Trevor McKendrick is going to be releasing a number of posts outlining how his first year as a member of the App Store went. The first post is a good introduction and I’m subscribed for the rest.
I especially liked the transformation his app has undertaken in just a single year. Quite a difference, but still amazingly useful in the first iteration.
Inspiration to say the least.
My friend, Nate Beran, just posted a great article about his views on IT partnerships. I recommend you go and take a look yourself if you have any interest in the seemingly endless talk about shipping more and more things away from internal IT departments to 3rd parties.
Here is the salient paragraph for me:
So what does a partnership mean to me now? It is a relationship where an MSP/vendor provides me services I need AND assumes enough of my risk to create a vested interest in my success and growth.
Very good. Very, very good.
I’m not ashamed to say it, but I am unreasonably excited about the possible $6,000,000 expansion (New Ulm Journal link) August Schell Brewing Company of New Ulm is planning on undertaking over the next couple of years.
Why am I excited about the possibility of a brewery expanding from 130,000 barrels per year to 230,000 barrels per year capacity? I don’t work there. I don’t even know personally many people who have ties with the brewery.
However, it IS local.
Local is vitally important because local is what you see, what you feel, what you touch, what you can intimately know because of its proximity.
For me, that is more true than anything because New Ulm is the city I was born and raised in (nearby really, living on a farm you don’t really get to live IN a city) and now spend time raising a family as well. Old, very old, and established companies talking multi-million dollar expansions is at least a signal for a future in a small town when the outside world might want to write us off.
Taking pride in what is local also provides plain support for the people who are here, the people who are a part of this community, and the people who you are raising your kids with. You don’t necessarily have to have anything to DO with it, but just being excited about it and sharing it with other people is something, albeit a small something, but something.
One thing my family likes to do during the one-third of the year you can be outdoors in Minnesota is to take long walks downtown. It is a good experience to get out and walk around the town and see what is happening not just in your neighborhood, but in the whole of the city as well. You get a better feel for what is LOCAL. If you don’t get out there, you might miss some amazing things happening around you every single day.
As example of that in New Ulm is The Grand. Right now it is also undergoing an expansive remodel to turn the oldest hotel in New Ulm into a home for the arts in the area. It features live music, wine tasting, and a very unique eating experience for South-Central Minnesota.
However, you probably would miss it if you were not told about it by someone who has visited or take the time to really take a good long look at what is around you. It has no flashy sign but it contains the things you would want to find for a place to sit down and relax.
If I do restart New Ulm Wiki (which is currently offline), it will be to have tool to show off what is local to New Ulm because I can’t help but think we are missing a lot by rushing through life.
Nate Beran writes about how it is time for IT to start trying to change business from within. I have to say that I agree.
This is where companies are going to rise or fall. When there is a partnership between IT and the business, big things will happen because IT does not have all of the answers … but IT does have some different answers or at least some different questions.
The future is coming.
I’ve recently been working through the interview process for a customer service position with a company that I greatly respect. One of the cool benefits of going through the process is the questions I get asked during an interview and how my mind works over those questions during the next couple of weeks.
I work in the “customer service” business every day. Working IT in a higher education setting puts me in contact with staff, faculty, students, parents, and visitors from all different walks of life. While I don’t ascribe to the saying “the customer is always right”, one thing that I have learned is that service counts.
It counts a lot.
I worked here for only four months, but I learned so much about customer service in those four months that it made the four-moves-in-six-months worth it.
The big takeaway for me was that excellent products can bring a person in and can even get them to buy something. Products can always be shiny enough, or “new” enough, or “fast” enough to get a person to purchase them. You can always market your way into purchases.
Loyalty, true customer loyalty and satisfaction, only happens with excellent service. Don’t underestimate what excellent, timely, and available customer service can do for your bottom line. Customers who feel like they are being taken care of are going to speak more highly of your product and your company than they would have if they don’t get that service … obviously, right?
This all seems elementary on the base level, but how many companies have outsourced or claimed to “help their bottom line” by gutting their service department? What a terrible fate for the company because that will rot the company from the inside, not just from the outside. Not taking service seriously means not taking the company as a whole seriously because you are saying that it is the sale that matters only, not the experience that someone has with whatever you are selling.
Just think about that? How terrible.
This goes to even how easy it is to GET service. Don’t bury service and support on the bottom of your pages, requiring people to set up another account just to talk with you. The Apple Stores are important for Apple not just because they sell a lot of stuff there, but because it is a place for people to gather and get their questions answered. That builds relationships and loyalty that Microsoft and Samsung are trying to replicate by having their own stores instead of relying on the Verizons, Best Buys, and independent PC resellers of the world.
Customer service is vitally important to the health of a company. That is one place where investment is necessary and will pay off in the long run.