Sometimes a person can have so many ideas that they never focus on doing anything with any of them, because they’re busy thinking of new ones.

http://www.ewhisper.net/blog/primer-how-to-host-your-own-online-applications-for-non-techies/

1. The Perfectionist
2. The “Done is good enough”
3. The Devil on your shoulder
4. The Workhorse
5. The Innovator
6. The Technophile
7. The Guilt-Tripper
8. The Workaholic
9. The Scheduler
10. The Friend

Get the details of the list

The answer to this question is that you will at some point have to outsource some of your duties if you want to grow your business. The answer to the other obvious question is, no. You will likely not find anyone as passionate about your business and ideas as you are. If you find this person, they will probably want to be a partner and not an employee which does not help you.

Once you get over that idea, which was not at all easy for me, you should see a difference. One of the differences will be that your management duties will become more important as your now managing the needs of your new hire or additional resource (outsourced) BUT the good news is that its no longer each and every customer. This is a HUGE benefit.

While im not an expert, I have had extensive experience in managing tech support call centers on and off shore at the enterprise level. John provides good solutions / resources and I have a few useful tips to add.

• Find companies that offer the services that you are in need of (tech support, sales, executive assistant, developer, etc)

• How much is your time worth?
  • Do some math on your existing time allotments for the particular duty in question and get to an hourly figure
  • Determine whether it really requires a full-time or part-time resource based on current hours used.
  • Consider paying per action (each ticket closed, each sale made, each email answered, etc)

• Process, Process, Process (This will save you a ton of time as your common question and issues will be documented for your resource and will not require your input for every issue.)
  • Whatever you decide, you will need to have documented processes for everything that you do.
  • Go through every scenario in your business as a customer and as the business owner. This will give you the requirements to develop processes.
  • Take these requirements and create clear easy to read and understand documented processes for everything, exactly the way you would do it.
• Meet Weekly by phone or video conference (not chat or email) with your resource for an hour or two for open discussion or to address any items that may have come up that are outside of the process. Contrary to popular believe, Email is not the most effective way to conduct all business. A one hour phone call can prevent several instant messages and emails.

There is no sure fire way to make this transition and some small businesses never make it. Id just say that you will have to make the transition at a comfortable pace. Hand out small pieces of work at a time and then expand it as you become more comfortable.

Which brings me to the example raised by Seth Godin about AT&T. What really caught me attention about this post was an actually experience from inside an ISP. First, I’ll answer the question,

what’s broken about the architecture of your customer service? What could you change that would leverage the effort you’re already putting into it?

We have always gone above and beyond for our customers, as it is first on our list of objectives (yes before profit). However, there is always room for improvement and when we find process gaps we adjust to fill them.

Now as for AT&T , Ive never used that chat tool and I am not an AT&T customer but there appear to be several problems with the support model based on the screen shot. The two that immediately jump out are the lack of privacy for the customer and the constant overlapping of multiple issues on an ever scrolling screen.

I would be interested in knowing why it was designed that way, maybe they had a good reason for it that we dont know about. Even so the end result does not appear to be customer friendly, which mean there is room for improvement.

As to the following:

For less money, in less time, with less software hassle, they could have used any of a number of free or nearly free systems that would be fast, pleasant and efficient. You and I could fix this system in an afternoon.

I understand the feeling here. You say to yourself “this huge billion dollar company cant do any better that this??” Well, the answer is they can but they usually wont. I would bet that there were many skilled people over at AT&T involved with putting that chat tool together. However, I would also bet that there were enough, non technical, number crunching, people and politics, involved to insure the final product would not meet its potential.

If good customer service is important to a company, it should come before any other objective. Everything else should work based on that foundation.

On the other hand, workers talk a lot less and put their efforts into accomplishing the objective. In todays world of outsourcing and downsizing, employees are constantly asked to understand how to perform a variety of task with minimal resources, on short timelines with maximum results.

A wise, well respected former boss of mine, once told me “I can teach a smart person any skill”

Ive worked with a lot of small business owners that have email addresses but do not use them effectively. Understanding that a lot of small business owners are Pro’s at their business ( i.e. roofing) first and the operations and management of that business is a second talent. First I have to say that this client admitted to not having much technical background and had been using another IT company that they trusted and frankly, they were burned by them.

Problems

For example, this client had an email address that was provided by their ISP. I might add that this was a dial-up account (this was 6 months ago), so that gives you an idea of where this client was technically. They were doing all of their communications with faxes and phone calls. This particular business provides several quotes a day. The quotes are on a 3 page template which were created by an application the client used. It takes him about 20 minutes to prepare each one. It takes another 15 minutes on average to fax it to the client. If he has to contact the customer by phone its about 30 minutes on average (phone calls are long because people usually ask lots of questions when communicating by phone). These are all averages and take into account, wrong fax and phone numbers, busy signals, backlog of faxes and phone calls, and questions from customers. The average transmission was around 35 minutes. Thats a lot of time spent on the phone and making trips to and from the fax machine.

The email address contained the company name which was good (i.e. company name@anyisp.net). However, there were several problems, some technical and others were simply due to the business owner not knowing how to use the an email address effectively. The client had 6 networked PC’s. All had been configured to use the dial-up account to send and receive email via Microsoft Outlook.

If you’ve ever used email with a dial-up account, you know this is a nightmare (i.e. very slow particularly when sending and receiving attachments) especially when running a business. What makes this even worse is that this client also had an existing high speed internet account with another ISP but the last IT company decided to set up the email with the dial-up account.

Also important to note is that the client did not know the username or passwords for the dial-up account and had never setup the email for the high speed account. The last bit of the puzzle was that this client also had a partial website, that the ISP was supposed to be building for 6 months which was in shambles, and webhosting with yet a 3rd email account which was not being used.

