My Customer Service Experiences

As a small business owner I have found it increasingly more difficult to manage my paper trail as my company has grown. I am a training provider and I have lots of clients who all have different ways of communicating with me.

For example: In May this year, from just one client I receive 62 emails, 27 faxed student forms and 3 more through the post. I posted out 5 different invoices to them to 5 different branches and I posted out 30 training schedules… and I have over 70 clients.

So I contacted Esker in Derby.

They took my business processes and put everything digitally together.

What that means for me is:

• A fax comes in. the Esker system intercepts it, digitises it and asks me where it should go – one click and sorted
• A signed student training application comes in through the post so I simply scan it which digitises it, it then asks me where it should go – one click and sorted
• I want to send out a training schedule or invoice its a simple couple of clicks and I’m stuffing the envelope or the email is whizzing through the ether to my client.

I have to say that the system was neither expensive or complicated to set up. Esker did most of the work and it has freed up myself and my office staff to do what we do best. Quality training to eager people.

Chris Hill– www.getonlinesales.co.uk

Another great local business networking event is being planned for today (13th of July) at the beautiful Ringwood hall in Chesterfield. Starting at 12 noon for delegates, the event is organised by the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Chamber of Commerce. The event is FREE for members and non-members of the chamber.

This event is now fully booked up but I am told that there are plenty more similar events lined up. You can check out what is coming up in the area on the Chamber website: Chamber Events.

I am not completely sure who is showing at the event but I am quite excited to learn that Chris Hill from Get Online Sales has booked a stand. The Chesterfield based Social Media Guru who’s clients include international corporations like Fastsigns and Esker is available all day it seems.

I will let you know if he is as impressive as his reputation.

My wife has a dormant bank account with RBS and in march she went overdrawn by £1.75 this incurred a rolling monthly charge of £20.00 over two months.

She complained to the branch and £20.00 of the charges were removed , the account was then put into credit by £7.00 and we thought that all was fine. Several months later we have found to our horror that we have paid over £100 in charges with still more to come on this account, mainly due to the fact that that £20.00 rolling charge is debited from the account several weeks after the account was actually overdrawn. So each £20.00 charge took the account overdrawn for that month and incurred a further £20.00 charge.

Today my wife and myself went into the branch to complain about these ridiculous charges. The manager refused to speak to us and said that she will call us later, after she has looked at our account. I await that telephone conversation with bated breath.

The kicker in all this is that when my wife had money flowing through this account we were constantly getting telephone calls from RBS saying that the balance was too high for a current account and would we consider a savings account with them.

Surely if they know what the balance of the account was, they would have the decency to give us a call and let us know that for a £1.75 mistake we were incurring £100+ of charges. I will let you know how this pans out

A free to enter photo competition called Face for 2010 at www.facefor2010.co.uk has set up several categories for it’s entrants to send in their pictures.

Every thing from baby and toddlers, through children and young adults to ‘mature’ adults (I’m OK then!)

The interesting thing is that there is also a section for professional photographers to send in their work. This could be quite the battle to see if professionals can do any better than the general public.

And as each photographer gets a free web link and a bio mention I wouldn’t be surprised if this competition fills up rather quickly.

The winner of each category gets a lovely hand framed print of themselves from the competitions promoters www.artworkframed.co.uk And as I have purchased framed prints from this company before now and can highly recommend them on quality and price. This is definitely a prize worth having.

You can enter the competition Here Face for 2010 Photo Competition

Photographers can enter their work Here: Photographers Enter Here

The Facebook page is: Here

You can see your art framed and buy it from here: Artwork Framed

these are the framed prints that I bought.

As you can see I’m a big fan of Steven. M. Meyers prints.

Automated sales order processing:

this sounds really technical and a little bit like something a huge delivery business should have.

But not so… It is just a way of describing how a business takes an order from a customer whether that be fax, email or a telephone call and what happens to that order when it is taken.

Are the details entered into a computer database that spits it out to the relevant department, is it written down and handed to Dave who takes the orders or is it just put in a book?

Everyone has their own ways of handling sales orders but i have managed to find one that is cost effective, saves time and actually helps small businesses make more money.

The SaaS option from Esker is basically a pay as you go sales order processing tool, which means that small businesses like mine can afford to have it and it gives me big business operational speed. So here’s how it works…

My company receives around 700 orders per week for small goods. some come online via email, some come over the phone, some come in the post and some come via fax. All the orders have to be entered manually into the sales database where they would be allocated manually to accounts and dispatch. The post and fax orders where a real pain in the a** as they took an age to process and sometime even got lost.

Enter  stage left…. Esker.

They automated my whole operation in days. I answered a series of questions about my ordering and within a few days every order was entering the system electronically and being routed to the correct department instantly. So far I haven’t lost and order or missed a delivery slot!

• The Fax’s arrived as an email and were automatically routed into the system.
• The Postal orders were simply and quickly scanned in  and the software read the order and converted it instantly to the system.
• The emails flew straight in

This left bags more time for my staff to concentrate on hitting the phones and taking telephone orders which they processed easily onto the systems order screen.

My costs have reduced and my turnover has increased by 15% in just two months.

Thanks EsKer, I for one am very impressed.

If it is from a private company and not the Police.

 This is the advice of Tim Cary a Solicitor who specialises in traffic law and appeared as a guest of Anne Robinson on the BBC program WATCHDOG which was shown on BBC1 on Thursday the 6^th of May 2010.

