Happy Christmas & New Year

Hi All,
2007 has been a very busy year with the release of BT BizBox in August. Since launch, we have been constantly releasing new functionality and making improvements to the BT BizBox application based on feedback from you the customer.
Functionality released includes, to name few tools;

I want to take this opportunity to thank all our customers for their support during this period and to wish you all a Happy Christmas and New Year.

Kindest
Sarah

December 23, 2007 | Filed Under BTBizBox Updates | Leave a Comment 

Creating a new user

Hi all,
Great news, ahead of schedule we have rolled out some new functionality, which allows employees to be created at the same time as the administrator creates a new user on their BT BizBox account preventing any duplication.

When you create a new user at the bottom of the online form there is now the option to select them as an employee, by clicking this box the employee record is automatically created in your employee module.

I’ll be adding it to the help and support videos so you can see how useful it can be.

Thanks
Sarah

December 22, 2007 | Filed Under BTBizBox Updates | Leave a Comment 

Planned Maintenance this weekend

Hi All,
We have some scheduled maintenance planned for BT BizBox, which will involve a service outage from 10pm Saturday 22nd Dec until 5am Sunday 23rd Dec.

The planned maintenance is for us to update our database.

If you have any questions please contact me via info@btbizbox.com

Thanks
Sarah

December 20, 2007 | Filed Under BTBizBox Updates | Leave a Comment 

How the Internet has changed the way we work

With the advent of the mobile phone, small businesses were liberated. They were no longer required to be tethered to their office / home in order to receive business. Instead they could go about their normal daily activity and take calls everywhere.

This freed up considerable time and expense.

Then came the Internet. It brought with it just as dramatic a change. It allowed consumers to shop around and find the best deal / service - irrespective of location. So somebody in London could find that perfect gift from a small one man business located in the Yorkshire Moors or Lisbon.

Business were now able to compete on a national and international stage. This expanded the market but also brought downs the barriers to entry. I mean if it doesn’t matter where you are located then you can move to the cheapest part of the country / world and operate from there.

This globalisation of the marketplace brought with it additional challenges for small businesses. For a start you had to get your business out there. But where was there?

Search engines were a good place to start but if you didn’t know what you were doing you could spend a fortune on Google Adwords and still not get anywhere.

And when you finally got customers, you had to communicate with them - but how? I mean if you were taking business internationally then you either had to do everything via email or have the phone maned 24/7.

Then in a world where everyone can review / rate anything, you needed a reputation. How do you get that when they never meet you or speak to you?

Over the next couple of months we will be going through a number of these scenarios and helping you understand the difference between SEO and SEM, VoIP and UC, Intranet and Internet. We’ll demystify the Internet and hopefully show you how to get the most out of it.

We hope you enjoy these articles and they prove useful.

If you have any topics that you would like to hear about then let us know - we’re sure we know someone who can demystify just about anything Internet related.

Regards

Karen

December 19, 2007 | Filed Under Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment 

Progress on our roadmap

Hi,
Back in November we gave you a preview of our planned roadmap for the next few months. Phase one is due for completion by the end of January, I just wanted to give you an update on where we are.

In addition to these planned developments we have also launched;

So, lots of good progress in our developments. As always we are are keen to hear from you to make sure we are developing functionality that you require.

Thanks
Sarah

December 17, 2007 | Filed Under BTBizBox Updates | Leave a Comment 

Launching this weekend

Hi all,
A short note to let you know we have completed our testing and the following will be rolling to live this weekend.

1. New functionality in the ability to create departmental lists for your employees.

2. New functionality in the ability to email customers from within BT BizBox and record the email in the customer’s notes.

3. Improvements to meeting manager so that tasks can be assigned deadline dates during the meeting.

4. Improvements in drop down menus for titles within the customer, employee and contact modules.

5. Additional employee details to include personal details including allergies etc..

Keep your suggestions and requests coming and we can build them into the roadmap.

Thanks

Sarah

December 14, 2007 | Filed Under BTBizBox Updates | 1 Comment 

What’s new for the New year?

FREE ON-LINE TRAINING

Our plan is to start free BT BizBox on-line training courses on 9th January 2008.

These free courses will run on a weekly basis and there will be two sessions on the day, 11.00am and 5.00pm to try and suit everyone’s timetable.

The subject of the first course will be An Overview of BT BizBox, this will run for two weeks and then the choice of subjects for the following courses can be chosen by you the customer.

These free training courses are on-line, in advance of the course you will be sent a website for login into on the day and you will be provided with a local telephone number to dial. The trainer will then present the course in real-time allowing for lots of interaction.

An Overview of BT BizBox

9th Jan 11.00am

9th Jan 5.00pm

16th Jan 11.00am

16th Jan 5.00pm

Then weekly courses from then on with the subjects chosen by you the customers, the timings will remain the same, I’ll update the schedule accordingly.

