There are Examples Companies That Are Suffering and Others That Are Thriving

I hear about restauranteers who are suffering. Dining out is simply not one of those expenses that people are willing to pay for right now. I hear about how Netflix, the online movie rental company, is doing great! More people have decided to stay home and watch a movie instead of going to the theatres. I mean really, why is it that a movie ticket costs so little but if you want to eat some popcorn or a drink while you watch your movie, it costs you 3x what it cost you to see the movie? Maybe the theatres need to come up with another model. What if people could bring in their own popcorn? What if they were to serve healthier foods so that people felt a little better about what they are spending their money on? What if they served meals that could help customers  justify spending the extra money because it was a ‘meal’ instead of just an outrageously expensive snack. I can’t feed my children dinner at the theatres because nachos and a hot dog aren’t the healthiest of meals…. And frankly I hate hot dogs, and the cheese sauce they put on the nachos… I mean come on!

What  Can Businesses Do To Make a Profit? Listen to the People!

If you are a company trying to survive in this economy, or a potential business owner who wants to know what kind of business will thrive in this economy, you need to listen to the people. If they are cutting out your services or products as a way to save money, what can you do to lure them back in again? Staying with your current model just might not keep you a float. There are companies that are doing well during the downturn and in fact are thriving. What are they doing? They are asking and they are listening to the consumer! Try talking to your customers. Find out what might lure them back in. Read newspapers, listen to the news, anywhere you can get information about what people are buying will help you.

How To Find Out The Information You Need

There are so many great tools on the web to find out what people want. One survey tool I really like is www.surveymonkey.com. Email your customers with a survey. Ask them to rate your services or products. Suggest new ways you might be able to satisfy their needs and ask them to choose. And always have at least one suggestion box for customers to write what they have on their minds. This information is invaluable to you as a business owner.

Right Now is an Excellent Time to Start An Online Business

 Right now is an excellent time to start a new venture online. I know that sounds crazy but hear me out. You know what people are saying about what they are willing to spend their money on if you just read the newspapers. Luxury items might be the area you want to stay away from unless your prices are reasonable, and you are offering them somehting that they are willing to spend their money on during difficult times. Did you know that right now money managers, psychologists, business consultants, online marketing companies, and even hosting companies are growing? This could be because this is what is needed right now.

Five Ways to Start a Small Business Using Online Tools

If you have lost your job or are fearful of losing your job, consider this: what if you were to setup an online storefront to sell something that people need. Here are some suggestions of mine. They are simply suggestions and you should really use them as a way to get your brain moving in the right direction. Come up with something unique and marketable, and you could actually make money during a downturn. You could even end up making more money than you did in your previous job.

1. Sell on Ebay, or Craigslist: This is a great place to get your ‘feet wet’. Sell some things that you have around the house. Things that people are looking for. How about clothes? Instead of paying high prices at a department store, many people are buying ‘gently used’ clothes. Especially children’s clothes since children grow so fast that they need new clothes all the time. Sell baby things like cribs, rocking chairs etc. Once again these are expensive items if bought new, so many people are shopping online for them. Just go to www.ebay.com or www.craigslist.com. There are other sites you can sell on but these two are the most used right now.

2. Start an ecommerce site. It is easier than you think. We offer website hosting with a website design tool called Site Symphony that has a site creator AND an ecommerce software element built in! All you need to do is pick out a template, fill in your company information, and put in your products. You will need to get a merchant account and a payment gateway, which are once again easier to get than you think. With our partners you can go to one place and get them both simply by filling out an online form. That’s it!

3. Use Innovative Ideas to Market that Don’t Cost Much Money. You would be amazed at how many ways you can market your company or products by simply using your imagination. Pass out flyers at the mall. If your products are cheaper and better, maybe they will just go home and buy them online and save a bundle. Put a marketing magnet on your car. Youcan get one for around $100 at any banner printing company. Then everybody you drive by will see your company and it’s toll free number and website address. I have found more businesses by simply seeing their car magnet and calling them when I get home. The Yellow Pages can’t hold a candle to free advertising.

4. Purchase a Previously Owned Franchise. Don’t look into franchising without first looking for franchise owner’s trying to sell! You can find real deals. One place that you can look for businesses for sale is: www.bizbuysell.com.

