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 

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