What do you want to hear about?

Hi,

I appreciate that we have been publishing a number of articles over the last few weeks.?? We hope these have been useful to you, but we would like to understand from you what else you would to hear about.

Let us know your thoughts either via the blog or forums.

Thanks

Sarah

BT BizBox enabling you to take control of your business

Can you identify your good and bad customers?

How do you identify you good and bad customers - we are here to help you!

Every business will have their share of good and bad customers, but how do you go about finding out which are good and bad customers??? Obviously there are some methods that are quite straightforward such as taking a look at your customer statistics and see how much money each customer has paid your business, and how many orders they have made. This will give you quite an accurate indication of how is a good customer, it is also worthwhile checking outstanding invoices too to see how much money is outstanding for each customer. Here is what to look for when using your software tools to determine who is a good customer and who is a bad customer.

Good customers

1. Will always pay their invoices on time, if there is a problem with a payment a good customer will contact you prior to it becoming due and make you aware that the payment will be slightly late.

2. Place repeat orders with your business and choose you over your competitors when choosing products or services.

3. Give you their contact details when you ask for them ??? i.e. telephone numbers and mobile numbers, should you ever need to contact them. 4. Respond to letters that you send them if they need to. Obviously there is no need to respond to mail shots and other such communications, but if you need to send them a reminder letter if an invoice is overdue they respond straight away and settle the matter. Often this is just an oversight and the matter can be cleared up.

Bad customers

1. Will not pay invoices on time

2. Will not respond to letters or phone calls if you are chasing up unpaid invoices.

3. Will often complain for no reason in order to try to get money off services and products.

4. Will place orders and then change them at the last minute, this can sometimes happen as a one off but a bad customer will do this many times and fail to see that they are causing problems by doing so. If you find that after looking at these lists that you do have some bad customers you need to do something about them.

Bad customers can cause you and your business days of headaches .?? If you find that they are wasting your time and you are constantly having to chase them for payment, then you need to do something about them as you don’t need their kind of custom.

BT BizBox can help you sort the good from the bad through its financial tools.

BT Bizbox and Ribbit

Hi All,

Great news BT BizBox has successfully integrate Ribbit functionality into it’s platform.?? One of the first software applications to do so since BT brought Ribbit back in July.

If you haven’t already, signup for your BT BizBox account at BT BizBox

Thanks

Sarah

What’s new at BT BizBox

Hi All,

We have been extremely busy at BT BizBox, you will have seen that we have launched our new email marketing tool.?? A great way for you to reduce your marketing costs and reach a wider audience with rich media content.

We are also in the middle of creating new on-line tours, we are interested in what part of the application you feel need to videos to help explain them.?? Let us have your feedback on the blog or via the forums.

Thanks

Sarah

How BT BizBox can help in the current economical climate?

Are you feeling the heat from the current finanical crisis?

Everyone in business knows that there are ups and downs that have to be faced each year, some are financial or economic challenges and others are from other sources such as a growth in competition or changes in the market. One thing is for sure when your business is facing an economic storm you need to make sure that your CRM solution is up to the challenge that lies ahead.

BT BizBox is a web based software application that can easily be integrated into any small to medium sized business and will enable business owners to make their processes and service more efficient and therefore will not only save but make money too. For any business to function correctly it???s employees need to use various software applications to record contacts, create invoices and quotes, keep track of projects, store documents and files, keep contact information for employees and customers alike and much, much more. As you would imagine purchasing, updating, running and implementing different types of software not only takes time, but it also costs money, and money during an economic storm is usually in short supply.

BT BizBox can help you to weather the economic storm:-

BT BizBox cuts down on the need for many different types of software applications ??? with BT BizBox you and your employees can do everything from creating invoices and quotes to planning and setting deadlines for projects as well as storing documents and even checking calendars.

It’s easy to use ??? you need your employees to be able to work the application straight away so they can get on with generating new businesss, they can simply log in and start working! If you do find that you are unsure of how to use a certain feature click on one of the ???Help at Hand??? sections found on each page and you will be given hints and tips on how to get the best out of BT BizBox.