5. Buy a business that is for sale. You can find these at www.bizbuysell.com as well. It’s much cheaper and faster to buy someone elses business than to start from scratch. Just keep in mind that they might be selling it because it isn’t profitable. Don’t let this scare you. If you can come up with some simple ways to make their business a profit, you could get a real deal. I’ve heard of  people simply painting the interior or using their marketing skills to make a company a profit. Just use your imagination. They might be sick of the company and just don’t want to worry with it anymore. You have a fresh new eye and motivation. Just what an older business might need!

So, I hope these ideas will help you find your new venture. It is a big bold world out there. And if you just take a leap of faith, you too could be one of the millions who are profiting during this downturn.

Good luck!

Tamara Field
President, Apollo Hosting
www.apollohosting.com
CEO, Press 8 Communications
www.press8.com

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about New Years Resolutions. The top of course is always to lose weight. Then there is to reduce debt, quit smoking, find a soul mate, find a better job….

But what about business owners? What are their top ten new years resolutions? Well, I have made up a list of what would be my top ten and maybe the top ten of other business owners:

1. Loose weight

Okay, I just had to put that one on there… lol  Business owner’s are always busy! There’s never enough time to exercise or eat right. Fast food is one of the worst culprits. Try bringing in your lunch. Pack veggies to snack on too instead of visiting the vending machine. At Apollo Hosting we purchase granola bars for the employees to snack on as well as organic fruit.

2. Find more time for family

Once again our days are full. For a business owner, the day doesn’t end when the clock strikes 5 PM. Most of us work at home after we leave work. Then there are the business conversations with spouses etc. My kids know more about how to run a business from just listening to my husband and I than many business majors.

3. Increase Revenue

With the mortgage crisis and the bad economy, many consumers are just are afraid to spend money. Apollo Hosting hasn’t been affected like many of the others simply because our customers are largely small to medium sized businesses. The last thing a business owner wants to do is cancel their hosting account. Without a website many business owners would be dead in the water.

Some ideas to increase revenue would be to find inexpensive ways to market. A great book to read is called Guerilla Marketing. It gives invaluable insight into how to market your company without spending a lot of money.

4. Exercise more

Being a business owner is stressful. And stress creates a hormone called Cortisol. Increased levels of Cortisol can lead to all sorts of nasty side affects like:

Exercise is the main way to combat high Cortisol levels. But you can’t just do it once, you really have to include moderate exercise in your daily schedule to combat high Cortisol levels. Just a 10 minute walk has been shown to dramatically decrease your Cortisol levels.

5. Get to Know My Employees Better

It is very important to get to know your employees, and unfortunately many of us think we don’t have the time. But all it takes is a few minutes a day to walk around, say hello or Happy New Year and talk to your employees.

6. Find Ways to Cut Costs

In this economy this is so important. You can read my previous blog about how to succeed during a recession. I talk about how finding ways to cut costs can help the most but do NOT cut your sales and marketing budget. That’s the worst place to cut costs unless those costs are unnecessary to the growth of your company. Instead find costs associated with processes that are duplicated, conducting meetings via video conferencing instead of travel etc. 

When my husband and I started to look at this a few months ago, our employees were very helpful. They were excited to be a part of the plan to recovery. So don’t forget to include them! They want you to succeed as much as you do!

7. Spend More Time Volunteering In My Community

It DOES feel good to volunteer in your community. Find a community service that you can become passionate about and you could even include your employees. Some businesses spend a day a month volunteering at Habitat for Humanities. It is fun and builds great relationships with your employees. And  you know how they say that an employees most motivating factor in working harder is having a best friend at work. Your community gets the benefit of your help, and you help your company as well!  That’s a win/win situation!

8. Travel Less

Many business owner’s have to travel a lot. I talk to my colleagues and some actually spend 3 days each week traveling! What a way to live. With the Internet and the increased availability of access around the world, business travel should be slowing down not increasing. Conference calls are great but video conferencing is even better. And it is easier than ever to get started. Webcam’s are as little as $70 now.

