Seriously though, I don’t know what has gone on with the weather this year. Climate change? That’s for another discussion I’m sure.

Did you suffer much disruption? Did you have to send staff home? That must have been very disruptive for both you and your customers.

Luckily, FOT were well prepared and initiated “Operation Snowman”.

Terrible name for what was essentially a great exercise in mobilising our workforce to maintain continuous cover during a time of massive disruption for half the country.

Our customers noticed no change to our high level of service and we have worked out we lost approximately half an hour a day while we put the plan in place.

We had sufficient office cover while the rest of our staff remote worked over VPN and VOIP phones.

If you would like to know more on how we could have helped your business then contact us to find out more.

We also have a special offer running at present, this is very time limited so get it while you can below.

January Offer

Keep Warm!

Mark

Most of the funny help-desk stories you read are fiction based largely in fact. They make good reading and can bring a smile to your face, but there is often an underlying issue. The customer has a problem with X but does not have the technical know-how to communicate this sufficiently to the help-desk and a lot of the time the engineer doesn’t help the situation; either by not taking the situation seriously, or latching onto an idea and running with it without considering the whole picture.

In an ideal world a help-desk operative would be one-third engineer, one-third mind reader and a final third psychologist!

Our help-desk services have grown over many years into the company you see before you and a lot of this success is down to the fact we really listen. With comprehension comes understanding and once a problem is understood it is well on its way to resolution.

Often the best way is to take a step back and look at the situation from a high level. It can be quite easy to get lost in detail. Sometimes it really is a case of have you turned it off and on again. Yes, you may laugh but you would be surprised how many times this fixes a problem.

Being a good listener is not the be-all and end-all either. You must know your limits.

Stubbornness can often be a mixed blessing when it comes to help-desk work. You want to see the problem through from the initial customer contact to a successful outcome but you are pushing your knowledge to its limits. This can cause the problem to drag on longer than it ought to.

There is nothing wrong in saying you have tried to resolve the issue but it has beaten you. Pass it over to a colleague with more knowledge of the issue and learn from the experience.

Finally you need to understand that the customer is not calling deliberately to annoy you (well, not all of them…). They genuinely have a problem that is interrupting their ability to work and you are their lifebelt.

So it’s not always about the technology. It’s about the people.

“Only those who respect the personality of others can be of real use to them”
–Albert Schweitzer

And among the various bottles opened here was a very special example of Ruinart champagne. But what to do with the part bottle left over? Too special to throw away or leave to go flat. So I had recourse to an old trick. Insert dessert spoon (business end upwards) into the neck of the open bottle – replace in fridge and it’s good until the next day, and even the following one. Try it some day – it will save your bacon … or your champagne anyway.

So tell me – what do you do when you need to prolong the fizz in your customer relationships? When your sales people have moved on to the next opportunity, and your support staff are overstretched and have no time (or no answers)?

If you don’t have any little tricks up your sleeve, ask us. We don’t just know how to keep champagne fizzy – we can also keep the sparkle alive between you and your customers.

Want to know how?

Anyway, as well as the boutiques and the eateries, there is almost always an odd miscellany of street performers. ‘Odd’ being the operative word most of the time. I stopped by to watch one for a few moments while waiting for friends to arrive..

The guy who caught my attention had a good rock track accompaniment (note: not some gentle harmony). And yet he was enthralling the assembled crowd by dancing – quite energetically – with a 2 meter ladder balancing on his head!! And if that was not enough, he proceeded to gyrate (more smoothly this time) on one foot on a bar stool with a full size heavy mountain bike balancing on his head by the tip of the saddle!

Can you picture it? Not easy!

That certainly warranted a contribution from me to his hat full of coins. And then it struck me.

He was choosing to perform his act with these massive complications, which were potentially catastrophic, at the very least in terms of his act, and probably also in terms of his health too. In his case, he derived a specific reward for that. But how many of us also choose to fill our lives with unnecessary complications and obstructions, which don’t actually serve us, which don’t bring us a specific reward, and which bring potential disaster to our performance and to our health?

In our business, we actually see this quite a lot. Ambitious companies, looking to expand and grow, struggling to keep existing customers and contracts properly serviced and often without the necessary resources. All this when in fact just about the only thing that they can realistically bring to the table over and above their competitors is that elusive attribute – a well-resourced and passionate support team who are there for the customer, not just when pitching for the order, but in the weeks and months afterwards too, when
the slick salesman has moved on to other victims.

If you’ve had enough of juggling too many issues with insufficient resource, if you’re fed up of doing the business equivalent of dancing with a ladder on your head, then do yourself a favour. Consider what you’re going to do differently in 2010.

I hope you’ll forgive the hint of a blatant pitch – well, it’s Christmas, a time for goodwill and inappropriate behaviour, as well as unmitigated and uninvited selling. If you need a talented support partner who can turn 2010 into the start of a wonderful decade for you, why not at least pop in to www.fo-tech.co.uk for a mince pie and some mulled wine. Virtual or real! You’re very welcome, and we promise not to sell to you. Or make you dance with a ladder on your head.