Tim stated that he ‘was surprised at the volume of these fines being issued’ and said, ‘ People don’t have t deal with them, people don’t have to answer them because it is NOT A CRIMINAL OFFENCE not to answer these unless they are from the police.’

Anne Robinson then said that ‘People are worried about being taken to court… what are their chances of being taken to court?’

Tim answered that ‘It is up to the parking company to sue the driver NOT THE OWNER OF THE VEHICLE OR REGISTERED KEEPER and they have to prove that the driver was in breach of some contractual term,

Anne then asked ‘will they do that?’ and Tim said ‘I don’t know of any cases where they have done it and it would be incredibly difficult to mount a case before a County Court.

Anne then went on to mention people’s other worry about when debt collectors get involved and peoples credit ratings getting marked down.

Tim, who is an expert in traffic law said ‘Complete nonsense, complete nonsense. The only way that you will have your credit rating damaged is if you were to get a County judgment against you that was registered’.

And since he already indicated that that would be nearly impossible for the Private Parking Companies to do and to his knowledge they haven’t done it yet. I wouldn’t worry about ignoring parking fines no matter how officious they may seem.

As a matter of point, Anne Robinson pointed out that the fine itself, complete with photos of the ‘offending vehicle’ really did look like an official penalty charge and Tim agreed that it looked impressive.  He then went on to state that if his Mum got one he would advise her to fold it up into a paper aeroplane and simply throw it away.

So it seems that the Parking Companies have been telling us a few porkies…

Naughty naughty.

This building in Chesterfield catches my eye every time that I drive by it. Colour, design and something different to brighten up a busy main road. And it’s just a health centre!

Imagine the effect that simple window graphics can have on a small business, especially in the current climate where every one is competing for the same customers.

If I had a business with any kind of frontage I would defiantly want people to see me as they drove by. It’s not like I would have to keep spending on weekly advertising in the local paper or banging my budget on radio advertising each month. One small spend and BANG! instant eye appeal that gets noticed every day, day in and day out without further cost.

This sign was done by Fastsigns in Sheffield, they seem to know what they are doing.

I am amazed at how many companies ‘Pimp their Business’ on the side of their cars and trucks, usually with loud, eye catching logo’s and graphics… . I always thought that it took a certain amount of bottle to drive around with an advertisement on your car but it seems that not only does it make good marketing sense, it also attracts customers.

The best vehicle graphics company that I have found are Fastsigns and my local store in Derby were only too happy to talk me through the pro’s and Con’s of ‘Pimping my Business’

• Stand out – Makes sense really
• Half Second Message – You have to capture the eye with a glimpse
• Look Professional – Very important
• Colour Is Cool – With great graphic design, anything is possible

With all this in mind I suppose that I’m sold.  Because you should do anything decently possible to promote your brand and let’s face it… this is just a one off cost! so it’s important to get it right.

I just have to buy myself a decent car now.

I have just returned from a family holiday to Fuerteventura that I booked with Thomson Holidays, bronzed, fatter and quite tired after a fun filled time with my wife and three young kids.
The flight over with the youngsters was hard work though, and it was not at all helped by the fact that the French air traffic controllers were on strike and we had to go north to go south; adding an extra hour onto the journey.

Yet all was well when we landed, the sun was blazing, the kids were tired and I had pre-booked, through Thomson, a large 7 seat family car with a big boot to be waiting for us at the airport for the five of us and our heap of luggage. – At least that is what I assumed.

In the arrivals terminal of Fuerteventura, I hunted down the Thomson rep and asked where the Europcar desk was. It was explained to me that Europcar didn’t actually have a desk but worked from a black van in the multi-storey car park out front. I explained this to the missus and went off to find it.

The van was staffed by a polite young lady who upon receipt of my paperwork went on to explain that they didn’t have a large family car available have never had one and they cannot understand why it had been booked from there. So would I be interested in an Astra or something?

As you can imagine I was not too happy with this as I had been assured by Thomson that a 7 seat vehicle or similar would be there for us as there was five of us and 6 large cases.

We were royally stuffed!

I went in search of the Thomson Rep who pointed me at the rep in charge of the airport and who’s name may have been Amie (not too sure here as I was livid) and I explained my predicament.
‘Oooh’ she laughed to her rep friends, ‘ You are having a bad day aren’t you,’ I went on to explain my situation and she just laughed again, then told me that I needed to speak to Europcar as they needed to sort it out.

How not very helpful!

‘IT’S NOT FUNNY!’ I barked before storming off, just barley holding back the tirade of verbal abuse that I really wanted to unleash upon her. ( but I know better)
So I stormed back to the poor Europcar rep who had by now been on the phone and had managed to arrange a replacement car (not as big but we would have to do) The only problem was that it wouldn’t be available until 5pm that evening.

I had a bit of a fit.

The end result was that they kindly agreed to front a minibus to take us to our hotel and deliver the car to us later on.

We missed a day with the car and they agreed to refund a chunk of cash for that. I was given a Spanish telephone number to ring when I got back. Marvelous!

I have since popped into First Choice (Thomson) and complained. I have been told to put it in writing, which I always suspect is a way of hoping that I won’t be bothered to do so.

Little do they know me…

I have just got to share this with you. It is marketing at it’s best.

At last Burger King have tapped into the British sense of humour!

King excellent!