9. Increase Time Spent Networking

There are at least two reason’s why I think this is important. One, is to make sales of course. But just as important is the need for business owner’s to ‘connect’ with other business owner’s. It helps you to feel like you are part of a group and every business owner has a story to tell. Many of their ideas will become great strategies for you to follow as well. And you can help them in return with a problem you are facing.

The Chamber of Commerce in most cities has great networking opportunities. Most of them have networking groups that meet monthly. I know I would like to spend more time networking, and this is a place where I always feel welcome.

10. Blog More!

I guess I saved the best for last! Blogging takes time but it is a great way to communicate with your customers, employees,  potential customers, vendors, and even your friends. Plus it shows authority in whatever you do which is always helpful to a business owner. The more authority you have the more people will want to purchase from you, and work with you.

So that’s my top 10. I think it pretty much sums up what many business owner’s in general could be thinking. I like to think so.

Interesting Web Sighting

Before I go I wanted to tell you about a cool site that I found today. It is www.copyscape.com. The site allows you to type in the url for a web page on your site like your home page, and it will scan the Net for other sites that have ‘copied’ text on your site. I actually found one hosting company that copied our text exactly. (I’ll have to email them about this later!)

Good luck!

Tamara Field
President, Apollo Hosting Inc.

I know I talked about Web 2.0 in a previous post, but now I am beginning to wonder ‘Who in the world has time for social networking?’. I think the answer to that is those people who don’t have a job! That would be younger people maybe college students, high school students and the like.

If you are a company that sells to a young audience then by all means a Facebook presense might be the thing to do. After all these potential consumers might actually be searching for ‘Coke’ or ‘Apple’ or ‘Sourpatch Kids’.

But, lets face it, if you are a B2B(Business 2 Business) company you aren’t going to be looking for consumers on Facebook. And if you are like me, you probably don’t even have the time or the energy to navigate yet another Web. We already have only a few minutes a day to surf Web 1.0. Now we’re supposed to surf Web 2.0 as well?

My days are full, I just don’t have time to read what you’ve written on Twitter in the last 10 minutes! That’s another kind of annoying Web 2.0 gadget. What is this? You can only add about 1-2 sentences at a time to your Twitter so the idea is to ‘update’ people on what you are doing. Okay so maybe your friends might be interested in what you had for breakfast…. but mine sure aren’t.

So I have decided to only use LinkdIn since I can connect with other business people. I have chosen it to be  the only Web 2.0 gadget worth being a part of. So, don’t go looking for me on Facebook and by all means, don’t invite me to be a part of your Twitter….. (You do realize that Twitter will probably be sold for 1.2 billion dollars in the next couple of years. So much for logic when it comes to Web 2.0!)

So what can we do? Well, keep your business going. Keep innovating, and keep making money. Keep satisfying your customers and trying to find new customers. Ultimately you will need to ‘trim the fat’ in your organization. Maybe there are some things that you purchase that you really don’t need, or business trips that could be conference calls or whatever. I believe that if we all pull together, ignore the bad news, and keep going that it will get better faster! I also really believe that this constant barrage of bad news is creating a self fulfilling prophecy! If we believe all the horror stories that the press is telling us certainly it will happen.

Google came out with their quarterly earnings just recently and they were up by 46 percent compared to this time last year. Apple came out with similar results. So why are we being told that the ‘sky is falling’? Apple and Google don’t seem to think so. They are forward thinking, innovative, and they have traditionally stayed their own course…. they don’t follow the crowd!

So just don’t follow the crowd. Keep you business going, cut costs, keep innovating, keep satisfying customers & finding new customers, and keep making money. It’s that simple.

Tamara Field
President
Apollo Hosting, Inc.

Many of us are hearing the new term Web 2.0. But what exactly is Web 2.0? I didn’t even know there was a Web 1.0. So if you are feeling out of the loop, I’ll fill you in on what the ‘Search Engine Strategy Gurus’ are saying Web 2.0 is all about.

I just returned from the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, California. I have been attending these conferences for about 8 years now and it amazes me to see how things change over time. It used to be that at these conferences we would literally follow the Yahoo! employees around begging them for more clues as to their newest algorithim. Then at the next conference we would follow the Google employees around asking for clues. (It all depended on which search engine was on top that year). But at this conference things were different. The word ‘algorithim’ was mentioned maybe a handful of times over the entire conference. So what is the buzz these days? Social Networks.

