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?

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.

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.

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!

Don’t worry, I am not going to go off on a rant again, its just that I am getting so disheartened with people thinking that we should be cheaper for the work we carry out… actually that’s unfair, the majority of people are aware that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys, or in our case if you pay proper fees then you get professional service.

In our ever evolving company, we often discuss well into the night the direction we want to take our business and many moons ago we made the decision not to ‘sell our soul to the devil’ or to be more precise – sell ourselves short.  No more would we try and fit in with a customer who says things like ‘what could you do for £20 a month’… the answer now is ‘nothing’!

So why the blog post?  Well as ever I just wanted to share with you the thought process behind our small business, and to hopefully give down to earth honest advice to other start up and small businesses.  If you know you are worth the money and you work hard for that money (cue Donna Summer!) then don’t undervalue yourself or your product.  By all means negotiate and even barter if it is appropriate, but in our experience the customers that paid the smallest amount usually demanded the highest quantity of our time and therefore we ultimately lost money.

As ever, your thoughts, suggestions or just comments are always welcome.

No matter how professional you are, there will be times in your life that you are also faced with external pressures, family issues, health issues, they all combine and whilst most of us can appear as calm business people 99.9% of the time this can sometimes prove just a wee bit much of a struggle.

So, my tips to help beat the stress of the work/life balance, following on from a great article I read on Jobs2U are as follows, and yes many of them will seem like common sense, but sometimes you need to be reminded!

• Make a list – what needs doing, what can you do, what can be left for a day or two, what is priority – sometimes just writing or typing things down can make you realise that there isnt quite as much to do as you thought there was.
• Take breather breaks – make an excuse to go for a walk or the shops, even half an hour away from you desk can put things into perspective.
• Delegate where possible – you are not invincible, accept the help of others if it is available.
• Don’t skip meals, don’t survive soley on strong coffee and don’t sit up working through the night when actually you should be in bed!
• And last but most definitely not least – yes your business is important, but so are your family and friends, they need you too sometimes, so re-schedule, give realistic time estimates to customers and schedule in some days off – we all need them!

One thing that has confirmed that we are not alone in our self-employment crusade, was the amount of people we have spoken to over the last couple of months who never take the statutory 20 days holiday a year.  The old adage that ‘if you don’t work you don’t get paid’ is a real worry to many self employed people, however, with clever planning and some extra hours prior to your holiday, it is possible to take a proper holiday.  Saying all this, I have to confess that this year will be the first year we have ever taken 2 weeks off in the whole of the 8 years we have been self employed, so it may be a case of ‘do what I say, not do as I do’!

Interested to hear other techniques that you use to keep the balance right and work effectively.  I think we have finally got to the point where we know our limitations and plan properly, something we definitely did not do in the early years.

Now we have known this for some time, but on Saturday I was reading an article in The Guardian and it appears we are definitely not alone.    Reducing stress and raising efficiency – we know this already!  To us having our 3 cats around means you can’t go a whole day without leaving the desk as they demand to be fed at various points, you can’t sit there moping around if you have had a difficult decision to make because they want your attention and the best thing of all, is you know all of those really annoying sales calls you get – well Amber Fenton is our marketing executive, Billy Fenton is our health and safety guy and as for Charlie, he is just office junior at the moment but I feel a role in the company opening up soon!

Well this is our dilemma right now.  For the first time ever (as far as we know) someone has said something completely untrue about our business practices which is not only hurtful but is unfair as we don’t know this person and so it kind of follows they don’t know us.

So, why would someone deliberately set out to harm your business reputation?  Of course the obvious answer is jealousy – a competitor perhaps?  Possibly, or is it a personal vendetta?  Possibly again, but you know ultimately does it matter?  There is little you can do unless it is so far ‘out there’ in the public domain that you could take a legal view of the situation. So what we have decided to do is let it go by us,  pick ourselves up from these hateful comments and hope that the person who has said them will one day be professional enough to come and talk to us directly – who knows it could be the start of a great B2B friendship!

Is it appropriate that I blog about this… I’m not sure, some people may be of the opinion that we should just keep quiet, but my view is that in such a small Highland community this kind of talk can damage peoples livelihoods and is therefore very unnecessary.  We pride ourselves on best practice, we work hard and we actively contribute to the business community in a ‘free’ capacity so why would we want to damage our own reputation with less than ethical practices… the answer of course is we wouldn’t!

Interested to hear about your experiences and how you dealt with them so do get in touch.

Whilst drinking one of my many cups of morning coffee I decided to take a break from the screen and have a read of the latest Good Housekeeping mag which has been sitting on the coffee table daring me to open it knowing that I wont be able to put it down and on page 81 of the November 2010 issue is a fantastic list of money saving tips that could be applied to any time of the year not just Christmas.

Again, is this relevant to my business?  Well actually yes, as being self employed basically Aviemore Business Solutions is going to be buying Christmas presents for all the family this year.  Anyway, one of the items that caught my eye was a new toolbar that you can install that checks the price of the item you are looking at and tells you where online you can buy it cheaper – now for all those large electrical goods or high value gifts that you will be buying your loved ones this festive period isnt this just a fantastic piece of information?   Want to give it a try yourself?  Well go to InvisibleHand and get downloading.

Another great online tool I am interested in is a virtual basket tool that will check the price of your shopping and tell you which supermarket is going to be cheapest – sounds like a great idea to me!  If anyone has used either of these tools I would be delighted to hear from you, having said that, on my way to instal Invisible Hand right now!

Being self employed the thought of taking a holiday means a lot of planning in advance, pennies to save, email responders to remember to put on, telephone messages to be changed and the realisation that actually if you are not here it is not the end of the world.  People are not going to die a hideous death because we were not here to sort their email queries out.  Don’t get me wrong, customer service is the highest priority in our business, but honestly, we can go on holiday can’t we?!

For the first time ever in our self employed lives, we went away for just over a week WITHOUT a lap top and have come back to work this morning and amazingingly enough our customers are still here and there were no major traumas whilst we were away.  Yes we did have our Blackberries with us, but were very disciplined not to use them to respond to emails (ok just a couple of times!).  But you know what, a holiday was what we needed.

Yes it is a bit of a struggle this morning but now inboxes have been cleared and to do lists made, life is good and we are raring to go.  By giving ourselves a holiday we found that batteries have been recharged, time to think things through was used to good advantage and to top it off we have just booked our holiday of a lifetime for next November – that gives us loads of self employment time to organise our bad asses and go away without feeling guilty!

Do you struggle to switch off and go on hols?  Answers on a postcard please …