BT BizBoxcan help you to identify customers who have outstanding invoices sooner ??? no more searching through files to see who has paid and when, with BT BizBox you can see all outstanding invoices at a glance and act upon them. This results in more invoices being cleared faster which adds to the businesses profits!

How Green is your business?

As we adopt a Green lifestyle at home by recycle items, use energy efficient appliances, thinking about the type of car we have based on their carbon emissions, we have also began to take this approach in our business work as well.?? Businesses are beginning to realise that they must adopt Green behaviours in order to contribute to the wellbeing of the environment. This can be anything from ensuring that all waste paper from the business is recycled to signing up to other Green initiatives such as only using certain products from certain sources within the business.

It is not only the products and services that a business uses that can be seen as Green ??? technology plays a vital role in helping a business to be Green:-

1. Turn your office into a paperless office ??? this can easily be done now due to the storage capabilities offered by new computers and storage devices. By storing all information, documentation, files and so on electronically paper is saved in great quantities, which helps your business be Green by saving paper which saves trees.

2. Use video interviews whenever possible for first round interviews ??? this is one of the newest advances in technology as more businesses now are using video interviews rather than having face to face interviews with candidates in the first round. This not only saves time for the candidates and businesses but it is a very Green way of conducting interviews as there is no travel involved to the interviews which cuts down on carbon emissions.

3. Use webcams as a form of communication between businesses ??? this is a very useful way of having meetings as each person can stay in their own office and by using a webcam they can have meetings or conferences with others without having to travel, once again saving carbon emissions.

4. Choose new energy efficient computer hardware and peripherals ??? doing this will help your business to save energy which can also lead to money being saved also which is an added bonus.

5. Have ink cartridges refilled ??? doing so will not only be another money saving option for a business as refilling cartridges is much cheaper than buying brand new ones but it also reduces the amount of old empty cartridges that are being thrown away each week.

6. VoiP calls (Voice over Internet Protocol) do not use regular telephony technology as calls are made over the Internet, in this way technology helps businesses to be Green as VoiP shares Ethernet copper which is actually toxic and is already in place to complete an Internet connection.

BT BizBox can help your businesses to be more Green.?? Being Green was once quite difficult for businesses but today it is commonplace and new technology helps.

When Web 3.0 Arrives, BT BizBox Will Be Primed and Ready

Just when the global community was starting to comprehend the wonders of Web. 2.0, the term Web 3.0 has made its way into the digital lexicon.

Fortunately for those still trying to grasp all of the concepts and features of Web 2.0, they haven???t been left behind. Web 3.0 is still considered a phrase describing the future of the World Wide Web, which has an infinite amount of possibilities and just as many differing opinions on what those possibilities will be.

Visionaries looking at the future may have alternating views on how it will evolve, but the one thing they agree on is that the digital future, as did the digital past, will have a profound social impact, especially due to the growing participation in online communities.

???In only a few years, social networks have become a staple in the Internet landscape as the social networking phenomenon allowed people to ???put their lives online,??? ??? Chris De Wolfe, co-founder of MySpace, told The Guardian recently. ???A person???s profile became a representation of who they really were in the offline world, and allowed them to transfer their offline world online.???

The offline and online worlds are likely to intersect more and more as the Web continues to evolve into 3.0 status. It???s as if a population is colonizing a virtual world, and online communities are the cities, towns and hamlets housing the inhabitants. Those cities are expanding at a rapid pace, too, according to a U.S. study conducted by the University of Southern California prestigious Annenberg School.

The 7^th annual study, titled The Digital Future Project, found that U.S. membership in online communities has more than doubled in only three years, with more than half logging into that community daily and 71 percent of members saying their community is very important or extremely important to them. Furthermore, the study found that online communities have a major impact on social and political causes.

???There are so many ways the Internet has changed people???s lives,??? said Sarah Laycock, spokeswoman for Tierlinear Ltd., maker of the Web-based productivity tool BT BizBox. ???People having a voice online and being able to reach out to like-minded people has simply been a phenomenon. Sites like Facebook, My Space and Twitter are connecting people in ways we???ve never seen before.???