Search Engine Optimization Is Still Important

Now don’t get me wrong, there is still the strong need to optimize your site for the search engines namely Google. The same rules still apply: Have good link back equity, use your keywords in your site and tags, have relevant content, update your content regularly etc. etc. You can learn about all of those techniques that have been around for years by simply doing a search on SEO (this stands for Search Engine Optimization).

Web 2.0 Is All About Social Networks

Web 2.0 is different. The new way (the Web 2.0 way) to get traffic is through social networks. What are social networks? Well, to start here is list given by Wikipedia of all the social networks. There are a ton of social networks! You could also include blogs, forums and Wikis on the list of social networks. Did you know that there are now more blogs on the Web than websites!

How can you too be a Web 2.0 participant?

Start by creating a presence in Facebook. Want to find contacts for your business? Then you should also have a page on LinkedIn. After that you can move on to creating a presence in: Plaxo, Flikr, and MySpace. There are hundreds of Social Networks that cater to anything from travel(travbuddy.com) to finding old classmates (classmates.com) to tracing your genealogy (geni.com).

I would suggest getting a nice picture of yourself, professionally taken if possible, since most of these sites have a space for a picture. It would be a bit tedious to have to go back to each of them and change your picture later on.

And if you don’t already have a blog what are you waiting for?

It is becoming so commonplace now for people to have a blog that blogs actually out number websites on the Internet. The most popular blogging software that I have seen is Word Press. Word Press is a free blogging software that we offer at Apollo Hosting to all of our customers. With one click you can install it in your control panel and start blogging. You can choose from lots of different templates to make your blog your own. There are also lots of ‘plug ins’ that others have written that you can easily install into your blog to do any number of interesting things like adding a google map. We also offer other blogging software like b2evolution or pLog.

You could also create a Wiki, a Forum or a Picture Gallery

Wiki’s are not just for Wikipedia. Anyone can create a Wiki. There are so many social networking tools that you can take advantage of and most of the great ones are free! For example you could create a Wiki using the free software phpWiki, you could create an online photo gallery to show everyone your pictures by using our free tools Coppermine or Gallery. And don’t forget forums which are also easy to create and is a great way to get people talking. The list goes on and on. For a list of all the tools we offer look at our website hosting site tools page.

Link to others, and keep your content fresh

When you start writing your blogs, or creating your Facebook page be sure and link to other social network pages. This is what social networking is all about. They will see that you are linking to them and in turn will probably link back to you. And if you create interesting content others will naturally link to you. Finally, submit your blog to Google Blog and other blog submission sites. You will be amazed at how popular your blog, wiki, or forum will become if you have fun with it and keep it fresh.

Finally My Book Recommendation

I have been reading a great book called ‘Made to Stick’ by Chip Heath & Dan Heath. It is a great book that talks about how to communicate your ideas in a way as to make them memorable and lasting. It’s a very nice continuation to ‘The Tipping Point’ which is one of my favorites. In ‘Made to Stick’ you are reminded of things in life that have ‘stuck’. For instance remember the story that a child who was trick or treating and found a razor blade in her apple? Well that story was huge and it created a panic all over the country. The funny thing is that story was just a myth or an urban legend. But it sure did ‘stick’. Everyone heard about it, and passed it on. So, how can you communicate your ideas in a similar fashion? Well, don’t create a panic of course, but according to the author just follow these 6 principles of sticky ideas: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories. Basically ‘be simple, and use stories’. I like that!

Good luck and adios for now!

Tamara Field
President, Apollo Hosting, Inc.

Cutting Expenses – But Not Marketing or Sales!

Some of the things that many small companies do during slow times can in fact be detrimental to the company later on down the road. For example, your first instincts will be to cut expenses. This is a smart thing to do but just be sure you are cutting expenses in the right places. Sales and marketing are not the right place to cut expenses. If you want your company to thrive you will need to continue to make sales even during the lean times. Look at your processes like billing. What are your billing terms? Changing your billing terms from say net 45 to net 30 will get your money into your hands faster and help with cash flow.

