The first 100 people to email: workwiseoffer@powwownow.com and enquire about Powwownow Engage during Work Wise Week (12^th – 18^th May 2013) will be given a free three month trial for their company*.

Successful individuals will be notified by 31^st May 2013 by Powwownow. 

Powwownow Engage

The Smarter Connection

With business leaders increasingly under pressure to be both more productive and more innovative – the ability to connect people together and getting them to work in a fast and flexible way is more valuable than ever.

In this paper, the Insight Team from Powwownow share their latest research into the importance of effective collaboration and team work, explore how our offices are changing shape – and show how small businesses and medium sized enterprises can benefit the most from the powerful new workplace communication tools now available.

Click below to view our whitepaper.

Whitepaper – The Smarter Connection November 2012

To achieve such a traffic rate in normal economic times would have been an achievement. To do so during today’s recession is something worth shouting about.

First it is important to note the key reasons why people choose to use conference calling: to save time and money. Simply put, conference calling cuts out the hassle and expense of travelling to meetings and using a video call even adds that personal touch.

Meeting Business Targets

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Motivations for using a conference call service covered; why choose Powwownow as the provider?

There is obviously a range of factors considered by businesses when making this choice but primarily this again comes down to time and money: Powwownow is simple and affordable to use. With a clear one step sign-up for making a conference call it is easy to use and also explain to other potential call participants. The affordability comes from customers only paying the cost of their own phone call, without any additional contracts or bills.

It becomes even more prevalent to save these resources during an economic downturn, such as now. Since 2008 when the recession first hit, many companies have had to introduce stringent cutbacks. Affordable tools and services that enable businesses to save money and potentially avoid unpleasant cutbacks have therefore become even more appealing.

Similarly, with many companies unwilling to offer the salary increases that would usually be expected, it has become increasingly popular to offer non-monetary incentives, such as remote working. This is made significantly more effective through the use of reliable and affordable conference calling, video and web calls.

Powwownow’s products have been able to help companies facilitate this increased demand for money-saving tools and effective remote working. The product range has also been expanded through the development of new collaboration tool, Powwownow Engage. This has a range of functionality such as screen sharing, instant messaging and HD video calling, which makes engaging, communicating and working together easy.

As a result of this increase in service demand, Powwownow has actually bucked the economic trend, growing in size from being only a handful of people in 2004 to having more than 60 members of staff in 2013. In 2012 alone the company saw 30% growth, with Powwownow achieving an impressive annual turnover of 10.2 million per annum.

When asked about how Powwownow has succeeded and grown as a small business through the recession, CEO Simon Curry commented: “The achievement of our first ‘million minute day’ at the end of 2012 was a massive milestone for us. Testament to all of the hard work and man hours that our team has put in to growing and developing the company, especially through these economically gloomy years, this really is something that we are hugely proud of. Never satisfied to sit back and take our industry leading position for granted, we are always striving to better ourselves and are now looking for the next challenge. We believe that conference calling shouldn’t be seen as an expensive luxury but as an essential, practical and reliable money-saving tool.”

Business Collaboration

It may be hard to remember a time before emails, but the development of this instant written communication tool was possibly the most important enterprise product ever invented for business. Not only allowing people to instantly send messages, for the first time it also allowed electronic documents to easily be worked on from multiple locations and by different users. For many people, this is still the default form of collaboration. However, this does not make it the most effective.

Using email to send different document versions back and forth can quickly get confusing. It is also the most common reason for email systems to become overloaded, as vast quantities of data is repeatedly saved to the system.

This is where using a unified collaboration tool such as Powwownow’s Engage, means that people are able to work together to edit and discuss documents from different locations at the same time. There is no need to save separate versions as people are able to see and work on the same one, whilst also discussing in real time via HD video calling what changes should be made.

Using the same system to screen share, work on documents, chat and exchange written messages means that it is easy to switch between these different methods of communication. For example, if it turns out that a quick question sent on IM actually requires a full conversation, using a unified collaboration tool makes that conversation only one click away. It is also possible to then easily include other call participants if needed – real time presence makes it easy to identify if they are available.

Having one combined tool also means that there are fewer systems to manage, keeping processes simple and costs down. This means increased productivity and efficiency, as people are able to easily communicate with whoever they like in the format that best suits the task at hand. This ease of sharing and inclusion often results in improved process integration and enhanced business continuity.

