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September 30, 2008 – 4:01 am

2)    Pay good money for good people

It may sound counterintuitive to pay more money to attract top labor talent, but the reality is it works.  High quality employees that are either exceptionally skilled or hard workers are hard to come by.  Paying more money to attract top performing employees can reduce waste by trimming less productive performers.  Many business owners would suggest one great employee is worth three mediocre employees.  In fact, mediocre employees are often a drain on good employees and can have adverse business impact.

September 29, 2008 – 5:01 pm

With the global economy struggling and costs of doing business, such as oil, gasoline and food expenses on the rise, maximizing business productivity has never been more important.  Businesses that can produce the most with the least in regards to human resources, equipment, automated processes, and other resources have the best chance of success.  Many businesses have failed in the last several months because they could not discover great ways to maximize productivity while trimming costs of doing business.  Here are ten ways that your company can do both:

1)    Take advantage of Internet technology

Customer service is still one of the most important factors in success for many businesses.  However, in the fast pace consumer world, delivering efficient and convenient service is often a highly sought after skill for companies.  There are many great new web technologies and software solutions that offer consumers a chance to shop and buy more efficiently.  They also give businesses greater productivity from an often less expensive transaction process.  Many traditionally face-to-face businesses are now relying on the web for sales and customer contact.  In fact, Internet sales are growing by 25 per cent annually and now account for roughly 6 per cent of all business sales worldwide.

Are you taking advantage of that 25% annual increase?

September 29, 2008 – 1:04 pm

We are finalising the click to call functionality this week and will roll this out on Saturday 6th or saturday 13th October – depending on how testing goes.

This functionality will enable your customers to call you directly from your website or from any email that you send just by clicking a button.  More importantly it will auto save their name and telephone details so you can contact them again in the future for sales / marketing purposes.

Regards

Mike

September 20, 2008 – 4:24 am

Its been a while since we shared our roadmap so we thought we would re-post.

2008 Focus: To develop the processes and procedures that allows businesses to engage online.


Area: Sales & Marketing

Click to Call

  • 0800 on Steroids. Customer visits website, enters their phone number and when they would like the call, clicks button to submit. When required time is reached, system initiates call between the 2 parties and starts the call.
  • Capture Phone Numbers and Names into TM for business to market to

eMail Campaign Tool

  • Ability to send marketing emails to customers / prospects and report on click throughs etc.
  • Video Marketing capability where a member can send video clips via email and monitor how customers engage with the content to establish if one video sells more than another video etc.

Customer Surveys

  • Auto send of online surveys to customers / prospective customers on satisfaction etc 7 days after they have filled in a quotation request.
  • Ad Hoc sending of surveys where members can send out surveys on demand.

Online Video’s

  • Video’s of tours / vehicles integrated with online quotation / tours widget

Micro Formatting

  • Enhanced Search Engine Optimization of all online content with automated micro-formatted content

Area: Integration

API’s

  • Payment Processing. When a payment has been made through the system it can exchange the data with 3rd party applications.

XML Export

  • Export of Key data in XML format to allow import into 3rd party applications (eg. Quicken, Sage, MS Money, Excel etc.)


2009 Focus: To develop the websites that aggregates all of the content and widgets available and provides an end to end sales journey for customers and business owners.

Area: Sales & Marketing

Payment Gateway

  • Take “Deposits” & “Payments” online
  • Referral System between members / partners. Eg. One member can resell another members products and services and take a commission on the sale.
  • Discounts and “Special Offers”

Foreign Language Translations

  • Online tours auto translated into French, German, Spanish etc.

Community Site

  • Aggregation on customer feedback, online reviews, tour info, operator info and discussion forums to create online community site

Area: Integration

GPS

  • GPS system for vehicle tagging and real-time tracking
  • Route Optimization, Fuel Optimization, Breakages etc.

SMS / Texting Services

  • Improvements to the SMS alerting system so that customers can receive SMS on status of orders booked online
  • Ability to SMS customers on location of vehicle and marketing material “Special Offers” etc.

As always – let me know your thoughts.

