During my travels this week, I had two very relevant conversations with small business owners regarding their desire to be online and market their businesses via the web. This obviously isn’t a unique topic. Since the Australian dollar reached parity with the US $, it has been all over every small business website and forum in Australia.
Every industry expert has written one or more articles encouraging Australian businesses to expand their sales channels to include the web in order for them to develop cheaper ways to access more customers.
As I see it, this has all come out of the growing trend by Australians to research and buy online, in particular to buy cheaper goods from overseas suppliers.
This push hasn’t just been about the little guy. Major retailers in Australia are also struggling to compete with their overseas counterparts. MYER recently launched their online store which ships goods directly from o/seas to Australia in order to offer more competitive pricing to its customers.
Let’s get back to the little guy. The first story is about a one man business which designs, builds and installs kitchens and wardrobes. This is your typical small business with a computer and phone run out of home.
This individual (I don’t have permission to quote him here at the moment), has an iPhone (which I thought was unique for a cabinet maker but maybe I am wrong) and sounded to me relatively tech savvy. I say that because, when we started talking about his website and the trials in building it, he mentioned to me an article that stated Australia had recently sold its two millionth domain name. The fact that he knew this impressed me.
Our Cabinet Maker had started building his website 12 months ago and at this stage had yet to publish it. The owner had spent considerable time investigating how he wanted it to look, what the prices for building the site where and who he should get to build it. His quotes ranged from $1,000 – $10,000. He picked a supplier at $2000.
Twelve months on, he knows that it has some sort of Content Management System so that he can keep it up to date, he has had to design it himself (I assume this is his design of the GUI) and he has had to push and push this designer to get even close to completing it. Unfortunately it is not yet live.
He is obviously very disappointed and when I told him that I knew a few things about websites and a few things about how they can be optimised he got very excited. You see his web designer had recently dropped the bomb shell that simply having a website wasn’t going to be enough in order to get new business leads, he needed to optimise it. He needed it to rank in the top three of his key words.
Whilst he was now aware of the challenges, he had no idea where to start. Given he has already invested $2000 in building this website, he is unlikely to want to invest more money optimising it (which I am sure his designer will try and sell).
I agreed to give him a few tips and maybe show him where to get started. The work on his website is only just beginning.
I recently read the MYOB and Google initiative that was going to give 50,000 Australian small businesses a free domain and basic website. Whilst I thought that this was a great initiative in atleast getting them online, actually getting their website to deliver some valuable traffic and leads was going to be a much harder challenge.
What we might end up with is a lot of disillusioned small business owners thinking the web is a waste of time for them. Then again with Google on their side, they are likely to know the best tricks to get the traffic started.
In next week’s post we will cover my second story which is about using Facebook to host your website and market your small business.
This is not another Telco rant post, there are other places to find these if you want, in fact the Australia and world blogosphere is full of them. It is however a story about an experience I had this week with my telecommunications provider that left a rather sour taste in my mouth and raised a few questions in my mind regarding the value companies, small or big place on the loyalty of their customers.
Having worked in marketing all of my working life, I am qualified in at a minimum saying that all businesses want customers to stay with them. Maybe not all of them but 90% of them. You see there is a cost in acquiring most of these customers, then there is a cost of servicing them which is obviously ongoing, so the longer they stay happy and with you, the more profitable they are. Not rocket science.
Now I have been a loyal customer to this Telco for over 16 years. Well in fact I have been a mobile, home phone and broadband customer with this telco ever since I began any of these services. I started my first mobile plan with them and and am still there (plans have changed). When I eventually moved out of home my home phone line was with them and still is (over 10 years ago) and since hooking up my cable connection (4 years ago), I have also been a broadband customer with them. I have never missed a payment (maybe once or twice because the invoice was moved from the front of the fridge and I assumed it was therefore paid). In all I would say I have spent between $15,000 – $18,000 with them over that 16 year period. Whilst I am not their most profitable customer, I am loyal, I pay my bills on time and I only call their helpdesk once per year.
Now this week I had a weird experience where my mobile phone bill came in at $351. My mobile cap is $29 and suits me and my phone usage fine. Last year I had changed my mobile phone plan twice in the space of a 3 month period to take advantage of an offer the Telco had advertised. On both occasions, I spoke to the customer service person on the phone and they advised that the change was made. On the first occasion, it was confirmed in writing (email), the second it was not. I was comfortable. The written notice wasn’t an issue because calls and changes to plans I assumed were recorded (phone). In my mind I had nothing to worry about until the contract expired.
So after received this extraordinary bill, I called Billing and explained that there was a mistake. They advised that there was no mistake and according to their system records I had been billed correctly. I explained the plan details I thought I had and they advised that I had started my plan in June but that no other changes where made. Now, I can daydream but I don’t day dream about calling my Telco.
The guy on the phone was obviously only reading what was infront of him. I insisted that I had made the change of plan. He insisted that there was no record of it. All I have is a record on my phone bill of calling Telco sales line and staying on the line for an extended period. No written record of the change.
He offered to change my plan and see what he could do about the large bill. I obviously didn’t want to pay$320 of it. He returned and advised that the Telco what meet me half way, so we would split the bill. This was all because I had such a great record. Always paid my bill and on time. Loyal customer that I was.
Now he made the point that they don’t do this for other regular customers, but was making a special exception for me. Lucky me. Confused, angry and with no choice I agreed.
So what does loyalty mean to your business. To this Telco, after 16 years of being a good customer I was worth about $10 per year. Looks like I have used all of that up in one go. That is 1% of what I think I have paid them in all of that time.
If you stand in front of your staff and tell them to build loyalty within your customer base, put a plan in place that ensures the customer experiences the value of this loyalty. Otherwise, here one day gone the next. My Telco has certainly failed in this regard.
