Every morning I walk about a mile from the train station to the office. This morning around 6:30am I was traversing the gray streets of Chicago when a guy I’d never met sidled up beside me.

He greeted me and I returned his greeting.

“Why’s everybody so wrapped up in themselves?” he asked.

I stopped. We talked for a little while. This fellow lived on the street. He had his own reasons for trying to get me to stop, of course. But his sense of isolation was palpable.

I’ve heard it said that one of the worst parts of poverty is being cut off from relationships. Everyone is “so wrapped up in themselves” because we don’t want to be taken advantage of, because we fear what a conversation might bring, because we believe our time is better spent at the place we’re headed to, whether work or home. It’s easier not to stop, not to listen, not to look others in the eye.

It’s hard to tend to and care for people.

At the risk of diminishing the importance of this man and the problems of poverty, can I suggest that this lesson applies in business too?

It’s hard to tend to and care for people.

It’s tempting to get wrapped up inside our own team. It’s tempting to cut ourselves off from difficult conversations with clients or prospects or partners. It’s easier to work on ways to make a quick buck or even busy ourselves with shuffling papers than to really attend to people in the process.

Some times what’s good for business and what’s good for people is not the same thing. The recent financial mismanagement and money-grab is still a stunning example. But in tending to people the two can be aligned. Open conversations with clients. Hear what they really think. Tend to what those around you are saying. Pay careful attention and respond.

Tending to people means you are more likely to retain a lot of satisfied customers, which is the best way to keep your business healthy in a challenging market. That’s good for your business. Tending to people will also make you and your clients feel understood, connected and valued. That’s good for people.

Much of the technology Highland Solutions provides to clients is about empowering this process of tending well to people. We know technology can be used to separate people as well, but we’re most satisfied with our work when our solutions help connect data and people in ways that are good for both business and people. If your business technology is separating people instead of connecting them, consider some alternatives.

As a final thought, next time a street person wants to hustle you for some cash, consider giving them a little time. It won’t do anything for your business. While running a successful business is a great thing, in the end it all comes down to people. Tending to them is always good work.

I find, in general, very technically savvy people tend to be paranoid about privacy and security on the Internet.

This worries me.

What do they know that I don’t know?

So in a toast to technically savvy Internet paranoia, here’s a trio of Firefox browser add-ons designed with the security paranoid in mind.

Disclaimer: If your IT has standardized security measures, you should check with them before installing any of these. If you do choose to install them at work or at home, read the FAQ on each add-on carefully before installation. Firefox and each add-on are in continuous development, so we can’t predict if and how they will work in the future. These were made by technically savvy people for technically savvy people, so some know-how is required. In short, we think these are cool, but use at your own risk.

Adblock Plus

What it does: Blocks advertising, banners and other unwanted stuff on websites.

Why the technically savvy paranoid guy likes it: Web sites look clean, they load a lot faster without the graphic heavy banners and ads, and you’re not at the mercy of advertisers on every site you visit.

Investment/Reward: Easy to manage, low security benefit.

Get it here: http://adblockplus.org/en/

NoScript

What it does: NoScipt blocks Java, JavaScript and Flash from running on websites by default and allows the user to “whitelist” (allow) these scripts only on a site by site basis.

Why the technically savvy paranoid guy likes it: Java and Flash are web based programs that can run on your PC. They can be used to run malware on your computer, or do other nasty things like Cross-Site Scripting (which can steal your login credentials).

Investment/Reward: Intermediate difficulty to manage, high security benefit. NoScript can disable advanced functionity in websites that rely on Java and Flash to function (Facebook, Zimbra, etc.), so the initial tweaking can take some time. Users will need to manage their settings.

Get it here: http://noscript.net/

Better Privacy

What it does: BetterPrivacy deletes Flash-based cookies known as LSOs (Local Shared Objects) that otherwise can exist on your computer forever.

Why the technically savvy paranoid guy likes it: Browsers are now able to block or delete “normal” cookies. In response, Flash-based cookies known as LSOs have quietly taken over the web. Sites place LSOs in your computer where they are never visible and never removed. The cookies can be used to track your actions.

Investment/Reward: Intermediate difficulty to manage, medium security benefit. Better Privacy can disable functionality in trusted websites that rely on LSOs for stored visitor information. Users will need to manage their settings.

