What is Twitter

Twitter is used to send out tweets or “texts” that are 140 characters or less. This will allow you to update a bunch of people at once. This is usually good for a company or brand that wants to be in constant contact with its followers. Usually when there is an issue with a product consumers will complain through twitter and the issue can be resolved or the person can be redirected to the proper place to get help.
This is also great for individuals who are their brand. For example musicians, artists and more. Follow your favorite rock star for a week and see how entertaining that can be, you will be surprised. Apparently there is no restriction on content.

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What is Facebook

Facebook is a private club of friends. You can post pictures, rantings and ravings but be careful. Security on Facebook is tricky and changes day to day. Did you know that someone who is a friend of yours can see photos and information about you even though you are not friends with them? be sure to check the privacy settings. Also, be careful what you say on Facebook. If you don’t want it on the cover of Time then you might not want to say it on facebook. Even to your private friends, as this might get to your not-so-private friends. Just imagine sending a nasty update about someone you don’t like. Your friend gets the update and the person you don’t like is sitting right there and reads it. I mean, you have to have some respect for other people even if it is your status update.

Please remember Facebook was designed with college students in mind, not children. (Let’s not argue about that). Facebook has age restrictions and if you see a spammer someone who is not real, or an underage person you should hit the report button. Let’s keep this above PG13 but below Rated R. Facebook does have strong policies against adult content. They also have a “no bullying” policy. We believe everyone has a right to say what they want to say on the internet. If you cannot say something nice. Just be quiet. You will save yourself some grief. Unless you have a valid consumer complaint. In that case you should subscribe to my blog and find out how to file a complaint with the BBB.

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What is a Facebook Fanpage

Anyone can become a “fan” of a fanpage. You can have your own personal account and then create a fanpage for your business, band, or whatever else comes to mind. A fanpage is great because it allows you to separate your business and personal life on facebook. You can also create a fanpage for a celebrity or anything that you favor in pop culture, How many fans can you get ?

What is Foursquare

Foursquare is a location detection service that allows you to “check-in” into venues. Say you want to meet a few friends at Starbucks, as I do. I check in in the morning and let them know through the description field how long ill be there say 12-3pm. If anyone checks in they will see i have been there or I might still be there. Foursquare also has tips that let you know what others thought was interesting. Say you go to a new restaurant and want to know if there are any impressive dishes, well previous foursquare users may have left you a surprise tip. Good and bad information is posted there and is not checked for quality control.

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What is linkedin

Linkedin.com is a business networking service. You can post your resume, link to other social media sources and connect with people in your industry. You can join industry specific groups. Unlike facebook there is a lot of moderation involved. This keeps things nice and clean Be careful what you connect from linkedin to other social media networks. You might not want everyone to have access to all of your private life.

For more information about what is Linkedin

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Internet Security

Be careful what you say on the internet. Your information is yours alone. Please protect it. If you are using social media for personal or business uses please read the documentation about security, if you do not understand it just let me know and I can help you out. Remember the information you publish on the internet, once published is no longer yours. It belongs to the owner of the website. Even after content is deleted it is still kept in the cloud somewhere.

I love hearing every summer how the web hosting industry is slow. Yes, I do understand that the summer is slow for new sales. But, when running a web hosting company this is the best time to get things under control. There are three things you can do to improve the bottom line and now is the best time to work on them.

1. Are your receivables under control ?

Most likely, not. If you have clients who are over 30 days late on payment and you have not suspended their services, now is the time. Do an audit on all clients and make sure their domains are still active and their hosting is still active and call anyone 90 days or less overdue. Anyone over 90 days start a mass suspension on your slowest call volume day. I prefer 15 day blocks depending how many clients you have overdue. I try to stay under $100,000 in suspensions a day. Try this on for size.

a. Day 1 call accounts 0-90 days overdue

b. Day 2 suspend accounts 90 to about 120 days overdue. Just imagine if all those accounts called at one time will you be able to handle the call volume.  Do suspensions as early as possible during the week. Train your staff on how to suspend and unsuspend accounts. If someone calls how will you give them a 7 day grace to come up with funds ? I put these clients on a temp list and have the billing manager work this list to get these accounts paid asap.

c. Day 2 Suspend everyone over 120 days. ALL OF THEM. Why ? You need the revenue and the servers don’t pay for themselves. You have staff, overhead, servers, equipment and you need to improve your bottom line so that if you do get busy again you can afford to hire staff accordingly. Think of 10% of that revenue. What would you do with it if it came in all at once ?

d. By now it should be Thursday and your staff are complaining about doing their new tasks. We will give them a break and let them know this is the best time to handle invoice and retrain them to handle them before they become this problem next year.

e. Review with all your managers how they think the week went. Get advice from all department heads and find out what you can do to help them streamline the process of unsuspending accounts. How can you retrain the billing staff to remind clients of open invoices before they become a problem. Retrain yourself on looking at the age of open invoices and $ how much you could have made on time if you can get your staff all on the same page.

