Over the past 7 years, we have come up with all manner of cock-a-maynee plans for using text messaging in every day business life. Everything from ordering pizza and plumbers to testing for the sobriety of concert going teenagers. I’ve been amazed at what people can come up with. Having said that, some strategies have been better than others for helping you to build your business. Here are the top five uses for SmartNote.
Number 5: Reminders
There is nothing worse than making an appointment with someone, turning up, only to find they have forgotten. If you are an estate agent, you have virtually guaranteed to come across this situation at least a couple of times a month. Propertyteam have been using SmartNote to remind viewers of appointments for years now and scheduling reminders has become so useful that Martin O’Mahony, MD of PropertyTeam says “this software is the best technology purchase I have ever made”. Staff send out reminders for those dreaded Saturday morning appointments and if someone can’t make it - they call to cancel.
Number 4: Keeping the troops up to date
The IMO are a busy bunch. They co-ordinate a variety of services for consultants and doctors all over the country. This mobile buch aren’t often at a desk so sending out a text message is an ideal way to let everyone know what is going on back at base. In these recessionary times - group text messages sent out to thousands of reciepients make sure that members hear all the latest news from the horses mouth rather than through the grape vine (so to speak).
Number 3: Keeping the bar full
Howth Golf Club changed management a couple of years ago now and with the change they brought in our group text messaging service. The key to survival for established and new clubs alike is keeping the bar busy. Sending a text advertisement to members of special events and competitions means that the members don’t clutter up their post boxes with quickly binned flyers and at the same time keep up to speed with events in the club. The service literally boosts the till reciepts in the bar within hours.
Number 2: Feeling Hungry?
La Terratza restaurant in Castleknock have been using text messages as a means of promoting to past customers for a long time. In the last six months it has become a little bit quieter than Rudy would like however. Luckily he has collected patrons emails and phone numbers via competitions advertised on table settings and can now offer loyal customers great special deals. “It definitly works” Rudy recently told us over the phone while making another order.
Number 1: Retail Therapy
The single biggest advantage of text messagin promotion is the immediacy of the service. Having taken collection of a shed load of stock in the morning, proprietors and managers can fire out deals and invitations to customers by text within minutes. Noa noa, have just sent out a text invite to customers to their annual Christmas customers evening. There is simply no cheaper and more effective way of getting the troops in on short notice.
It is an early morning here in SmartNote. I’m off to present to PropertyTeam in the lovely Heritage Hotel in Killenard. There should be about 40 people there so I’m looking forward to showing them all how the system holds together.
“Missed appointments cost �19.8m” is the headline that greeted readers of ‘This is Oxfordshire’ on the 4th of September. A local hospital was losing nearly £20m pounds due to missed appointments. More recently, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair previously announced that “missed outpatient appointments alone cost the NHS around �250 million a year”.
Unfortunately the cost is not just counted in monetary terms but also in lowered quality of service at clinics and hospitals. If those that no longer need care simply rang to cancel appointments, existing patients could receive attention more quickly. While many clinics and hospitals plan for missed appointments by scheduling a number of patients at the same time - this approach can lead to frustration.
The repercussions for some patients who miss appointments can be fatal. A report in CHEST - The Cardiopulmonary and Critical Care Journal, April 12, 2001 showed that “the death rate soared to 27% for lung volume reduction surgery (LVRS) patients who” did not attend follow up appointments compared to only 3% for those that did attend.
Some work has been undertaken to evaluate different methods of encouraging patients to attend or notify clinics of cancellations. “A Method for Decreasing Missed Appointments” in Family Practice Management, February 1997 showed that calling to remind patients of appointments dramatically improved attendance figures.
SmartNote allows clinics and hospitals to schedule the delivery of text messages (SMS) hours or days before a patient is due to attend an appointment. Messages are fully automated and can arrive 24 hours a day. The SmartNote team can offer a range of implementation from a web based interface to custom integration with existing IT infrastructure. All of these services are available and keenly competitive rates - minimising the time to realise a return on investment.