Get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623

The Ushahidi program provides a way for volunteers to collect information from sources like text messages, blog posts, videos, phone calls, and pictures, which are then mapped in near real time. It can be used to plot everything from disasters to wars. And unlike older forms of crisis-mapping software, Ushahidi is advanced enough to paint an accurate portrait of events while remaining incredibly user friendly and easy to build on.

This is open-source software at it’s best: fast, powerful, extensible, user-friendly and leveraging existing platforms instead of reinventing every wheel.

Kudos to the folks at Ushahidi. What great work.

The Ushahidi site and a photo of the software are after the jump.

http://haiti.ushahidi.com/

Darren experimented with a video chat site called ChatRoulette. The site randomly paired him with another person, and either person can click away to a new partner whenever they want. Darren couldn’t even get others to acknowledge him before donning a clown wig.

Applying his experience to the people browsing his blog (and your website), he offers this summary of visitor behavior:

• They don’t stay till long - they’re always clicking
• They are always looking for the next best thing
• They only pause if they see something that is interesting, intriguing or completely relevant to them
• They are ruthless
• They are impulsive
• They will judge what they see within a split second of arriving on a site
• They rely upon instinct and first impressions

He has some take home lessons for interacting with this type of person on a blog or site, but it’s important to note that not every site or blog (especially business ones) should plan their web strategy around this type of visitor.

Darren makes his living from advertisements on his sites, so his goal is attracting the most number of eyeballs. For most businesses, the goal is attracting the right eyeballs.

So while Darren’s advice is good to a point, remember that good content allows your visitors to self-select. If the people who buy your product or service are methodical, you might want to be reserved and offer a lot of information on page. If your buyers are looking for something novel or interesting, you might consider breaking out the clown wig.

But beware: if you host a circus, you might attract the wrong crowd.

To do customer support well, your support reps need reliable, current information about your customers and any outstanding problems. Without good data requests are missed, responses are duplicated, and your company ends up looking incompetent at best and uncaring at worst.

A CRM can empower your staff to make your customers truly satisfied and help lower the cost of doing so.

Here are six ways a CRM can help customer support:

1. Centralize Multiple Channels

Interactions with your customers can occur in many ways (web site visits, phone calls, email, chat) and through multiple staff (billing, account managers, technical support). A CRM serves as a central repository to show all interactions with all staff through any means. Now you KNOW what is happening with your customers, your staff never looks uninformed, and your customers never need to repeat themselves.

2. Bridge Support and Sales

Since a CRM is also usually a critical sales tool, bringing customer support into your CRM bridges the gap between sales and support. Sales reps can be notified when support cases with their customers go unresolved and can check in advance to make sure they are not planning a sales call on an angry customer.

3. Track Cases

A CRM provides the tools to create and associate support cases with customers. The cases can be assigned to reps, escalated if needed, and tracked to completion. Nothing gets lost, and no customers fall through the cracks. Automating regular support procedures such as an initial email response or a case closure email soliciting feedback can make the process even better.

4. Create a Knowledge Base

Many CRMs include a knowledge base section where procedures and articles can be accumulated to support your support activities. This is especially helpful for technical support processes. Once you’ve established a knowledge base, you can make it accessible to your customer base as well. Providing customers with information they can find on their own without ever interacting with your staff is nearly zero cost customer support.

5. Provide Self-Service

A self-service portal is a CRM extension that allows customers to create support requests from your website that are automatically populated into your CRM. As your sales reps respond to and update the case, the customer can status their requests from the portal. This minimizes time-consuming follow ups and status checks for your support reps and let’s the customer know you value them and are responding to their issue. When tied in with a customer accessible knowledge-base, a self-service portal can increase customer satisfaction while decreasing your costs.

6. Know How You’re Doing

As with any business critical process, if you want to get better, you need good data. How long does it take to respond to a customer request? How much time elapses before a case is resolved? Is the number of requests increasing or decreasing? Where are support cases getting stuck? How are your reps performing? Reporting tools and charts allow you to see this kind of data at regular intervals and in real time, providing the information you need to continuously improve your processes.

Know of other key benefits of a CRM for customer support? Share your thoughts below.

If you’d like to know more about a CRM, visit our CRM page or give us a call.

Everyone is on an email island.

Staff members have their own internal ecosystem (emails related to people related to appointments related to tasks), but there is only one way information comes in our out: through an email.

Usually staff members are also managing a separate “phone island” with contact phone numbers and voicemails completely disconnected from their email.