A few words of advice. If you do not have the staff to handle this influx of invoices and get this situation under control you will need some temporary outside help. You will need to monitor this group of staff members as they will have direct impact on your brand. The will also be handling sensitive data such as credit card numbers, email addresses, access to your billing system, and much more.

Is there a program your team can create to make sure these things can stay under control ? I wrote a few scripts that would run through the servers and suspend everyone 31 days over due. I make sure to run this program only on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Why ? Monday should be your busiest new sales day. You should never suspend a client over the weekend. You should never suspend a client on the end of the week because your weekend staff might not be trained well enough to deal with an influx in billing calls.

Last but not least. You should let your web hosting company know that billing is everyone’s job. Not just the billing department. If clients are not billed how do you pay for tech support. Clients should recieve tech support until they are suspended after that they should be redirected to billing to resolve their issue before providing them further technical support.Our next article will deal with ticket management

As a Billing Manager at Midphase.com there were a lot of calls that needed to be escalated to a manager. When the calls got to me I had the task of getting the same information that the employee next to me already got. Well, you would think technology could solve this issue with some retraining. And it did. To be a better manager and improve the customer experience it can be as simple as one word repeatedly to your employees until they got it. “COMMENTS, COMMENTS, COMMENTS”. You need to instill this policy and consequences into your employees as soon as possible and in a very professional manner. My billing department learned how to talk to a customer,  comment on an account, and resolve their issue if it was billing at the same time. If it was not a billing issue they found a free tech support agent and let them know a call was coming to them directly. This gave the tech time to get ready for the particular call and resolution or research that needed to be done.

Most calls that come into a billing department are really not about billing at all. I made it another policy to listen to the customer even if the issue had nothing to do with billing, comment the account, and transfer the call. When you tell a customer “I am going to transfer you to the technical support department.” The first response from the customer is mostly “NOW I got to repeat this all over again ?” Response: “No [client name], I have commented your account with the new information you have given me. Our tech support person[employee name] is ready to take your call and help you with your issue. My name is [employee name]. Here is your client id [clientid] So that when I transfer you, that is the only information you need to give them for them to pull up your account and be on the same page. If you keep that number every time you call it will help us find your account quickly. Is there anything else I can personally assist you with in the billing department, before I transfer you ?” Now, if that doesn’t put a smile on someones face.

Webhosting Business : Attracting More Canadian Clients

As a Billing Manager for Midphase.com one of the biggest complaints from international clients was the lack of a toll free number they could call from to get their issues resolved. When your international clients need to wait forever to get a call answered, then wait another 20 minutes on average to get their issues resolved, they get impatient. They have a very good reason to be, the United States consumers are getting a free call to most hosting companies and most Canadians are paying the service fees to get help. Shouldn’t they get a toll free number, or the ability for your phone system to prioritize calls long distance calls ?

There are a few solutions to this issue depending on your budget. A toll free number for Canadian clients, or the for the country the majority of your clients are from that is not the United States. You should already have a toll free number for United States Clients if you are a hosting company doing business in the United States. RingCentral.com has some affordable and creative solutions that can be implemented easily into most small web hosting businesses.

Another solution is call prioritization. There are a couple of ways that I know of to achieve this one would be through you phone system directly. You would need to contact your network administrator and review those options with them. IF anyone would like to chime in on those options, please register and comment.

The second way of call prioritization that I have come with is a human intervention. Changing the social behavior of your employees is the responsibility of the Manager. For Example: I had four employees, each one was given a different priority task above their normal duties. One of them was required to call back anyone that left an email response and were outside of the country. I am sorry but sometimes its just easier to address a complicated ticket with a phone call. Logging the entire call is the responsibility of anyone taking the call. That is another issue we will get into in another blog article. The bottom line is that international clients are very happy when you call them back on your dime, and you solve their issue, and you send them an email response with the conversation as well as the solution. :-p

Hope that gives web hosting companies an idea on how to help out their international clients Have a great day! Thanks for reading.