Archive for the ‘Everything Else’ Category

Follow Friday #FF is driving me crazy

Everything Else | Posted by Katie
Apr 13 2012

Is it just me or is the #FF becoming a bit of a joke?  Actually I know its not just me because I have read other people’s blogs about it but today kind of felt like the last straw when allllll day and I mean all day our Twitter stream has been full of random #FF tweets.

I don’t have a problem with a genuine #FF where it states a good reason why I should go and start following this new person, I do have a massive problem when there are reams of tweets #FFing the world and cramming as many Twitter accounts into the one tweet as possible.

Oh and just to continue on with my rant there really is nothing worse that someone RTing the tweet that they were #FF’d in!  And now I sound like an ffing lunatic!

I suppose that one of the reasons I get so angry about it all, apart from the fact it is useless drivel filling up the Twitter stream, is that I probably miss a lot of genuine Follow Fridays because of all this rubbish.  So on one of the blog posts I read recently, whilst over a year old, they did mention trying to start a #RealFF and I would be interested to hear if anyone has used it, been impressed by it and has found new business or contacts through it?

I have to say until this madness calms down I will not be partaking in the #FF love-in, just not my scene and just adds to the nonsense in my opinion that Twitter is kind of leaning towards, you know the thing I’m talking about, where people RT something just because it’s got their name in it – come on, that’s like showing newspaper clippings to random people in the street just because there happened to be a photo of you in it!

So, is it confirmed that I am definitely a grumpy old woman or is anyone else feeling my pain?  Answers on a genuine lack of #FF tagged up tweet please :)

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Customer Service is Key

Everything Else | Posted by Katie
Feb 01 2012

How many different companies do you think you use in a day, a week, a month for your personal transactions right through to business services?  Well I know that we use loads and more often than not there is a problem.

All businesses encounter problems, delivery issues (why charge more to the Highlands – don’t get me started on that one!), stock issues, faulty or damaged goods, or as in the case of a recent transaction with Amazon, the order was lost completely.  Who’s fault is it?  Well I don’t really care to be honest I just want the goods that we ordered.  So I went onto the Amazon website, went to my orders, found the one that still had not arrived, pressed contact us, said they hadn’t arrived and within 5 minutes – yes you did read that right – I got a response from Amazon that wasn’t one of these ‘thank you for your enquiry we will deal with it when we manage to get round to it’ replies, it was in good English and it answered my question.  Now why, if a large and lets be honest enormous company like Amazon can manage good customer service, why can’t we all?

As a small business we pride ourselves on customer service, hate to think that a customer is let down by our lack of attention to detail or by not keeping them informed of anything, but our customer base is much more manageable than Amazon’s – so what makes them so different?  We have a list of complaints from Blackberry to Vodafone, Scottish Hydro Electric to Intuit Quickbooks and all of them are large multinational companies and all of them fail miserably to deal with customers the way we should be dealt with.

Not quite sure what I am going to do about it other than my usual rant on our blog, but I am interested to hear your good and bad customer service experiences so we know who to use in the future and who to avoid like the plague… our current avoidance recommendation is the Morrisons Petrol Station at Fort William – rude staff – and our current hero is obviously Amazon :)   Who are your heroes and villains in the customer service world?

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Is social media ruining our grammar?

Everything Else | Posted by Katie
Dec 09 2011

OK I feel another rant coming on….  I have ranted before about spelling and how it portrays your business poorly if you make glaring mistakes, but now I am starting to get completely riled by the shortening of words on social media posts.

Thanks to the 140 character width on Twitter I appreciate that you sometimes have to be a bit canny with the way you word things, but using sum instead of some just is not right and I am here to stand up for the English language!  I can almost (and I mean almost) put up with numbers being used instead of words i.e. 4-for or 2-to/too and 2B-to be or my personal favourite (not) m8-mate but to change words completely so that their meaning makes no sense just makes me shake my head in shame like a grown up adult – who’d have thought it?

