3Points June 2009 Newletter - PDF Version
The One Question that Can Determine Your Company’s Future….
Determining your company’s future in tough times is not an easy thing to do, but there are emerging methods of helping you measure it. Today we wanted to share one of those methods with you. The measurement is called the Net Promoter Score (NPS). It’s the brainchild of Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Co., who is a pioneer in the study of customer loyalty.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a living view of how likely your clients are to refer someone they know to do business with your company. In Fred’s world, there are three types of clients. The first, and most important type of client, is known as a promoter. This is a client that trusts you so much that they will absolutely refer business to you. The second type is a passive client. While they are satisfied with your products or services, they are less likely to refer business to you. The third client type is a detractor. This is a client who may or may not be satisfied with your products or services, but one thing is for sure, they don’t trust you enough to refer business to you.
You can implement an NPS program by following these simple steps:
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Ask your customers the following question, “On a scale from 0 (won’t) to 10 (will), please tell us how likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”
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Once you have the scores, sort the responses into three groups: Promoters are companies that rate this likelihood in the 9’s and 10’s. Passives rate the likelihood in the 7’s and 8’s. The detractors rate the likelihood in the 0’s through 6’s.
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The percentage of promoters, minus the percentage of detractors, equals your score. As an example, a company with 100 clients, that has 75 promoters, and 15 detractors, would have a Net Promoter Score of 60.
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Once you know the number, find ways to drive it up! Start by asking this question, “May I follow up with you to discuss your rating?”
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If they agree to a call back, do so within a few days of obtaining the score, and get concrete, constructive criticism about what you can do to improve the likelihood of referrals. Effectively address those things, and the NPS score should go up. As the NPS score rises, the likelihood of referrals should rise too.
According to Fred’s research, a company’s promoters (those people who will absolutely refer clients to your business) are responsible for over 80% of new customer referrals. This is a significant statistic for revenue growth. Fred’s research has shown that the average U.S. Company has an NPS of about fifteen (15). An example of an industry whose NPS score should cause real concern is telecom. According to some industry insiders they have an industry wide average NPS of negative four (-4).
Today, many businesses feel that the NPS is a significant force, and is driving a real quality revolution. Countless businesses swear by it because now more than ever, companies need to increase customer satisfaction. This of course translates into increased customer referrals, and of course growth.
Recently, 3-Points launched our own NPS campaign, and we did so to determine where we stand in your eyes. Our goal is to continually increase our level of customer service, and wherever possible, to help each of you attain your business goals. We look forward to talking to you, and getting your honest critique of us, in the near future.
Social Networking: A Marketing Mecca or Productivity Thief: You Decide….
Social Networking, which is the combination of online websites that allow people to find each other and share information, is growing at a phenomenal rate. In January of 2009, Compete.com released statistics about the use of Social Networking sites across the Internet. During the month of January 2009, Facebook.com outranked MySpace.com for the first time in both number of unique visitors (68 million), and in the total number of monthly visits to their website (1.2 billion). Twitter came in a distant 3rd, and LinkedIn, the most pervasive Social Networking site for business, came in 5th. But the real question we need to ask is whether or not these Social Networking sites are going to provide value to our businesses, or if they are going to sap away our people’s time, and disrupt our company’s operations.
As with most new technological innovations, the benefits, and the unintended consequences, associated with Social Networking on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn will be hard to quantify during these early years of adoption. If you listen to the Social Networking Cheerleaders, whom I call the “Socialites,” they say that these Social Networking websites are the future of all human interaction, and that no business can survive without embracing them.
These Socialites espouse the benefits of having (anytime / anywhere) real-time connections to all of your customers, vendors and relevant stakeholders. They claim that Social Networking is the Mecca of all marketing engines, and that these technologies put small businesses on a level playing field with the Fortune 500.
The claimed benefits of Social Networking include replacing expensive advertising with free Social Networking strategies. They also include the benefits of having the people you know connecting you with people they know, which opens your business up to an audience that had previously been unavailable to you. The Socialites also say that Social Networking promotes trust through transparency.
The fact of the matter is that many of these assertions are proving to be true, as long as you use them in connection with a coordinated marketing strategy. A great example of an organization that used Social Networking to its benefit was the Barack Obama Presidential Campaign. According to Infonomics.com, which is an organization that closely monitored the use of technology in the Presidential race, the Obama campaign created a “…technological revolution that has changed every aspect of American life….” It further stated that the use of technology in that campaign “…had fundamentally realigned the power dynamic in politics”
In order to do this, the Obama technology team had to assemble a Social Networking marketing strategy that eventually included 57 MySpace profiles, as well as a presence on Facebook, Flickr, Digg, LinkedIn, and a dozen other platforms. It was an unprecedented use of Social Networking; and it has set the new standard by which all future presidential campaigns will be run.
Unfortunately for the Socialites, this campaign proved one other thing about Social Networking, which is that a properly executed Social Networking campaign requires people (sometimes a lot of people), all of whom must share a common vision before success can be achieved. This does not bode well for most small businesses, most of who are working at full capacity already.