The additional benefit of this is that remote access working is more effective. This is both in terms of it being easier for the person working at home to be better connected, but also for them to be managed virtually and still receive the support required.

What are your experiences of using unified collaboration? Do you agree that this user friendly amalgamation of tools makes work processes easier? If so, this is surely where the future lies?

Advantages of Video Conferencing

Cost savings – money, time and space

The same as with traditional conference calling, video conferencing removes the cost and hassle of having to travel to meetings. Cutting company fuel bills and allowing increased productivity from the time saved, video conferencing gives a tangible return on investment. Participants can be based anywhere in the world and, time differences permitting, meetings can be arranged simply and easily at the drop of a hat, with no need for large meeting room facilities. The reduction in travel is also an environmental win.

Remote working

Video conferencing is a particular advantage for geographically diverse work teams. Impromptu meetings are able to be set up and held immediately, making it easy for people to come together to discuss ideas. Being able to take control of a shared screen, participants are able to work through documents together as if they were in the same room. This kind of collaboration ability enables remote working to become an effective and realistic option, with people that choose this work style no longer being put at a disadvantage. For a company, the ability to offer effective remote access working is a particularly important asset during the current economic climate, where companies may be less able to use monetary incentives to attract employees.

Spot the difference

There will always be situations where a face-to-face meeting is required. However, in most cases, video conferencing is as good as the real thing. Being able to see the people you are talking with means that you are better able to read responses through body language. This makes debates easier and, coupled with the ability to share and review data together in real-time, increases productivity.

Common concerns

Perhaps due to the vast benefits that it can bring, a common misconception is that video conferencing technology must be expensive, complicated or unreliable. This is simply not the case anymore. This commonplace technology no longer requires additional training or the need to employ anyone to set it up. There is no need for expensive or specifically compatible equipment for call participants and the technology used is as now as reliable as a standard telephone call.

So really, the question should be, why wouldn’t you use video conferencing to make your life easier?

The rise of eCommerce solutions, the proliferation of useful advice online and the use of social media platforms are all examples of how consumer marketing experience is affecting the expectation of SME decision makers. The level and openness of information has changed. Dan Pink points out that in many cases, a well-connected savvy buyer, thorough the use of forums and social media sites can now have more product and review information than the salesman. This is something that has completely changed the traditional buyer-seller dynamic.

Targeted Engagement

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Research from Marketo suggests that up to 70% of the B2B buying process is now done online – before they speak to a prospective vendor. Therefore the ability to target and engage with prospects in the right way, in the right online environments is vital. In addition, by using and understanding customer data, marketers can gain smart insights that can shape communications and offers. For example, such targeting can now lead to varying copy and changing messages for different prospects and groups. The business needs of a hairdresser are likely to be very different from those of a car dealer – even if both may be prospects for your services.

It is important to remember that not every product brand is right for every SME and that not every SME may be right for you to serve. Segmentation and smart targeting of SME communities enables you to focus on the best prospects and maximise your chance of relationship success.

Examples:

Customer Relationship Management is a powerful tool to help businesses track overall customer data, behaviour and activities. The CRM process runs through four main phases; Segmentation and Selection, Attraction, Retention and Expansion.

Whilst traditional segmentation has often cut the customer database by industry type, purchasing behaviour, personal characteristics, geography and perhaps some psychographic variables, the more sophisticated CRM programmes can now go much, much deeper. They identify and sub-divide customer groups by: customer life cycle (how long have they been a customer?), satisfaction levels (from surveys), product usage, brand loyalty, price sensitivity or contact behaviour. With this kind of sophisticated understanding marketers are able to shape more targeted messaging and services and feed results back into their system.

Increasingly, there is also a narrowing of the divide between the nature of B2B and B2C communications. In an article in ‘The Financial Times’ in 2011, Alex Dayon, VP at Salesforce.com said that ‘The idea that B2B and B2C requirements differ is stuck in the ’90s. It is true that B2B and B2C are developing at a different pace. But there are different complexities to the relationships and differences in the number of people involved.’

Most importantly no matter how automated the systems, it is worth remembering that every B2B buying decision still requires a personal response to your messages and brand. Whilst B2B may appear like a purely rational decision focused on price the reality is that the decision is still heavily influenced by personal perception and satisfaction in the service received. The full cost is not just the ticket price of the item; it is the cost of the price plus reliability, lack of stress and service. And so much of this perception will extend from the power of individual relationships built by sales teams, call centre staff or delivery drivers. As the legendary marketer Mark McCormack said: ‘all things being equal – people will buy from people they like. All things not being equal, they will still buy from people they like.’