This week we decided to do something a little different and get some input from a couple of our Twitter followers on online backup plans and practices that they have put in place recently with small business customers.
When I asked the guys, I advised that they didn’t need to have Carbonite in the story, as I was more interested in the backup plan as such rather than the technology.
So I have a couple good stories to share with you this week.
The first is from Grant Booth from Upside Down Websites. You can learn more about Grant and his many services by following him on Twitter or visiting his website. www.upsidedownwebsites.com
I was asked a year ago to audit a local newspaper’s backup. They already had something set up but wanted to upgrade their backup so that they could be up and running in 30 minutes following a complete data/system failure.
The current backup included a Raid1 set up on the server with all data from the Raid duplicated to two NAS drives (rotating weekly – if they remembered) once per week (one kept offsite).
The goal was to offer 100% recovery in 30 minutes. Therefore, even though the Raid or Server could have a total 100% failure, we also installed Carbonite for live offsite back up (presently 300GB of data).
The newspaper has a deadline of 7pm on a Tuesday night. With the above mentioned setup they could now be up and running within 20 minutes by either plugging the NAS directly into a work or home computer or using Carbonite’s remote access to download the files to any computer and complete their deadline.
The combination of local and offsite/online backup means the paper can now recover from 99% of disasters save a nature disaster where having the newspaper out the next day would simply not be necessary.
The second story is from Dan Rippon. You can catch Dan and his many talents at www.thatcomputerguy.net.au or via Twitter
I have a financial services client running online backup for their server, prior to which they had nothing at all in place (shudder!). Online backup was chosen as it removes the need for big up front hardware investment and also potential for human failure in not maintaining tape rotations – and without an in-house IT person, this was a large factor. The firm has a light business broadband plan with a data quota of 100GB per month. This wasn’t enough to support an upload of the initial data via the internet.
The online backup provider I used in this instance was Onlinebackupservices.com.au, a business I have had a long association with. The initial upload of which was done via a data dump to a USB drive. The drive was sent by the online backup provider and I took care of the configuration and initial extract. I couriered the drive back to Melbourne shortly after, where the provider uploaded it directly to their server. From there the software client kicked in to sync everything up.
Backup is set to the company data folders, so anything added is backed up; data retention is currently 365 days but could be more.
I get an email every morning of backup activity so I can react to any issues if needed, otherwise it runs like it should.
So there you have it, two original and real small business online backup stories directly from Carbonite resellers. Thanks again guys and keep up the good work.
“What is the best way to backup my data?” Many people call up asking this question. The real answer is that the more you do to backup your data, the better off you and your data will be. A single backup method or technology is rarely appropriate for a person or company.
Our businesses tend to hold multiple types of data and therefore we should be considering different backup strategies. Before we begin to worry about the technology or media we are going to use, we need to determine what data needs to be backed up. If your computer or office were completely destroyed and you had to get new equipment. What would you want restored to the new equipment?
To get started you should undertake an audit of your data and where it is held. Once you have it all listed, the next step is to classify it according to how quickly you need to be able to recover it, as well as how current the backup needs to be.
They aren’t easy questions to answer. One way of working through this is to think about what you would need to first to get your business backup and running after a fire destroyed all of it. This categorization will relate to which backup methods are most appropriate.
- For letters, spreadsheets, digital photos, and other documents; you should consider both online backup as well as an external hard drive. Online backup services should be able to chew through smaller files very quickly. The same goes with using an external drive.
- Outlook and other email, online backup will ensure that timely automatic backups keep your latest emails protected.
- For large collections of MP3 files or video files; backing up to an external drive and physically keeping a copy offsite is probably best. Although in both cases online backup can also be used, however the backing up or retrieval of videos can be slow will eat into your monthly download limits.
- For software; making copies of your installation media and maintaining copies in an offsite location is best.
- For databases or software that includes a database eg MYOB; I would use both an external drive and online backup. The combination of both will ensure that data is automatically secure once it has been written or the file closed. Depending on the size of the data, an external drive can be a very quick way to restore it.
The above recommendations are intended to be examples for home computer owners and small business computing. The other considerations that you should make are how organised are you regarding using external drives. Will you or your staff keep the drives plugged in and are you willing to have more than one so that they are rotated. Online backup is a great compliment to a manual backup strategy as it ensures should you or your staff not keep up with regular backups, then the online backup system can take over.
Interesting article sourced from www.scmagazineuk.com This is why I think small businesses (3- 5 people) don’t backup:
Small businesses don’t backup because they are too busy trying to stay in business and IT in most cases gets outsourced. Most backup solutions can costs in the thousands to be automated, so when faced with the option of cheaper manual processes, you know what they choose. Small businesses need cheaper alternatives that are automated.
Over a quarter of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are not backing up company data, while a third have conceded that they failed to secure data.
New research from Buffalo Technology found that data loss is being risked as data backup is being overlooked by SMEs. When these businesses were asked why this was the case, time (34 per cent), security worries (16 per cent) and not being concerned (14 per cent) were listed as the main reasons. Other small businesses (13 per cent) found complexity a barrier.
However, 46 per cent said that they would backup all of their data if the process was automated and 23 per cent said they would if it was quicker and easier. Security and reliability also featured as influential reasons.
Paul Hudson, northern European sales director at Buffalo Technology, said: “What this research highlights is that businesses are still to wake up to the fact that securing their company and customer information is a must. At a time when customer retention is just as significant as growth, giving your clients the confidence that their personal information is in safe hands has never been so important.
“Taking the appropriate steps to backup and secure data, whether on desktop PCs or company laptops, has never been easier and quicker. High capacity, easy to deploy and easy to manage data storage solutions are examples of a technology that can effortlessly transform SME IT systems into robust and secure business networks.”
