Shameless Plug - Waynessa Bags

I wouldn't normally do this but it is for a good cause - my wife!

My wife has started up an online store selling quality fashion handbags, purses, wallets and accessories, and we would love to be getting a bit more attention on the net. Please have a browse and let me know what you think of the site (I created it). And of course if some pretty item takes your fancy, please feel free to throw it in your cart and buy it!

Waynessa Bags - All your accessory needs.

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Who Owns Your Digital Life? Follow Up

Recently I wrote a piece about Who owns your digital life? I talked about how if you read the small print on your digital purchases (books, music, movies, etc) then you would see that you never actually owned it, you only purchased a licence to use it.

Wel it seems Amazon decided to prove me right recently when they deleted somebody's account and wiped their Kindle because they were apparently linked to an account that had been abusing the system - see
Amazon account ban reminds us DRM content is only rented | Digital Trends

I find this frankly staggering. Amazon just decided "we don't like you so we are going to delete everything you have purchased from us - thanks for your business". This should be a wake up call for us all. Not least by virtue of the fact that we keep having DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) imposed on us. All DRM does is takes all your rights away and gives them (leaves them?) with the company that 'sold' you the product. I believe that DRM makes content and products Defective by Design. I would urge you to take a look at this web site and learn more about your rights and how they are abused and more importantly, how to do something about it.

Customer Service - What do you see?

Everyone remembers a bad customer service experience. You could deal with the same company for years and maybe they provide fantastic service - they really go above and beyond. But what do you remember? If you said "the one time they screw up", you'd be right.

I came across this article - Your Customer Does Not See - and it really makes sense. It talks about doing all the right things but it doesn't get noticed by your customer. However, when you mess up once, they do notice that. How do you deal with that? Well part of that will be in being consistent. Have a set of policies and procedures that describe how you deal with each possible situation. That takes a bit of effort and certainly no small investment in time. But a happy customer is a customer for life, so in the end it has to be worth it.

Go the extra mile. Don't just flick off a quick email. Pick up the phone and talk to your customer. It is easy to miss the tone of an email and take it the wrong way but when you have someone on the phone, you can much easier deal with whatever the situation may be; put the fire out if you need to.

But probably above all else, make sure you listen to your customer. Ask them what they want, then shut up and let them tell you. If what they ask for isn't possible, it's OK to say so - you should never promise something you can't deliver, after all. In this case, explain what they want isn't possible and why. But really importantly, you then need to provide an alternative solution to the problem. Never just say no. Say not like that but this way will offer you some value.

I had a poor customer service experience recently with a web hosting provider. I had a technical issue that I understood and believed I knew the fix for. I logged a support case with the company and gave them all the relevant information so that they could come to the same conclusion. Instead, they answered some question that I didn't ask. I replied to them and got a response from a different agent. This guy also responded to some other question. I went through this several times, with several different agents over several days before I called and spoke to somebody who quickly escalated it to a more senior agent, Lo and behold, the problem was resolved almost immediately. The moral of this story? As the service provider, make sure you read and listen to what your customer is saying. Don't read the first line and assume you know the rest - or even assume you know more than the customer.

Information is King - where is your CRM?

In the digital age, digital information is king. Pretty obvious really. Or is it? Do business owners and managers realise this?

From some discussions I've had, it seems not. Some people just don't seem to 'get it'. They store email addresses and phone numbers into their contacts in Outlook, Gmail or on their phones but that's it. Opportunities are tracked via notes or tasks with no real structure and no game plan on how to close the deal. That may be all well and good if you have opportunities coming out the wazoo but in a tight market, you need to be smarter than that.

So what will a CRM solution give you that you can't just do in Outlook? Plenty is the answer. I'll elaborate.

1. The most obvious thing is that it will give you the ability to create, store, view and sort your opportunities in a consistent and structured manner. This will make them easy to search or browse and therefore easier to follow up on (and close). You will also keep all documentation relating to the opportunity in this single repository - quotes, build specs, etc. 
2. The ability to put a dollar figure on your potential future business. It's all well and good to think you have plenty of business in the pipeline but how can you measure it? Most CRM solutions will give you some kind of dashboard that will tell you exactly what is in the pipeline, and if you have it set up correctly in the first place, which opportunities have the highest probability of closing. The most likely opportunities will then float to the top and these are the ones you will want to concentrate on.
3. By having your opportunities in the one system - and again making sure that system is set up correctly - you can make sure that all the members of your sales team are following the same procedures when working a deal, by programmatically presenting the next step as the previous one is completed.
4. Following on from this, most CRMs will give you the ability to automate parts of the process. For example, if you have a process that says when you get a new lead, you send them a welcome pack on day one, a link to some relevant info on your web site on day two, then arrange a meeting on day three, you can often automate this whole process. That's a far more efficient way of managing leads, not to mention removing the possibility of a human forgetting a step.

CRM solutions need not be expensive these days, with many hosted in the cloud and available for a nominal monthly fee per user. That being the case, there is no real excuse not to have one. If you aren't using a CRM solution in your business, why not?

Bruce Willis goes after Apple

I wrote the other day about what happens to your digital collections when you die - Who owns your digital life?

Well it seems that Bruce Willis (yes, that Bruce Willis) has got fired up over this issue and is backing legal moves to increase the rights of downloaders. According to The Sun at least.

Regardless of the validity of the source here - there is no direct quote from the actor - it is good to see this important issue get some media coverage.

How Secure Are You Online? The Checklist | Lifehacker Australia

This is a very handy security resource and I recommend you read and understand the ideas in here to keep yourself safe online - How Secure Are You Online? The Checklist | Lifehacker Australia

One great tip in here is to use the web site Should I change my password?. This monitors the sites such as Pastebin, that hackers use to dump username and password lists when a site gets hacked. If your email address shows up, it will alert you so you can go and change your password. Excellent!

Who owns your digital life?

In times gone by, families would collect books, records and other items over the course of a lifetime. These items would sometimes be passed down from generation to generation, becoming a family legacy. But these days, we consume more and more books, magazines, movies and music digitally. What happens to those when you're gone?

Well if you read the terms & conditions for a lot of the kinds of web sites we buy these things from - Kindle books from Amazon.com, music and videos from iTunes, etc, you don't actually own the content you have paid for. In most cases, you are granted licence to consume this media under a single account. OK, it's not overly difficult to circumvent some of these 'protections' but legally, that stuff just doesn't belong to you.

So as the WSJ asked recently Who inherits your iTunes library?. This stuff in theory could just get lost in the sands of time. There are two takeaways that immediately spring to mind from this:

1 - Should you leave your account passwords with your will so that somebody else can enjoy your collection after you are gone? Maybe there is something in the t's & c's to stop you doing this but it wouldn't be enforceable I wouldn't imagine.

2 - In the case of 'the classics' - in terms of books, at least - most people would probably want a physical copy anyway. The same may well not be true of movies and music, though.

There are a few other important discussions arising from this too. Not least 'ownership' of digital content (as opposed to 'licensing' that we seem to have been duped into), Digital Rights Management (DRM), your digital life in social media, and the question of just who reads those t's & c's anyway?