Cashflow 101 is a boardgame designed by personal wealth guru Guy Kiyosaki. Guy has a definite view on how you should be looking at your personal finances - how to get rich and what to do with it when you get there. Speaking as someone who is still in the former category I can’t vouch for whether its true or not - but I do know that the game is a lot of fun and gives most more than a little to think about - especially if your working hard to get your hands on the filthy lucre and wonder if there is better way to go about it.
With this in mind I’m hosting a boardgame at the Olesya Wine bar on Exchequer st on the 3rd of October at 6.30. There are 10 spots available. If you would like to come along drop me a note. So far I’ve got the following attendees.
Its €25 at the door - which is going to support Fighting Blindness. At the moment there is a fair old technology bias to the group so don’t be afraid to try and break that up.
Elance, Get Friday and the host of other internet based outsourcing websites today make it easier than ever to outsource parts of your daily work. Outsourcing- you might think - is the concern of owner-managers or plain old managers. Not so. A recent presentation by Joe Vitael proffered a simple equation for when to outsource. Take whatever it is you earn as a salary - say 50k per year. Half it and divide by a thousand. That gives you what your hourly wage is. If you have something on your todo list which you can outsource for half of that money - do it - get it off your plate.
I was at a BNI Meeting yesterday where I saw a very interesting presentation from Gerry Kidd of Streetlink Couriers. I have heard nothing but good reports about Gerry. His company has a great reputation for reliability. It perhaps wasn’t a massive supprise to find out that Gerry had been looking at ways to streamline his business further using technology. He wanted to do this on two fronts. The first was for his account customers - allowing them to book couriers online rather than calling into the office. The potential pay off here could be huge in terms or ROI. If Gerry could reduce the number of staff answering the phones, or increase volume without taking on more staff, it would make a massive difference to his bottom line.
The second foray into the online world was with www.onceoffdeliveries.ie. Once off deliveries is something that isn’t usual fair for Streetlink. It can be awkward to collect payment and there is generally more hassle associated with them. There are however plenty of people who don’t use a courier regularly enough to have an account but still need to get stuff from A to B. The online service allows people to get an up front quote for a once off delivery and pay there and then by credit card online. It allows streetlink to take on jobs with payment up front - and because of the once off nature of the service - they can charge a premium.
It was fascinating to see the two approaches compared. The former had great potential for reducing cost and increasing volume. The latter would see to be some ‘icing on the cake’. In reality - the onceoffdeliveries.ie site has turned out to be the bigger success. His existing customers had become used to dealing with account handlers over the phone. There was also the extra reassurance of confirming the delivery by voice which the web seemed to lack for some. Several existing customers at the meeting expressed a similar worry about ordering online. Maybe these people were just on the wrong side of the bebo generation but there was a definte point to what they were saying - despite the fact you could also track your order online.
While the account system has increased the amount of volume, it hasn’t reduced staffing requirements. On the other hand - Gerry gets cash up front - at a premium - for once off jobs that he never would have never had before. A little online google advertising has lead to a turnover of €500 a week. Better still, he has opened up the service to two other courier companies and receives commission for every job they pick up from the system. In this way he has managed to scale his business beyond his existing capacity. This new online income is also independent of his real-world activities. It’s a system that could be maintained from anywhere in the world - or indeed operated anywhere in the world. The cost of the system was €8,000 and with a turnover of €20,000 per annum, it won’t take long to turn a profit. This has all been without any concerted marketing of the system. Gerry is currenlty looking for an overnight courier to extend the range of the service available.
If you thought the weather has been somewhat sub-par over the past couple of weeks - I couldn’t agree more. The unseasonable rain has had more than a few unexpected repurcussions for us - included a day where our website was unavailable. After some digging around - we discovered that this was because the power-sub station at our data-centre had been flooded. We thought we had a pretty rock-solid solution available to us - but it goes to show that you can nver have enough in the way of back ups. With that in mind, a raft of improvements to how our service is run including an expanded customer support / feedback portal have been brought forward. SmartNote customers can now log any techincal queries online and have an operative attend to the issue. We are also investing further in our hosting facilities and are currently sourcing a fallback location for emergency situations.
