Customer Service

Sorry SharePoint fanatics…
This is a blog about sales and marketing, but please bear with me.

In the last week I have experienced one of the best and worst moments of our business.  As a metrics fanatic, we tend to track everything around here, or at least I do.  As the saying goes, “if you can measure it, you can improve it.”  I discovered that as of the last two months, our #1 metric for lead generation has been current clients! This is a mark of great success for our company and it is one that we deliberately focus on.

Plenty of questions pop into your head when looking for the right SharePoint hosting provider. We’ve compiled a list of great need-to-know questions you should ask during your RFP or RFQ for hosted SharePoint services. If the company hesitates when answering any of these questions, your best bet is to keep on looking.

What a wild ride this last week has been.  I was scheduled to speak at the SharePoint Conference in Baltimore but had to pull out at the last minute to fly to Seattle and meet with Microsoft. I then flew to D.C. to have lunch at the White House.

Did you know President Obama is a big fan of SharePoint?  Fact: Microsoft SharePoint helped President Obama win the Presidency.  I’ll explain.

Migrating SharePoint data seems like it should be a straightforward process but as with any task within SharePoint, planning is your greatest ally.

Any time you migrate SharePoint data from one server to another, additional applications, web parts, and features may need to be reinstalled.

Below I have listed several scenarios and the expectations you should have when performing each of them. In the coming weeks, we will expand on each of these with more detail on the process involved.

So much of our daily discussions around here center on trying to make our company the leader in customer service coupled with making this the best place to work in the Midwest.  We are constantly looking for ways to cultivate innovation, to improve processes, to “legitimately plagiarize” great ideas and to foster bold leaders within our organization.

As a part of that, we often rely on the great leaders and coaches throughout our history who have said “it” best.  Below are just a few of our favorite quotes that inspire us to server our customers and our employees as best we can.

Warren Buffet says “Risk is not knowing what you’re doing.”  While “Risk” is a great board game and Buffet is probably talking about investing, risk should never be a factor in planning Network Infrastructure.  Often, mistakes are made simply because we didn’t know there was any “risk” to begin with.  Part of the crucial planning process is simply deciding on a naming convention for your servers and domains. This is a vital decision that can save you a lot of time (and money) by getting it right the first time.

What is a customer advocate?

In the most basic role, a customer advocate is a representative and intermediary of the company with the customer and a representative and intermediary of the customer to the company.

Traditionally, the customer advocate’s role is to resolve disputes for customers that have been through the fpweb.net internal resolution process, and our customer is not satisfied with the outcome.

Our primary focus relies on four behaviors important to meeting customer needs:

• Accessibility,
• responsiveness,
• follow through, and
• ownership of the issue

How do I affect Fpweb.net’s customers? I asked myself that question today. I am 3 months “new” and still  learning about the products that we offer the public. So, I don’t quite know all the ins-and-outs of Sharepoint or how Exchange is the ultimate when it comes to giving your business “anytime, anywhere communication” with “full-access to e-mail, calendaring, contacts, and more”… but, I am NOT new to customer service.