Hiring Freeze

You might want to stop hiring until the economy picks back up except for turnover in the most crucial positions. This is not the time to create new jobs for tasks that your current personnel might be able to cover.

Keep Your Current Employees Informed and Ask For Their Help

During lean times, especially when there is a hiring freeze, many employees might start fearing for their jobs. It is best to be honest with them and explain that times are slow so you are trying to cut costs.They can help you do that by telling you about anything in their department that could be cut back on to save the company time and/or money. This cooperative approach is a way for your employees to feel a part of the solution. Be sure and praise them or in some cases give them a reward for saving the company money! Tickets to a show or ballgame, a gift certificate to a restaurant, or even a free day off are things that will certainly motivate most.

Review Vendor Agreements and Negotiate Lower Rates

During lean times your vendors are most likely happy to just have your business. Many of them are willing to renegotiate your current pricing agreements just to keep your business. Contact each of them and try to negotiate a lower rate or delayed invoicing at least until the economy turns around. You may have originally agreed to the rates when times were good and maybe you didn’t mind spending the extra money. But now that times are tight, you should take another look at those terms and try to negotiate a better rate.

In conclusion

It is smart during slower times to take a step back and look at your company. Cutting expenses, negotiating lower rates for services, and even holding off on new hires are all ways you can do this. Don’t forget to ask your employees for their help. They know the processes better than you do. You might be surprised at how times like these can help your company work more as a team when you are honest with them about what needs to be done.

USA Today came out with an article just recently titled Google searchers could end up with a new type of bug regarding a cyber crime that is happening when an unsuspecting victim simply performs a search on Google. How many of us use Google search everyday? Most Internet users perform their searches using the Google search engine. But did you know that simply clicking on one of the links returned after a search on Google could be putting your entire PC, and any passwords that you use over the Internet from that point on in the hands of these Cyber crooks?

“The vulnerability occurs when someone does a Google search, then clicks on a result that has been secretly tainted by hackers.”

They will usually be taken to the Web page they expect. But at the same time, they are invisibility redirected to a computer server that installs a hidden program.’ The article goes on to say ‘This program enables hackers to use the PC to spread spam and carry out scams. Typically, it also lets the attacker embed a keystroke logger, which collects and transmits your passwords and any other sensitive data you type online.’

“The malicious code was found by security experts at Google on several hundred thousand pages”

Google says that most searches are safe. But you really can’t tell if a link is safe or not. All the links look the same.

A security researcher at Hewlett-Packard says ‘It should be the responsibility of the website operators to stop exposing people to risk as soon as possible.’ Google says that ‘it is helping affected websites fix the problem and is also developing new tools “to detect and block” malicious Web pages’ on their Web site.

There is so much talk about identity theft these days that everyone should have up to date security software on their computer. Identity theft happens not only when a criminal gets a paper copy of your information but also through spy ware like this that intercepts your information as you type it in over the Internet!

So what can you do to protect yourself?

Here are some suggestions:

• Never write down your username and password
• Never give out your username and password to others
• Always use a password that is not easy for others to ‘guess’
• Make sure you PC virus and spy ware software are always up to date: Just do a search on ‘computer security software’ on Yahoo! (ok, don’t search on Google just yet). You will see a few big names. Symantec has a product called Norton 360 and McAfee has a number of good products. Both companies offer a one year virus definition update that will make your computer safe from even the most recently discovered virus and spy ware programs. Both companies have been around for a while and work well as long as you continue to pay for the definitions even after the one year of protection that is offered for free.
• Pay the annual security definition update: This is crucial! If you want to continue to have a secure computer, you need to renew your annual security updates with the software company that you have chosen.
• Set your security software to automatically download new updates: You don’t want to have to remind yourself to go out to their site and see if there are new updates. Set the software to check each time you access the Internet to keep your computer secure.

How to Protect Your Customers from Themselves

Our team of engineers found out about this new vulnerability soon after this article was published. We went to work researching the problem and then finding the fastest and most powerful way to keep these cyber criminals from accessing our hosting customer’s sites. This is a daunting task considering the programs accessing these sites have legitimate user names and passwords stolen from customer’s computers. How do you keep out criminals, but still allow your customers easy access to their website which they are paying you for? We didn’t want to upset our customers by making it difficult, but we also wanted to keep these malicious hackings from taking place.