The 3.0 era will take the Web to an entirely different level, with its most intriguing byproduct being the Semantic Web, where artificial intelligence will start to play a major role as software becomes so smart it can reason by using a set of rules that express logical relationships between concepts and data.

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee is recognized as the visionary behind the Semantic Web concept. In 1999, he expressed the future of the Web:

???I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web ??? the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ???Semantic Web???, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ???intelligent agents??? people have touted for ages will finally materialize.???

When the Semantic Web comes to fruition, it will streamline inefficient and time-consuming tasks that often impede productivity and cut into profits. Devices like Tierlinear???s BT BizBox ??? which includes microformats, OpenID and Open Data Portability ??? will drive applications to talk to each other, even without the end user knowing. For example, a user could have information stored at Google, Yahoo! and another application, but a main dashboard application aggregates them together and shows a user the information in real-time based on a historical pattern.

???Products like BT BizBox will be able to assist small businesses in identifying their busy and not so busy periods,??? said Laycock. ???It will know what they are interested in seeing so it will learn what information needs to be sent to them in real-time. It???s something few imagined would be possible a decade ago.???

Laycock says that the BT BizBox in its Web. 3.0 form would create nirvana for small business, connecting suppliers, customers and the business. For example, a supplier would send out their product list in an open standard format which BT BizBox would read. BT BizBox then processes the file and identifies which customers like which products.

The end result would be that the BT BizBox would be capable of taking information from the Web (via RSS) and resign that data, resending it out in RSS feeds (via email, etc.) to the business customer base automatically. This would result in businesses that sell exactly what customers want and flip their traditional business model.?? Businesses over time will simply become distributors of product and offer service, which the suppliers are incapable of offering.

???The current version of BT BizBox is an online Web-based application, which can be accessed from anywhere by any Internet enabled device,??? said Laycock. ???This makes it ideal for the rising number of home/flexible workers as they can access all the centrally stored company information away from the office making them more productive.?? In the Web 3.0 world, BT BizBox will be extremely powerful tool for every small and medium-sized company.???

New Look and Feel

The new design will be rolled out to the live production environment this evening. We have completed the final testing and will start the migration at 9pm tonight. The current site will be unavailable for no more than one hour from 9pm.

Regards

Sarah

Coming soon……

Hi all,

We are in the final stages of developing the new look and feel and are now working on our planned roadmap for 2008.

So, what is coming soon….?

The plan is to launch the new BT BizBox in the middle of June.

Along with the new look, there are improvements to the project management tool, the finance module, the address book and the dashboard.

We have made some significant improvements, which make the BT BizBox project management tool a very powerful tool for organising your business. The level detail has been increased with projects, sub projects, tasks and the ability to store documents centrally. You can track deadlines, view owners and keep on top of your project team.

The finance module has the ability to help you manage your cash flow effectively. You can create quotes and invoices for your customers quickly and simply. You can track the conversion rates of your quotes into invoices, see payments made and payments due in order for you to stay on top of your cash flow. The next stage of the finance module is expenses with the ability to raise purchase orders with your suppliers.

All of the finance module will be closely linked into the reporting suite so you can see your customers behaviour, which will help you manage them more effectively and in the long terms bring more business to your organisation.

As I have previously stated the address book has seen some improvements, you no longer have to manage separately your customers, contacts and employees they are all managed together in the one address book.

The dashboard is a unique tool, which provides you with the ability to manage all elements of your business at a glance. We have designed it with a number of widgets, both internal and external. We have chosen a number of external widgets, which we think will benefit you, however we are always looking for your feedback so we can add more

The most exciting thing, which are working on now, is the i-marketing tool for BT BizBox. This will be a fantastic tool for your organisation and the great thing is that it is all going to be developed into the one CRM solution you are currently using to manage your business - more on this later.

So, lots happening…. expect to see an increase in posts over the coming weeks as we launch the new look and continue to improve the functionality.

Don’t forget to give us you feedback on our forums.

Thanks

Sarah

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  BT BizBox is a simple to use, "Business in Box" solution aimed at small and medium sized businesses.

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  • What do you want to hear about?
  • BT BizBox enabling you to take control of your business
  • Can you identify your good and bad customers?
  • BT Bizbox and Ribbit
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