First, a quick recap over the top ten email basics – these should provide a strong foundation for any email that you send, whether it is a regular contact message or part of a larger mail out.

Email Etiquette – How to engage with your customers

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1. Be professional and understandable – politeness is a given but also make sure not to use unnecessary abbreviations.
2. Introduce yourself usefully – you wouldn’t talk to somebody new without first saying hi but bear in mind what is relevant to the topic at hand.
3. Use obvious subject headings to indicate content and purpose – for frequently used topics perhaps agree on abbreviation headings, such as ‘AR’ for “Action Required”.
4. Send on a need to know basis – use ‘cc’ and ‘bcc’ appropriately and don’t ‘reply all’ unless everyone really needs to know.
5. Emails aren’t private – refrain from discussing confidential or potentially embarrassing information: never put in an email something that you wouldn’t put on a postcard.
6. Use friendly formatting – don’t SHOUT or get too excited with exclamation marks! Always spellcheck and use a standard font face.
7. Don’t overdo emoticons – in fact there’s a good argument for avoiding them all together: if you feel the need to better express yourself, you probably need to take another look at your words.
8. Be contactable – have an up to date and useful signature.
9. Beware of sending large attachments – if this is absolutely necessary first check that the recipient has room in their inbox and also the best time of day to send it.
10. Don’t hide behind an email – remember, your tone can’t be heard in an email and likewise neither can theirs; try to keep phrasing neutral and give the benefit of the doubt.

So we’ve covered the basic standards required for everyday emails. But what if you’ve got a larger email campaign? There has to be more than this required to really grab a customer’s attention?

1.       Make it to the inbox – don’t be labelled as spam

An obvious statement but without this your email is pointless; therefore make sure you adhere to the 2003 CAN-SPAM act. In short, this means that you must make sure your email is accurate and honest, has a text version available, includes a postal address and contains a way to unsubscribe, which is implemented within ten days. It is also a good idea to setup a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) in order to verify the sending server.

However, even after making sure that all of this is in place do make sure that you perform testing as a final check!

2.       Establish the goal and set a call to action

The same as any business action, know why you are sending the email and what you hope to gain from it. Likewise, make sure that this is obvious to the reader. This means ensuring that all of the necessary information is there and that messaging is clear. Make sure key facts are highlighted but not overwhelming for the reader and that the call to action (for example, acknowledging receipt, providing information or clicking on a link) is obvious.

3.       Make a good first impression and don’t rely on images

When sending emails that require HTML elements, remember that many readers will have images switched off by default. Therefore don’t solely rely on text within an image to make your point. Make sure that the image alt attribute can be read and that it displays an accurate description of the image it represents.

With a wide variety of email clients in common use, make sure that there is a prominent link to view a web based version of the email. Similarly, provide a text version of the email, not only to help get past spam filters, but also to aid viewing on mobile devices.

4.       Be personal and personable

Make the reader feel special and not simply part of a long mailing list – personalising an email is a great way to create a connection. Likewise, adding pleasantries such as “Have a lovely weekend!” makes the reader feel like they have been contacted by a human, rather than a marketing machine. However, make sure to tread a careful line and not to be over familiar. Too much assumed friendliness can be a turnoff and an email cluttered with marketing jargon, however well intended, is unlikely to be well received.

Remember that personalisation goes further than simply adding the recipient’s name. For example, you could suggest products that the reader may be interested in based on their previous buying habits, similar to how Amazon does. Or you could send different emails to people who frequently or rarely open your emails to either reward or incentivise.

5.       Analyse your emails

After going to the effort of sending an email, you want to make sure that it has had the desired effect. Was it opened? Were any links clicked? Was it marked as junk? Analysing the response to your emails will go a long way to improving the success of future mail outs, as well as the integrity of your mailing list.

A good way to test changes to your emails is to perform a split test, where you send a different version to two different groups of recipients.

Are there any other top tips that you recommend for captivating your customers through the power of email?

It is therefore a shame that the cost of saving time and money by using a conference call facility should be that the effective use of a presentation is lost. Although supporting documents can be circulated ahead of a call, there is no way to guarantee that everyone will be looking at the same part, or that relevant facts will be highlighted appropriately.

Using a web conferencing facility overcomes this problem. By using this to integrate screen sharing into a conference call, whatever the host displays on their own screen is also viewable by call participants. This could be anything from a presentation document to a website, a spread sheet to an annotated article.