Regards

Mike

September 17, 2008 – 6:05 am

We are developing some new functionality to allow you to capture feedback from your customers / prosective customers 7 days after they have requested a quote from your website. So the process is as follows:-

  1. Customer visits your site and fills in quotation form
  2. You get sent an email / SMS and respond to the quotation
  3. 7 days after quotation form filled in customer recieves an email asking for their feedback on the process and how you can improve it
  4. Customer fills in questionairre and you recieve the feedback
  5. We improve the process based on your requests

So there are a number of benefits with regard to doing this. Namely, [a] you get to keep in contact with customers / prospective customers without having to do anything, [b] the customer identifies you in the market as someone who cares about customer satisfaction and [c] we can improve the process for you so you generate more leads and hopefully more sales.

We anticipate this functionality being live within the next 2 weeks.

As always – feedback appreciated icon smile Customer Feedback / Questionairre

Regards

Mike

September 14, 2008 – 6:00 am

The new servers have now been put in place and are ready to use. You dont need to do anything different – you will now be serviced from them. Total downtime this morning was less than 3.5 minutes icon smile New Servers

We think you will enjoy the new performance improvements.

As always – feedback appreciated.

Regards

Mike

September 13, 2008 – 8:03 am

Tomorrow morning at 6am (GMT) we will be performing a server upgrade. We dont expect the service to be out of action for more than 90 minutes.

Why are we upgrading?

We always want to ensure that we provide the fastest service available.  Internally, we require all pages (except certain reports) to load within 2 seconds or less. This upgrade will help us get to 1 second or less in the majority of cases icon smile Server Upgrade Obviously the speed depends on your broadband connection speeds but everything we can do at this end to help is always something we think we should do.

So from tomorrow we will be on bigger servers which can process more data faster than before and we will have a dedicated supply of bandwidth to the Internet so you can be assured of the best possible speeds from our software.

Regards

Mike

September 12, 2008 – 7:19 am

This morning we rolled out a number of new functions.

  • Billing Address different to Customer Address
  • Quote Widget HTTP_Refferrer & Associated Report
  • Newsletter Widget
  • Quick Links Widget

Lets explain some of those in more detail.

Quote Widget HTTP_Referrer

This allows you to identify where your quotes are coming from on the Internet. So if you publish you quotation widget on a specific website or place a link to your widget from a specific website you will now be able to report on the number and value of quotes coming from that location. So imagine you are running a marketing campaign and would like to know the exact return on investment (ROI) from it – you can now find out exactly how much and when those quotes came in.

Newsletter Widget

You can now allow prospective customers to sign up to marketing emails from you. This is great for capturing new leads and sending direct marketing campaigns or newsletters out on a regular basis. We will soon be launching a new service where we can market to your customer / prospective customers on your behalf with your latest offers for a very competitive price.

Quick Links Widget

You can now set up a dashboard widget with quick links to all of your favourite parts of TravelManager. This should cut down on the number of clicks you have to make in order to get to the functionality you use the most.

We have lots more revenue generating and cost reduction widgets coming online soon – so keep watching icon wink New Functionality..

As always feedback is appreciated and keep your ideas coming as this helps move the service forward in the direction you want.

Regards

Mike

September 7, 2008 – 5:39 am

We have now successfully implemented the API functionality for TravelManager.  We are currently testing it on live and will publish the details within the week.

This will allow you to use the TravelManager widgets for online quoting and tour bookings and be able to get the data out of TravelManager into any other software solution you require or to do your own reporting on.

We will be adding more API requests over the coming weeks and months as you provide us feedback on your requirements.

Regards

Mike

September 6, 2008 – 7:39 am

We are currently developing a new widget which will sit on the dashboard and allow you to create quick links to your most used parts of TravelManager.  We will provide an initial list of some 20 or so areas which you can add to this widget and will add more over time.  You simply need to set up the widget for the links you require and they will then be only 1 click away from the dashboard icon smile New Widget

We are also uplifting the welcome section to include more tutorials and help guides, including videos and a quick link to the online webex demo solution.

Regards

Mike