owner, I firmly believe that you need to bake good customer service into everything that your company does. If you give good service, you become a supplier of a commodity that is in short supply, and what's more you will get recommended. What's not to like about free advertising by your customers? 

So next week, just give a little more to your customers. It could repay you ten times over.

A Little IT Maintenance Saves A Lot Of IT Support

If you are a small business, you need your IT to work. As a small business owner myself, I believe we're in fact more reliant on technology than big business. Let’s face it, we really need to sweat our assets to help us to compete with big companies, and technology enables us to do this. We can deliver better customer service than the big boys, and react every bit as quickly as they can ... just as long as our IT keeps running.

Since the onset of the internet age, the speed of everyone’s business process has accelerated beyond anybody’s expectations due to email and E-commerce, so it hurts when your IT fails. What’s more I’m convinced that technology has its own sixth sense that tells it exactly the right time to throw a hissy fit to cause us the most inconvenience. It can be when I have to get a quote out, get some marketing material together for a deadline, or just when I want to clear everything up before I go home. That’s when the technology gremlin strikes! Fortunately I have my own support department at hand that I can call on when I need them. If you’re a small law firm, accountancy practice or marketing company, you may not have such a luxury!

When we get a call from a new customer, it is almost inevitably because ”the wheels have fallen off” their IT. We have even experienced one business owner who was scared of re-booting his Windows server in case it didn’t come back on again! I can understand business owners not wanting to take their time managing IT, but surely living in fear of a power spike is no way to run a business?

The idiom that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is especially true when it comes to IT. If you only ever spend money on your IT when it fails I can only guarantee you that your IT will keep failing, and we all know the problems when that happens. Invoices don’t get issued, customer service can grind to a halt, and your sales person suddenly becomes an impromptu IT engineer. He may well know a bit about computers, but shouldn’t he be looking after your clients or chasing down new business? Your IT will work better and more reliably if you spend money on preventative maintenance. That way you will experience fewer failures, your blood pressure will be lower, and your salesman can get back on the telephone.

Am I biased? Well, I run an IT support company, of course I am! … But it’s hardly rocket science is it?

How Can Online CRM Help Your Company To Communicate Better?

Given that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers, you clearly need to take good care of your client base. Yet sales, customer service and finance functions within a company fail to join up, and this can be bad for business. Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to customer relationships, and installing a CRM provides a simple means of sharing relevant information about your customers that will help your employees to do their job better. 

Let’s take three hypothetical situations to demonstrate my point:

• A salesman is chasing a customer for a new order, but is unaware that the customer has unpaid invoices that are more than 90 days overdue .

• An engineer arrives on site to perform an installation, but has no knowledge of discussions between the customer and his salesperson on the detail of the work to be carried out so the work is completed incorrectly.

• An accounts administrator is chasing for payment of an invoice that has been issued, but is not aware that the contract has not been able to be completed because the goods are being returned as faulty.

In each case these people may have acted differently if customer communications had been joined up using a CRM system. The salesperson may have insisted on cash in advance;  the engineer wouldn’t have had to revisit an installation, and the accounts administrator may not have lost a customer for appearing incompetent.

What Else Does A CRM Do?

Of course there is a lot more to a CRM than providing a central point of reference for customer communications for everyone in your company. A CRM can join up your entire business process including:

• Gathering web  and social marketing leads directly into your sales process.
• Generating documentation for quotations, orders, invoices and customer service.
• Producing business pipeline reports  to assist in business planning.
• Analysing the relative profitability of all of your products / business .
• Measuring the performance of your sales staff.
• Evaluating the return on investment of your marketing campaigns.

You can of course do all of this by extracting information from multiple sources and crunching numbers through a spreadsheet, but at a far greater cost over time. It is the integration and automation of your entire business process that is the true prize of a successful CRM deployment.

How To Remove Malware and Viruses From Your PC

Malware is the scourge of the Internet to the extent that Google discovers over 9,500 new malicious web sites and provides 300,000 download warnings every day. Once installed, malware either feeds you advertising, feeds your browsing activity back to advertisers as profiling information, or if you’re really unlucky it waits for you to visit your online banking site and redirects you off to a malicious web site where it will collect your login details.

How Do You Know You Have Malware On Your PC?

When you start to see browser windows popping up with advertising messages for no apparent reason, you can be pretty sure that you have some malware on your PC. Otherwise, you may not see any visible sign of malware other than your PC grinding gradually to a halt. It turns out that malware is very sociable and once it finds a home on your PC, it will usually invite a few friends over to party! By the time that the malware party on your PC is in full swing, you will find that it takes forever to boot up, shut down, or open any application. That’s usually the time when you reach for the phone to call in your IT support company!

My Top 3 Malware Removal Tools

There are 3 tools that you can turn to when you think you have malware on your PC:

• Spybot Search and Destroy – Probably the most popular malware scanner – includes real time scanning.

• Malwarebytes – My personal favourite malware removal software.

• Combofix – If all else fails, try Combofix. It provides heavy-duty malware removal.

Malwarebytes has been my preferred malware removal tool for some time now.  Usually it will find whatever is on the PC and removes it in one full scan, although I always recommend running 2 scans to make sure that you haven’t got some “smart” malware which includes a hidden component that reinstalls itself whenever it finds that the main program has been deleted.

Sometimes however you will come across an infected PC that proves impossible to clean. When that happens, you just have to back up your data if you can and reach for the Windows installation DVD to reinstall.

How To Stop Malware Getting Onto Your PC

Malware finds its way onto your PC when you visit a compromised web site. If your PC is not kept 100% up to date with the latest security patches, criminals and cyber-scoundrels are able to exploit bugs in older versions of programs to plant their software on your PC.

Unfortunately there is no easy way of telling good web sites from bad ones. Diligence in IT maintenance combined with robust IT Security really is your only defence, and if you don’t have the time to take these tasks on yourself, then you really need to find an IT support company who can help you.