This is a fractured and frustrating setup.

Every person is managing two (phone and email) critical but separate communication islands. And those islands are separate from everyone else in the company as well.

There is a better way: moving email and phones from islands into a communication hub.

Here’s what I mean:

In transportation, a hub allows shipments to come in through a variety of channels-train, plane, boat, semi-then collects all that stuff in one place and sends it back out in whatever way is best. In a similar way, technology allows communication coming in through a variety of channels-emails, phone calls, contact data, calendar invitations, voicemails-to be gathered into a single place and networked together. Instead of managing many separate islands, your staff is managing a single hub.

A communication hub combines email, instant messaging, shared contact lists, shared calendars, company directories and phones in a single place. Imagine:

• Phones pull contact information with your email account.
• Instant messaging conversations are stored in your email folders.
• Voicemails left at your office phone are delivered as sound files to your email, which you can then listen to on your mobile phone.
• The company directory is automatically populated in every email account, phone and mobile phone.
• Clicking on a phone number in your address book dials the number on your phone. Free and busy are visible for others to see, so scheduling becomes a breeze.
• Inbound phone calls pull up customer information based on caller ID.

You get the idea.

At Highland, we use Zimbra as the backbone of our own communications hub.

These tools can increase productivity and reduce operating costs, and the cost to deploy and maintain them are actually decreasing because of hosted models and a competitive market.

What do you think? Any experience moving from email islands to unified communication hubs? Share your comments below.

Highland delivered an e-commerce site to help Deez stand out in a competitive automotive market. The site layout allows customers to browse multiple channels whether by brand, category, or through digital copies of Deez’s catalogs. Catalogs are still big in the auto parts world, so Deez included them as a digital link between catalog browsers and online purchases.

The home page highlights current specials and featured brands along with new and best-selling products. Our extensive experience with auto parts e-commerce sites coupled with marketing research done by Winsby, Inc. informed the layout, matching customer expectations and targeting buying trends.

SEO optimization for brands and parts listed in the catalog enhances search traffic. The e-commerce site itself is built on the Magento platform and uses integrated payment gateways, shipping and handling automation, and high security standards.

As the final and critical piece, Highland automated Deez’s e-commerce catalog with a product information feed from a business to business wholesaler. Now Deez’s site requires minimal upkeep to maintain the catalog, normally a time intensive process. Content management features provide full control over the new products, specials and other time sensitive sections of the site.

You can visit Deez here. Congratulations to Deez on their site launch.

]]> http://blog.highlandsolutions.com/940/deez-performance-launches-new-e-commerce-site/feed/ http://blog.highlandsolutions.com/960/is-your-website-click-happy/ http://blog.highlandsolutions.com/960/is-your-website-click-happy/#comments Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:02:04 +0000 The Savvy CIO http://blog.highlandsolutions.com/?p=960 Bad website design comes in several forms.

There’s bad design. In it’s extreme form (now more rarely seen in the wild), this is garish fonts and graphics, scrolling banners, and a home page that is about 15 screens long. I’m gone from these sites in under 5 seconds.

There’s bad layout, where you can’t find what you want, get lost quickly, and can’t see how to get back. If the site looks nice, I can put up with this for 4 to 5 clicks, and then I’m gone.

These mistakes are easy to see and, with the right skills, easy to fix. But there is another type of bad design that is more difficult to recognize and much more difficult to fix.

The click-happy site.

Click-happy sites can be nicely designed and intelligently laid out, but you have to click A LOT to interact with the site. Being click-happy is most noticeable in sites you come back to over and over again, like webmail.

I have a Hotmail account I use for sites that force me to verify an email address (so they can send their unwanted newsletters to an account I rarely read). Hotmail is click-happy.

Open message <click>. Open reply <click>. Send reply <click>. Move to <click> a folder <click>.

We’ve learned to put up with click-happy sites, but better ways have emerged. Coding languages like AJAX allow webpages to change without refreshing the entire page, and allow a more fluid and intimate user experience.

I love this little experiment that pushes this idea to the limit (and it’s even 2+ years old): http://dontclick.it/

Hover-over actions, mouse-motions, click and drag–there are many ways available to designers and developers to invite visitor interaction with your site.

Certainly you can go overboard. A browsing experience should be intuitive, which means clicking will still be the norm for “normal” sites . But the right dose of pleasantly surprising moments from other forms of interaction can leave a powerful impression with visitors of a business that is savvy and eager to help.