Having said that, you may be surprised at how many people at your company are already on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter; and some are even “Socializing” with their family and friends during the workday using company computers and PDA cell phones. Many of the Social Networking sites have an immediate response feature, whereby people give updates as to their experiences throughout the day. Then their friends comment on these actions, upload funny pictures to their social pages, and send micro-applications to each other to test their knowledge of movies, songs and many other non-business-related topics. The Nielsen Online article entitled "Social Networking's New Global Footprint," claims that people spend one out of every eleven minutes online on a social networking site. For those people who work at a computer all day, it means about 10% of their time, or 50 minutes of each day, could be spent socializing online.
The statistics about the business threats that come with Social Networking are also bad news for the small business. For instance, say you have a person at “Company A” who is on Facebook, and they have published where they work, and they have included a link to Company A’s website in their profile. They also have a lot of friends in their social network, some of whom they have not seen or heard from since High School. One of these “Old Friends” works for “Company B”, who happens to be a competitor to Company A. Now, the person at Company A is having a bad day, and they are posting all kinds of personal information about their experiences at work on Facebook, and the competitor at Company B is reading all of it. The rest of this story is self-evident, and potentially damaging in ways that can’t even be imagined.
Finally, but no less important, are the technological threats that social networking sites represent. As we all know, once a new technology becomes useful, the spammers and hackers of the world are going to follow close behind. This is certainly the case with social networking. Today, the main way that social sites are compromised is by using their own technical features against them.
For instance, on Facebook you can select various logos, pictures and micro-applications to send to your friends from a library of tools that have been created by other Facebook users. The spammers and hackers have recognized this security hole, and they have been programming Trojan Horse-like applications that hide within these files, and which can be used to compromise a Facebook user’s computer. If that computer is located on a company’s network, then every computer on the network faces a potential infection; and since the Socialites are swapping these Facebook elements millions of times per day, it does not take very long for a new threat to spread uncontrolled through an entire online community, and into all the systems that are connected to the infected ones.
Determining whether or not online Social Networking is for your company is a matter of personal choice; but if you properly plan, staff and manage the effort, it can be an amazing business tool that yields phenomenal results. However, if Social Networking is allowed to go unchecked, or left unmanaged, all too often these threats can have a serious impact on the company’s ability to function. The keys to success are adequate planning, specific intent, and closely managed execution.
For more information, please contact Steve Banke at sbanke@3points.com or call him at 708-546-4928.
Is Your Network Being Monitored?
If not, it sure should be. There is a popular misconception amongst businesses that if they aren’t experiencing issues, or if they have new equipment, then they don’t need their systems monitored. This could not be farther from the truth. Your systems should at least be monitored on a bi-weekly basis. At this frequency, we can catch a failing component quickly and notify a 3 Points network technician for immediate service.
For those client systems that aren’t being monitored, a small issue can turn into a larger issue. Large issues can cause system crashes which can lead to unplanned expenses which most companies can’t afford these days.
Remote monitoring also manages your software licensing. Each report will give you the expiration dates on your software licenses. The following is a small example of items that are reviewed each time remote monitoring is performed:
- Drive Space
- Exchange Mailbox Space
- Memory Usage
- Back-ups (Tapes and other)
- Anti-Virus Protection
- SPAM Protection
- Server Error Logs
- Windows Updates
- Server Defrags
- Firewall Firmware
- Internet Speed
- Software Licensing
If you are not currently on monitoring services, or aren’t being monitored on a bi-weekly frequency, please call your Account Manager so we can get started today!
3P Online Backups
“Who Forgot to Put in the Tape Last Night?”
“Your Data has Exceeded the Tape Size.”
How many times have you heard this? Although reliable and still the industry standard for backing up data, tape backup systems have become more expensive as small business data continues to grow. Furthermore, many small businesses have too much to focus on and end up forgetting to change the tape on a nightly basis. Over the last six months, several clients have requested alternatives to the traditional tape drives. So 3 Points has researched, tested, and now offers a choice - 3P Online Backups.
3P Online Backups offer clients the ability to send their backups to a secure, offsite datacenter. All data is encrypted on the way to the datacenter and also during storage, utilizing HIPAA compliant, 448-bit encryption. Instead of full backups occurring every night, 3P Online Backups check for and sync all data changes 24x7x365. Throughout the day, the backups only consume a small percentage of the bandwidth. However, during nights and weekends, the backups will utilize the entire internet circuit.
Also, as a small business’s data continues to grow, the need to upgrade hardware and software is eliminated. 3P Online Backups scale to the size of your backup on a daily basis. This means that as data grows or shrinks, you are only paying for the storage used. Backing up your data now becomes part of your operating budget instead of a capital purchase every few years.
Finally, 3P Online Backups is great for businesses with laptop users or remote/ home offices. Instead of having a file server at each location with a dedicated backup system, 3P Online Backups can store data from workstations as long as they have internet connections.
Our goal is to offer all our clients choices when upgrading their network, with special attention given to backup. So while Online Backups are great for many businesses, others will still want and need a tape drive. 3 Points will supply a comparison for both options and help you decide which direction fits your needs best. If you are interested in the program, please contact your Account Manager.