Posts

Women ARE Bad Drivers And Robots ARE Evil

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Traitor…that is likely the nicest thing my female colleagues, team members, friends and family are thinking right now. Shame on me really, because I’m here to tell you why we should throw those antiquated ideas out the (car) window.

 

Women, on average, are are looking after more than one person at any given time, requiring more patience and thought in getting from here to there.  So if we take a bit more time or allow more than one car to merge remember the literal and metaphorical band-aid at the back of our mind.

 

The Light Bulb Moment

 

As a managing director I think a lot about our customers and the service experience we deliver. The best win we get is the light bulb moment on a client’s face telling us we nailed it and frankly I got into this business because of those damn light bulb moments. Helping people can be addictive and (spoiler alert) the IT industry is actually full of people like me.

 

So we love these “nailed it” moments but in reality we now have to nail it each time customers need our help, not just when we are face to face.

 

As our client base grows we have to be more strategic about that “nailed it” service delivery. How do we keep the service personal and effective, but expand it in a smart way?

 

The statistics around our customer service expectations are that at least 50% of us expect it to be 24/7. We also don’t want our time to be in vain, spending precious time on the phone, only to not get the answer or solve the problem.

 

Over time technology has rushed to fill the gap, sometimes quite effectively. Live Chat, as an example, is a personal and convenient conversation that can help us get the answer we seek or progress it to a point where we know what we need to do next.

 

What live chat does not fully solve, and it is a big gap for companies, is true scalability. As you grow your client base you need more team members to staff the chat. You train them on the same content, the same procedures and sit them in the same desk solving the same problems. Formulaic but not cost-effective in the long run.

 

Our own light bulb moment came last year when we saw how far artificial intelligence had come. Google, Apple and Facebook have been at this for years, but for the rest of us the technology has evolved from esoteric movie fodder to something far more practical and democratic.

 

Artificial Intelligence For Business

 

Companies of all sizes and industries can now have their own personalised service agent using artificial intelligence. Think of it as a harmonic merge of Siri and live chat, tailored for your business objectives.

 

Front line chat agents are expediters to the end game, allowing companies to be “on” all the time cost-effectively. They free up people on your team to excel at solving the complex issues, allowing you to hire for unique skills rather than repetitive tasks that scream low ROI.

 

While this opportunity may sound scary to some make no mistake, your competitors, your board, the CEO is already thinking about this. It is time for all of us to join the conversation and make technology work for us, improving the service experience while still preserving our fundamental humanity and those beautiful light bulb moments.

FROLO Explained

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There has been significant upheaval in the restaurant online ordering space in the last 12 months, companies have merged, companies have been bought out for hundreds of millions of dollars and some have gone out of business.

We can’t predict exactly what will happen to aggregated online ordering sites but we can explain a new phrase, FROLO, that has popped up.

FROLO stands for free restaurant online ordering and that in itself sounds pretty good, who doesn’t love free?

Please read the fine print though because what FROLO vendors offer is not free. You pay to build your own online ordering website and you have a flat monthly support cost to host the website.

This is the nature of all websites, pay for the expertise to have your site built and then while you are happy with the service continue to pay for your website to be hosted, supported and secured.

The “free” part of FROLO is that no commission is charged for each order, and that is a great idea. In fact its such a great idea we thought of it back in 2008 and have been building and hosting restaurant online ordering sites since then, NEVER charging a commission on sales.

The online ordering industry is ripe for a shakeup and we think this will be good for restaurant owners across Australia. We will continue building custom, feature-packed online ordering websites that never tax your profits – how good is that?’,

3 Keys to Successful Software Integration

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We get a kick out of making our customers lives easier through websites and software that just works. Ultimately the biggest bang for buck for our customers is in software integration…but what does that mean?

In a nutshell its taking one piece of software and getting it to talk successfully to another piece of software to save manually transferring information that businesses need for daily operation.

Think automatic transfer and syncing of your online sales to your accounting software or your newsletter subscribers to your email marketing program, these are good examples of time savers for busy people and the list of integrations is endless.

Your website provider should be talking to you about how you can save time and money through integration, but before you get their help here are three important keys to successful software integration.

1. It should be cost-effective – get ready to think about the time cost of manual data entry versus the effort to integrate. No one has an unlimited budget so have an approximate idea of the time you are spending on that manual task to start with.

2. It should clearly replace a time-consuming process – don’t settle for a partial integration when the full process is what gets the win. Make sure your provider clearly identifies what you are getting and the benefits

3. A willingness to work with others to get the job done – we find that the key factor in successful integration projects is a willingness to work with other software providers. It is so rare for companies have one supplier for everything, so being able to talk to the people who already support your business is absolutely critical

Did we already mention we love software integration? And once you’ve taken the step to connect dots in your business that you did not know were possible we think you will too!

3 Reasons for Monkey Marketing

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If you are struggling with how to reach out to your current and future customers we recommend sitting down with our monkey friend Mailchimp.

What can a monkey possibly offer you? Heaps as it turns out. If you follow us on social media you know we love technology, our own and others, and in this case we strongly recommend using Mailchimp to manage your email marketing campaigns.

There are so many reasons to choose Mailchimp, but here are the top three:

1. Its Easy & Free – Once you signup you realise that Mailchimp helps take you each step of the way, creating a list of people to send to, designing a newsletter, recommending the best Subject Line to get people’s attention – its all there and if you have a list of under 2000 subscribers then you can send newsletters regularly for $0.

2. Tracking & Feedback – Are you still investing in marketing that can’t tell you whether it was worth the money? Mailchimp tells you everything about exactly who opened the email, who clicked on a link (and which one). It allows for automatic unsubscribe so you keep everyone happy and if the email did not reach certain users the monkey tells you why. It gives you the tools to see for yourself if its worth it (and it is because its easy and its free :-)

3. It Talks to So Many Other Software Programs – In other words, it integrates to the tools you already use in house so that programs like your CRM shows you marketing responses on a client by client basis, your Google Website Analytics is linked to your email marketing and most importantly your website sign ups can sync directly to your Mailchimp account. You always have the latest customer list when you are ready to send out that next awesome newsletter.

These days customers are researching you as much as you research them. Build trust by sharing your successes and knowledge with them through tools like Mailchimp so when it comes to choosing your company you already have it in the bag! All of our websites have the option to integrate to Mailchimp and other great tools – check out our Integration Services.