Darn it – More Lessons Learned

In the spirit of using those ghastly experiences one has with various companies and organisations as lessons learned, here are this weeks lessons:

1. Going Green – keep using online, web based systems for invoicing, customer retention, information. We fill up our green bin a lot faster than we should because so many companies insist on sending out paper. Someone ought to do a case study on Sage, for example. We left NovaUCD more than 18 months ago. We have rung, written, rung, written, emailed, rung and written to Sage to say stop sending us information to our NovaUCD address. These guys sell a customer relationship management system and they can’t manage a simple change of address.

2. Support & Maintenance Contracts should be for support & maintenance and your customer ought to request it. Do not send out an invoice to a customer who has

a) told you that they no longer use your product

b) been quite vocal about it on public forums

c) even spoken with your product manager to tell them why you no longer use their product

Don’t then send a credit note against that invoice and a letter telling them about upgrading their licence through the support contract that you have just issued a credit note against the invoice for… yes, I stopped following this too.

How did they know that I had stopped using their product? Well after the last invoice, I rang them up to tell them that. So they issued a credit note. In that phone call I told them for the 18th time (yes, once a month) that we had moved offices.

Please please please stop sending me this time wasting, environment killing heap of spam. I moved payroll software to Payback.ie because they are upfront about their charges, it’s all online, their support is brilliant, they understand small businesses and provide excellent solutions for us. I moved bookeeping to SortMyBooks.ie because it was a hell of a lot more flexible and user friendly than Sage products and they’re an Irish company and their support is brilliant. I moved invoicing to Freshbooks.com because it’s online, flexible, their support is incredible and it does what it says on the tin.

Sage just doesn’t get it.

Growing Your Business…

This Saturday I get to stand in front of a crowd of small business owners and pontificate on growing your business through excellence in customer service. On my mind recently has been the issue of Software as a Service – because that’s what we deliver with our online booking system. One of the main reasons we’ve been as busy as we have been (and I do have to say somewhat successfull) is that whilst we deliver software as a service (in that it’s a hosted application and not a boxed product) we concentrate very hard on delivering services with the software.

I wonder if there’s a new term for that – SaaSwS perhaps? For us, it’s pretty obvious that not everyone is going to want to build their own web page or booking form or set up their own online payment pages. They want someone else to do it for them, whilst they concentrate on what they’re good at : organising their event or selling their stands. Our challenge is to keep the cost of the services reasonable enough. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t as people’s perceptions of what things should cost are so broad and variable.

Had a lovely conversation yesterday with an academic who has tried out a little bit of entrepreneurship. We worked with him as co-chair on a conference earlier this year and he was so “massively impressed” (his words!) by the service we offer that he’s going to bat for using our service on another conference next year even though his colleagues (who weren’t involved in the first one) want to use another set up that has a lower obvious cost…  Although he knows as well as I that the actual cost will be higher than using us.

It was an inspiring conversation, and makes me all misty eyed as I heard a happy customer explain to me why he would be insisting his colleagues used our service. Wish I could have videotaped it! Darn, why didn’t I think of that at the time.

Now if we could just Bring Back Bertie

I stayed up late last night with my fingers crossed that Obama would make it – what a sigh of relief! Now we’ll hopefully see some optimism come into the marketplace – although I could do without the dollar strengthening right now. Ah well, you lose some, you lose some.

If we could now just bring back Bertie, I’d really begin to feel hopeful. Who’s with me on the campaign trail?