Web Conferencing

The advantages of using integrated screen sharing rather than having a basic meeting or call can be seen in both client and colleague relationships.

For a client, being guided through a presentation is a more relaxed experience than having to take lots of notes. Similarly, providing a document that is directly relevant to the call’s agenda and that has been explained during it, gives a professional finish.

For colleague relationships, being able to view a document together makes collaborating far simpler. It is often easier to understand a person’s thought process if there is a visual guide, rather than having to follow verbally. Also, by actually seeing what the problem is rather than solely relying on a description gives confidence to making a decision. This allows for increased responsiveness and faster decision making.

Web conferencing effectively syncs the cost saving perks of a conference call, with the professionalism and ease of presentation provided by screen sharing. Why spend more on traveling to meetings, or compromise on making yourself understood when web conferencing successfully integrates the benefits of both.

Have you thought about integrating web conferencing into your calls?

SXSW 2013

Some of the presentations were around some of the technological and societal advances that are happening now, some presenters stretched the thinking a little further; things that would break industry norms and others just seemed to paint on a bigger intellectual canvas; taking on some of the planet’s biggest problems.

Something that was of great interest to me personally and from a business perspective was that of big video.

We have a perfect storm in formation, we have:

• Low cost HD cameras
• High speed broadband
• High spec laptops
• Smart TVs

And now we have an emerging internet browser standard for real time communication (Web RTC), this will allow video via a simple web browser, no client downloads, no trouble to set-up and no hassle.

This will mean that video will increasingly move out of the boardroom and into our lives. Video usage is already shifting, it is more consumer focused, it’s around distributed teams and remote working, it’s beyond departmental meetings -  it’s now job interviews, integrated into corporate functionality, it’s friends and family, it’s now natural and not the exception.

We need to think of video as an application, the value of video is not in the technology but in the application of and use of it. With technology so integrated into our lives now, it is hard to ignore the importance that video now plays every day.

Another interesting keynote speech was from Elon Musk, the serial tech entrepreneur – I’m still in recovery.

One would have thought that to co-found and eventually sell PayPal to e-Bay would have been enough for most business lifetimes. Not our Elon. From 2005 he has been the CEO of SpaceX who design, build and fly commercial spacecraft. SpaceX has a contract with NASA for supplying the International Space Station; in fact NASA is now his largest customer.

Elon founded SpaceX in 2005 with the express objective of taking life to Mars and for humans to become a multi-planet species.

That just about edges my vision for Powwownow.

Budget 2013

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Billed as the “budget for people aspiring to work hard and get on”, these were the immortal words uttered by George Osborne during his delivery of today’s budget.

Inspired and full of hope, we were encouraged to hear of The Chancellor’s plans to help small businesses and innovation. A five fold increase in the value of government procurement budgets spent through the Small Business Research Initiative should prove to be a significant boost for small companies seeking to engage with the public sector.

Also, good news for start-ups looking to grow: from April 2014, a new £2,000 a year employment allowance will be introduced for National Insurance contributions from businesses and charities. This will make hiring that new member of staff more affordable and so company growth that little bit more achievable.

Lastly, the reduction in corporation tax to 20% (a worldwide low!) should bring a much needed boost to many companies. However, realistically this will be of no help to the smallest companies with profits less than £300,000, where perhaps this saving would actually be most beneficial.

Overall, this wasn’t quite the ‘entrepreneurs budget’ that we were all hoping for, but during a time when cutbacks are commonplace, there were a few nice bones thrown our way. Here are a few other key announcements that we thought could give SMEs something to smile about:

• Increase in the personal allowance on income tax to £10,000 in 2014-15.
• Creation of a single competitive pot of funding for local enterprise.
• Pledge to make the most of apprenticeships.
• Increased childcare support through the introduction of a Tax-free Childcare Scheme up to £6,000 per child from 2015.
• Cancellation of the planned September fuel duty increase and a two year freeze in fuel duty.

Possibly the most important of all however is for that Friday night team bonding, is that the beer duty escalator has been cancelled, with an actual reduction in cost by a penny a pint from 25^th March. Not such great news for those with a different tipple of choice though with alcohol duty on the whole set to rise.

So, now that the proverbial cat is out of the bag and companies know what to expect for the coming tax year, perhaps for now best to keep those champagne Bellinis on ice and hold out for that well-earned pint instead.