Posts Tagged ‘Customer Relations’

Leveraging Social Media

August 24th, 2009 by Ben Hwang

social media poststamps If you’re an Internet based business such as our web based accounting, then you might already be leveraging your social media networks.

There are plenty out there from Twitter to Facebook, and all of them have different types of scenarios that you should be paying attention to since the audiences are actually somewhat different. For example, if you are leveraging Facebook, there’s a good chance that you’re trying to sell a product or service to friends and acquaintances that you’ve met along the ways. However, microblogging sites such as Twitter provide a different type of scenario where the audience is not only the people that are looking to follow you, but also the real-time stream of information going across like a river. If it passes at just the right time, when someone is looking, you’ll have gained more eyes on your marketing.

Now, there’s multiple reasons to do social media networks, and it truly depends on whether or not your segmented market audience happens to use these services. For us, many of our clients happen to be freelancers of all types and are very in-tune with social networks in general which makes it a great area to not only market to those individuals, but communicate and provide customer relations through those channels. I do not believe that all small businesses should use this as a shotgun blast type marketing since it’s way too broad and is very much dependent to whom you are catering. But if you do provide products and services to an Internet market? Leverage your social networks like there’s no tomorrow.

Switching From Offline to Online Accounting

June 29th, 2009 by Ben Hwang

MerchantMirror_logo I often have to answer the question of why you should move to an online accounting system.

There are very simple reasons, but in the end, you’re actually looking at cost effectiveness from a small business owner’s point of view, that alone could be one of your key decisions in going with an online system. Obviously, there is also the disaster recovery, data backups and all of the good things that come with an online accounting package.

From our perspective, it’s actually easier to manage from a customer relations perspective. There isn’t the problem of asking what “version” you’re on, since what you see would be what the support personnel sees. The entire production system is always available to support without having to ask you for version numbers, training the support personnel on all the versions, and determining when to retire support for an offline version. In fact, it’s a tremendous win-win since it allows both parties to concentrate on solving the problem at hand instead of futzing with the details of versioning and inter-version discrepancies.

From an accountant perspective, it’s also better off because you can review the business without limiting the business owner from operations. One of the worst functionalities of offline locking is that the business owner is thrown into a constraint that is limited by their accountant. No longer is that an issue, due to the fact that the accountant can work concurrently with their client.

All-in-all, from our operations view and customer’s, it makes it an absolutely easy choice to make. Savings in both money and time should be the top two considerations of any business. And that’s exactly what we offer.

Why interactive feedback is so important

November 3rd, 2008 by Ben Hwang

It doesn’t matter if you’re a big company or a small one. Feedback from your customers is extremely important.

In fact, that’s one of the reasons why we’re providing our users a way to suggest and vote on features that they would like to see in the future. √Ǭ† If your suggestion isn’t already on our to-do list then we’ll add it and work on including it in a future release.√Ǭ† In addition, the highest voted features will get special attention and may even create a special release.

We’ve all had to use accounting tools in some form or fashion, and all of us have had both good and bad experiences.√Ǭ† By combining the experience of the entire community into a product, it not only allows our customer relations to be stronger, but it also gives our customers a voice.√Ǭ† We hope to grow the product and the user base by listening to those voices.