So, what has driven me to a blog post like this today, well normally I wouldn’t name and shame, however, as the company in question this morning is a large well known and well respected company I thought I would actually say GLASGOW AIRPORT why oh why are you letting someone write public notices (Twitter posts) for you who clearly has a tenuous grip on the English language?  They are promoting your business and regardless of the fact that this is social media, this doesn’t mean that you can use teenage slang does it m8?  Oh and by the way Glasgow airport – the link to your Twitter profile from the home page of your website doesn’t work – just kind of makes everything even worse!

Text messages are predominantly personal, but a Twitter stream or Facebook page especially for large companies is out there in the public domain and I find it incomprehensible that work is not vetted prior to being published online?  Perhaps I just need to shut up and realise that this is the way things are going, but I hope not.

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Moral dilema | business decision – when do you say no?

Business News, Everything Else | Posted by Katie
Aug 02 2011

You know that saying ‘you learn from your mistakes’?  Well, sometimes you do learn but it doesn’t mean the decision making is any easier.

So, the dilemma is:  what do you do when your customers don’t pay on time even though you have had discussions, you have agreed a way of working out the payments and then all of a sudden they stop taking your calls or not responding to emails?

Well, in the past this was the situation we were in and we naively thought that the customer in question would clear his debt and all would be well again.  How silly were we?  He ended up leaving us, still owing us a considerable amount of money, was verbally threatening on email and telephone and was so horrid that we ended up giving him the information he required to set up his website with someone else just to get rid of him.  That was a year ago and to this day we have still not received the money even after spending more money asking a debt collection company to get involved.

So, you can imagine how awkward we now feel when we find ourselves in a similar situation with two more customers.  Long standing customers, one of them is relatively local, and we are in the position where if we take the websites down we are effectively cutting off one of the major streams of income to their businesses.  Whilst this pains us and makes us feel uncomfortable, from a business point of view we are in the position of if we take their website offline then we are almost guaranteeing that the relationship is now beyond repair and we are probably going to lose their business.

Well, we had to toughen up, one website went offline yesterday – and amazingly enough the customer has got in touch – the other website is due to go offline tomorrow – we will see what happens then.  In the grand scheme of things, it is not cost effective having to spend time chasing payments so what do you do as a small business owner who doesn’t like to upset people?

I don’t know the answer!  As always, keen to find out how you deal with this situation because I am sure we are not the only ones.

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People say ‘I don’t get Twitter’ – I don’t blame you!

Business News, Everything Else | Posted by Katie
Jul 11 2011

As far as we at ABS towers are concerned Twitter is a wonderful thing, yes it can be time consuming, frustrating, comical and down right ridiculous sometimes but, from a keeping up with what everyone’s doing point of view it is invaluable.  Oh and yes we have got business from it.  All good reasons in our eyes why being on Twitter is a must for our business.

However, the same can not be said about many people we meet.  Don’t get me wrong, many have embraced Twitter along with Facebook and actively get involved, but you know, after the last week’s worth of tweets from ‘some’ people we have been following, it really is no wonder people don’t get Twitter.

Scenario….. as most of you are aware we live in beautiful Scotland and for the past week or so have been living in a golfers paradise thanks to the golf up at Castle Stuart, which, let me be clear whilst it’s not a million miles away it most definitely is not on our immediate door step and as a neighbour showed us yesterday in order to be there for the golf he had to leave here at 6.30am on a Sunday morning!  However, if you had been watching our Twitter stream you would be excused from thinking we live and work next door to Castle Stuart and actually its not the golf that people have been here for it has been for the wonderful shopping, accommodation, lunches and dinners that they can have #castlestuart #golfopen #golfspecial !

Before I go off into rant mode, I personally don’t have an issue with hanging onto the marketing coat tales of a big event.  What I do have an issue with is blatant advertising made to look like it is a public service, somehow it just seems wrong to me.  In our eyes ramming sales messages down our twitter stream throat is a sure way to make us unfollow.  It also makes us more aware of why people don’t get Twitter.

So we’re asking please…. remember the old example : would you stand in a room full of people you don’t know and without any prompting start shouting out a sales message?  The answer hopefully is no!

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