If you have been effected by our outage - and if I haven’t already called you personally - please accept our apologies and be assured that it has helped us to refocus on the core platform - stenghtening our offering further.
Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it. Coffee for example, is good in moderation - but even if your are a javaholic, you can overdo it. It was a shiney new Nespresso machine that delivered ths lesson for me. Having received it for Christmas I scuttled back to my city center pad for a St. Stephens day of coding and quaffing. The coding was my first forray into the world of Ruby on Rails programming. As a Java/php developer there was a lot to learn. Armed with 10 nespresso capsules and Rails Recipies I embarked on an epic 48hr codefest. This wasn’t a voluntary 48hr immersion. Ten nespresso capsules can pretty much annihilate any hope of a decent nights sleep or as it turns out - the following nights sleep either.
This did mean however that I got under the hood fast and managed to tear through a goodly number of the patterns in the book. This is a book aimed at the ruby competent programmer. There is no syntax introduction and it rather focuses on patterns and plugins available for use. As I wasn’t a competent ruby programmer - this meant there was a lot of experimentation going on. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I wasn’t in kansas anymore and this strange new world was populated with weird and wonderful approaches to everything from scoping to iterating. On the plus side this means it gives you a great set of useful tools you can start playing with right away.
No ‘hello world’ here. It was much closer to ‘user authentication’ or ‘adding embedded logging’. As a complete ruby novice this proved to be a bit of a challange. Not least coming from the statically typed, c’esque world of Java. As there was no coverage of rubys language features and this resulted in me doing some basic research on the net before I was able to tackle the examples. Having done this whoever, I found the book really enjoyable. The patterns provided are really useful - and provide you with all the know-how to create a leading or even bleading edge web application. There are six sections in the book (User Interface Recipes, Database Recipes, Controller Recipes, Big Picture Recipes and Email Recipes). As I page through my dog-eared copy of the book I realise that I only really scraped the surface of the examples provided.
I set about created a basic CRM web-app for my local business networking group. In that process I implemented the ‘Autocomplete textfield’, ‘Creating Drag and Drop Sortable Lists’, ‘Creating Pretty Graphs’, ‘Self-referential Many-to-many Relationships’, ‘Tagging content’, ‘Authenticating your users’, ‘Authorizing Users with Roles’ and ‘Send Gracefull Degrading Rich-Content Emails’.
Every problem I came up across when implementing the web-app seemed to have a chapter dedicated to it in the Recipies book. I was really impressed. Each chapter was well-layed out provided all the necessary goey detail to get going. The only problem I came across was with the graphic chapter as I didn’t manage to get RMagick installed correctly.
In summary - its fair to say I have yet to come across a more useful programming book. You could probably save yourself a good bit of time by becoming familiar with Ruby as a language and even the Rails framework before you invest. Probably the best thing about the book is it lays out practical ways to implement good practice (such as testing and continuous integration techniques) in a down to earth fashion. If you don’t have it - get it!
Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of 37signals and have been using their products for a while now. The simplest but one of the most useful - is the TADA list. It allows you to create simple todo lists. While working on a project, we have been using it to keep track of things to be done.
Using the SmartNote SMS -> RSS feature has allowed us to have up to the minute updates on which tasks are being updated as they go. Sign up now if you would like to give it a whirl.
At this mornings BNI meeting - we were considering our USP - or unique selling point in our businesses. Coming up with a unique selling point it something that might sounds easy enough. ‘Lower prices’, ‘better service’ or ‘we do what we said we would do’. These were a couple of the answers that came back from the room when asked what their own businesses’ unique selling poing was. If you think you have a USP however, consider applying the following litmus test. “Would your direct competitor make the same claim?”. If the answer is ‘maybe’ or ‘yes’ then you haven’t really nailed what it is that makes you stand out from your competition. Tony McIntyre from Citadelmortgages seemed to have the best answer when asked about his USP. He comes to your home and advises you on the ptions
for mortgages in complete privacy - as compared to advisors who work from banks or hotel lobbies. Tony will arrive at any time of day or night to give that advice. So - it begs the question - would your competitor lay claim to your USP?