Know any websites that put this type of interaction to good use?

Cloud computing has been generating a lot of buzz and by all accounts looks to increase in 2010. But even with all the hype (or perhaps because of it), we regularly get asked, “What is cloud computing?”

That’s a great question. There isn’t a broad consensus on exactly what cloud computing is and is not. I don’t think a valuable answer can be found in the technical discussion of what services are and are not cloud computing. Instead, the real definition is in how cloud computing meets a business need.

Eric Knorr and Galen Gruman at InfoWorld have put their finger on it:

Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.

Cloud computing allows your business to rent, lease or subscribe to services and software without purchasing, supporting or maintaining all the associated technology yourself.

The big advantages of cloud computing? Startup is quick, initial costs are low, risks are low, you don’t have to hire internal expertise, and you get access to enterprise-quality solutions at a much lower total cost of ownership.

The disadvantages? Security, support and customization can be wildcards in the cloud.

• Is the provider of the software or service offering proper security?
• Do they have real people answer the phones, or do they expect you to help yourself in a jungle of FAQ pages?
• Can you tailor the software to your business needs, or is your business expected to conform to the box they built?

Every cloud provider is striking a balance. For example, Google can provide very fast startup and a low total cost for a cloud offering such as GoogleApps, but they’re trading security (by being a high profile target), personal support and the ability to customize. For some businesses, that’s a balance they like.

At Highland, we like to think of ourselves as a hands-on cloud or maybe even a personal cloud. We value the fast startup and lower costs of cloud solutions, but we aren’t looking to trade in security, support or customization in order to achieve a larger economy of scale. We’re balancing the convenience of cloud delivery with personal support and flexible customization.

So when we advocate a piece of software that we didn’t create, we feel a bit of obligation to justify our preference.

Any CRM worth its salt offers similar benefits to an organization. Why do we think SugarCRM is currently the best CRM to offer our clients? Here’s a peek into a bit of Highland history and our thoughts on the matter.

Five years ago, it became obvious to us that CRM was a recurring need among our development clients. We had built a few custom CRMs from scratch, but were looking for a solid building block we could use in our solutions so we could stop re-inventing the wheel.

We prefer open, flexible, low cost solutions, and those preferences drove our search process. After extensive research and getting our hands on several possible solutions, we began working with SugarCRM in 2005 as part of Sugar’s open source community. Since that time we’ve deployed Community and Professional Editions of SugarCRM for our clients, both as a stand-alone CRM solution and integrated into a larger web application deployment.

So why do we use SugarCRM instead of other offerings like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics? Without a full competitive breakdown, here are four quick reasons we’ve come to strongly prefer SugarCRM.

1.     Ease of use

Sugar is fast and flexible, offers streamlined, smart web-browser views, and plays nice with Outlook and smartphones. Its AJAX-based web technology offers the snappy drag-and-drop capabilities users expect from current web applications. Ease of use means better user adoption, which is goal #1 in launching a CRM.

2.     Friendly integration (at a reasonable cost)

Every system will tell you it can integrate with other systems. That’s probably true, but time and cost are critical. About a year ago, we proposed a CRM solution to a firm on the east coast who opted to go with a Dynamics solution instead. When we spoke again months later, they had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and still did not have a functional, integrated system.

Sugar offers two key advantages: standard, open web interfaces and an open licensing style. Proprietary systems like Microsoft make integration difficult by forcing every system to play by its rules. And products with tiered-licensing like Salesforce.com don’t open up their web interfaces until the highest tiers ($100+ per user per month). Sugar’s interfaces are open right out of the box.

3.     Faster deployment (and ROI)

Our clients can often log into their CRM within 24 hours of ordering it. Customization, data loading and initial launch can happen within weeks. Sugar’s quick deployment and lower cost can yield ROI within just a few months.

4.     Lower total cost of ownership

If you run the numbers (and we have), it just isn’t close. Even for simple deployments, Sugar is significantly less than other solutions. And if the deployment needs to integrate with other systems (either now or in the future), the cost savings is stunning. Sugar can come in at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.

Of course, as we say over and over again, the CRM itself is only half of the equation. Launching the CRM well is the tricky part and benefits from an experienced partner. Which is what we do.

Have your own thoughts on SugarCRM compared to other solutions on the market? Feel free to share below.