These courses are for everyone and there are no restrictions on the number of attendess from the same company. They are completely free, if you or your colleagues are interested in attending one of these courses please send me an email to info@btbizbox.com so I can book your slots.

Thanks

Sarah

December 12, 2007 | Filed Under BTBizBox Updates | Leave a Comment 

The world is flat

“The world is flat” by Thomas Friedman is a book I would thoroughly recommend. (See Wikipedia article on the book for the 5 min version)

It highlights how the world is changing with the advent of technology and the Internet in particular. For example, only a decade or two ago, businesses used to compete locally for work. Today, they compete globally. Furthermore, the barriers to entry in many markets is dropping faster than at any other time. So there are more competitors out there. However, the market has also increased in size. If you don’t have to do business within a 10 mile radius of your base - then the world truly is your oyster.

This is a changing the way businesses need to operate.

Service is critical to maintain customer loyalty as someone somewhere will always offer you it cheaper.

BT BizBox is a software solution that aims to put you back in the driving seat with regards to how you grow your business. We are going to build an application where small businesses get access to the same or similar functionality and information that the big guys have taken for granted for years.

BizBox is all about allowing business owners to:

[1] Manage and communicate with their customers via email, SMS, phone (and whatever else turns up in the future)

[2] Manage their business (eg. what am I doing today, this week, this month, who owes me money, who should I invoice)

[3] Manage all of their information (word docs, docs created by the system including reports, key information that I need to be reminded of in time otherwise I will spend a fortune doing it in a hurry again etc.)

[4] Free up time and help foster a better work life balance (I mean that is the reason we started our own businesses in the first place wasn’t it?)

[5] Create greater levels of customer loyalty through increased levels of service, better customer understanding and greater use of referral & word of mouth marketing.

[6] Steer the direction and development of the application to better serve them as opposed to a generic off the shelf solution which doesn’t take into account their needs and requirements.

We are currently focusing on [1] and [2]. We will be focusing on the remaining 4 in the New Year.

We believe BizBox must minimise the amount of work that you or your business does.

ie.

you should be able enter the information (any information) into the system and the system should remind you (when you want reminding and how you want reminding)

you should be able to see at a glance how much work you have on right now, next week, next year.

you should be able to know who your most valuable customer is and why

you should be communicate with your customers without having to have a PhD in rocket science

Imagine a couple of scenarios if you will.

[1] You have a special offer on. You currently have to send out a mailshot (at considerable expense) or harvest the list of customer email addresses into your mail client and then mailmerge the message with the list which takes time and is a pain.

What if you could just write the text there and then, choose the customers by type from within BizBox and then hit a single button and voila its gone. Not only that but you can then track the response rate of that email being sent out - without any additional work on your behalf.

[2] You want to be able to price services on specific days of they year at a higher rate than other days because you know you will be busy or that the market can withstand it on those days or you want to lower prices on days you know you are relatively free. Wouldn’t it be great to see at a glance how busy you were this time last year or how many quotes you had to send out to turn into a job and therefore an invoice?

Furthermore we believe that if you, the user, has to keep on going into BizBox to extract information then its no better than a spreadsheet for controlling stuff :-) We think we can do better than that!

So imagine being able to tell the software what type of information you wanted to know daily, weekly, monthly etc.. and how you wanted to be contacted (email, SMS etc..) and then walk away knowing that you were going to be alerted to the information how you wanted it when you wanted it.

Thats BizBox 2008.

Regards

Karen

December 8, 2007 | Filed Under Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment 

Feature requests

Hi all,
We have been listening to your feedback on feature improvements and over the next week we are planning on rollout out a number of changes.

1. Improvements to the meeting manager so that tasks can be assigned to users who are not attendees at the meeting and also the ability to set deadlines to tasks during the meeting.

2. Improvements to the drop down menus in our customer, employee and address book modules, the title menu will be extended to include Ms.

3. Creation of departmental lists for employees.

4. Improvement to employee details, records of allergies etc…

We also have the route optimisation tool in testing, I will provide you with an update on this new functionality when we are ready to roll to live.

So, lots happening at BT BizBox this week.

I’ll keep you posted over the next few days on our rollout plans.

Thanks
Sarah

December 6, 2007 | Filed Under BTBizBox Updates | Leave a Comment 

Rollout tonight

Hi,
I wanted to let you all know that out of hours tonight we will be rolling out a new sign up process for BT BizBox, which will improve the end user journey.

It is a simple process which allows users to choose their own password upon registration, it also involves only one confirmation email.

For those of you who have yet to registered for your account please do so at http://www.btbizbox.com

Thanks
Sarah

December 3, 2007 | Filed Under BTBizBox Updates | 1 Comment 

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