This client was a classic case of why some small business owners never get involved with technology. They’re afraid they will end up in this very type of situation. They had been railroaded by some IT company, by no fault of their own, who set there email up using a dial-up account and by a large ISP that never finished their website.

Solution to the problems

Since there were an array of problems. We first recommended to the client that we implement a scheduled plan that he was comfortable with, so that the changes would have minimal impact on his business operations.

Since we were also rebuilding the website for the client and providing hosting, we recommended that the customer cancel the dial-up account and use the domain mail that came along with the web hosting the we were provided to them. This one step saved the client a monthly service charge of around $20 and got rid of a non branded email address in exchange for a branded email address. Branded email is very important for small business owners.

We set the client up so that all of the PC’s were using the High Speed internet access and Microsoft Outlook. We placed the new primary email address on all of the PC’s. The primary email address should be one the encompasses the entire company (i.e. managment@companyname.com). Read tips on choosing an domain name here.

Advanced setup -

• You can send and receive emails on one or multiple computers as long as they are configured to your new email address. You will likely have web access via an online interface (i.e. hotmail, gmail) from any where in the world where there is an Internet connection. If you have employees than it may be a good idea to have one primary email address that’s provided to your customers so that you and your employees are seeing the same emails. Additionally, if your website is configured to allows customers to send you emails, this primary email address would also capture those. Later, individual employee email addresses could be setup to respond to emails once you assign them to specific employees. The end result is a process that captures all of the businesses emails in the same mailbox. This is great process for tracking and keeping a single record of all emails.
• Email on your cell phone – Some cell phone services allow you to access your email with your cell phone. If you want this option make sure your cell service provider and cell phone are compatible with the POP3 email for the domain you registered and NOT another email account from the cell company which they will likely offer you.

After implementing only a few of the steps in this article our client now raves that he has easily re-gained about 30% of his time per day by simply using email to send his quotes to his customers. Phone calls and faxes are still used but emails are now his first choice and he is branding every time he uses it.

An example of emails are as follows and graded (given this website as the business):

• kyle_1234@gmail.com
  • Bad (has nothing to do with my business even though my name is in it or, is it really my name or some other person with that name?)
• adwords-articlescom@gmail.com
  • Better (Contains a website reference but there’s no way to insure I can get this address plus, it still belongs to gmail and not me)
• kyle@adwords-articles.com
  • Best (contains my name and my website address, very personalized and professional, anyone who see’s this knows my name, the name of my business or website and has a means to contact me)

Which one of these does your company email address look like?
Every time someone sees this on my website, on a business card, flyer, brochure, or I say it to someone in person, Im branding myself and my small business.

Id much rather brand myself and my business and not someone elses business. Why would I want to do that. Im not building a business for them, im building it for me.

The same rule applies to MLM (multi-level-marketing) and affiliate program providers that provide you with a website and or email address. For example; SuperDupperTravelCompany.com allows you to resell their travel products and will reward you with a tiny percentage of the profits (maybe). They tell you they will allow you to use “yourbusinessname@supperduppertravelcompany.com.” To go along with the website that they are giving you “www.supperduppertravelcompany.com/yourbusinessname.”

They may also tell you its a huge reason to sign-up and resell their product. The fact is this is likely costing them very little, especially considering that every time you promote your business, you are also promoting their business since the email is branded with their companies name. Nice trade huh, in fact, some would say your a marketing tool for these companies and whatever you keep on a sale equates to a very low advertising cost for them.

One response that I often here from small business owners is, “we don’t have the money for this type of email address so we use a free one.” Or I hear “I do not know how to get it done and don’t have the time to do it.” Consider the amount of time you could save if you could communicate with multiple customers at the same time with email instead of one at a time by fax or phone.

Read about a real life example here

*Solution to the problem

Cost -

At the time of this writing, GoDaddy was selling domain name registration for $9 a year and web hosting with 500 email accounts for under $50 a year. Total cost of less than $60 a year . Im not one to count another small businesses money or analyze their budget but if a small business cant afford $60 a year for branded email accounts then they should probably close the books and sell the company after reading this.

What you need -

To get a branded email for your business you need 2 1/2 things:

• Domain Name – get it at GoDaddy
• Web Hosting with POP3 email – GoDaddy
  • If you feel that you need someone to implement and configure these 2 items for you contact us. Most companies that sell these services will help you with configuring and using them at no additional charge either with online documentation or by phone.

How to do it -

1. Decide on a domain name for your company. Take your time and consider whether it is a good representation of your company or not. Try to choose a domain name that is easy to remember. Make sure its not to long. Use hyphens if the name you want is not available (i.e. your-company-name.com). Remember all of the email addresses that you create will include this domain name, (yourname@yourcompanyname.com). Many business owners assume their domain is available because they have not registered it. Often this not the case. See if your desired domain name is available by searching here.
2. Contact a domain registrar and register the domain.
3. Thats it! From there you either access and configure the email address using the a web interface (most companies will provide this type of access) OR configure Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Mail for VISTA users. for access on your desktop or laptop.

• If you have a domain (i.e. yourcompanyname.com) currently registered you likely have email accounts included. In this case your 75% of the way there. Contact the Registrar (company you registered your domain with) about email configuration and set up you email account/s. If email is not included ask the company about adding email accounts to the service.

Read about advanced set-up and use of email ( like cell phone and multiple PC email) here

*NOTE: I do not use any of the GoDaddy services mentioned here nor do I promote their services for reward, I mentioned them because they have a well known brand off of the internet and most folks have heard of them. I am not aware of any unusual problems with their services.