What our engineers have implemented as a result is something no other hosting company I have seen is actually doing. We have configured the user logins for all accounts on our servers as only accessible by the owner’s IP address. They have added other security measures that we won’t mention here for fear that cyber criminals might actually read my blog!

Websites all over the Internet were affected by this newest cyber crime. This information is not meant to scare you. We will continue to do as much as we can to keep your account secure. You can help by keeping your access information secure. Do not write down your passwords, do not give them out to others, and keep the computer you use to access the Internet secure.

Do you lock the doors to your house when you leave?

Of course you do! So you should protect your computer making it impossible for un-authorized users to access as well. The way to do this is to install and keep up to date computer security software. Cyber criminals are constantly on the look out for new ways to access your information! If you keep your computer secure, they will become frustrated move on to another un-protected computer to hack.

Most of our customer’s, who were affected by this unfortunate world wide scam that starts with a search on Google, have had their sites restored. Google mentioned that they are working to fix the sites affected, but if you were affected let us know. We will most likely be able to restore your site completely.

Thank you for your business.

Tamara Field
President
Apollo Hosting, Inc.
“Fast, Reliable Website Hosting Since 1999”

But all that has change now! The new team at Miva is awesome! And we got a look at the new not yet released version 5.5. It is really exciting to see all the upgrades they have made to the product. One of my favorite new additions is that customers will be able to use skins that they can change with a click of a button. For example if you have a skin that you create for Christmas, then when November rolls around you can just click to add that skin and it immediately changes the whole look and feel of your storefront to a Christmas theme. You could do the same thing for all the holidays… There will no doubt be lots of new skins created by the many devoted Miva developers that you can purchase online. Miva Central is an online marketplace with thousands of plug ins, books etc. that you can use with Miva Merchant. Or you can develop a skin right in Dreamweaver or any other html editor and use it. Creating your own skin might be a little daunting for a newbie, so I would suggest most people just purchase a skin, or hire a developer to create them for you.

We are proud to be one of the hosting partners that have been with Miva since the very beginning. We started in 1999 and offered Miva Merchant to our customers then and have continued to offer and support it since then. There have been other shopping carts that have come and gone, and so we are glad that we stuck with them. And now with the great new leadership and exciting product enhancements it’s even more exciting that we are going to be able to continue to offer this product to our customers.

If you don’t already have Miva Merchant on your account, and you are not on the Value Plan you get Miva for FREE as an Apollo Hosting customer. Apollo Hosting is a Premier Miva Hosting Partner which means we have close ties to Miva Corporation and get certain privileges like on-site training once a year. It also means that our technical support team is trained in Miva Merchant and can help with most problems. Miva does offer it’s own technical support for for a fee for larger issues and that is an option for customers as well. That’s a lot considering many companies do not offer any technical support for their products.

Tamara Field
President
Apollo Hosting, Inc.

Having been in the hosting business now for 8 years. I feel like much of this business is second nature. I know what it takes to treat our customers the best they can be treated. The problem is just getting the engines to work smoothly and in psynch. That is the real work. Chats, Help Desk Tickets, Phones… and the employees all need to work together and with one mission in mind, to help the customer. We have a great team here, and we have taken the vow to make things better very seriously! We are seeing some great changes in support. Our Help Desk tickets are down to the double digits right now and we are almost at our goal of 2 hour turn around for 90% of our tickets and less than 24 hours on our more difficult tickets (10%). If your site is down, you are automatically put in our emergency queue which will be looked at immediately. Our phones are being answered in a more promptly manner (you shouldn’t expect more than a 10 minute wait most of the time), it’s easier to get a hold of support via chat etc., etc.

We still have a few more ‘kinks’ to work out but things are definetly looking the way they used to be. I am monitoring my Ask the Owner emails and have been learning a lot talking directly to many of you. We have a LOT of very loyal customers. That’s nice! But, we have let some of you down and I want you to know again that it won’t be long until we are 100% back to the original Apollo Hosting standards of excellent customer support!!

On another note…. ever been googled????

Of course you have!! It’s the new way to find out about anyone, anywhere. But, have you ever googled yourself?? What? Why not?? You will surely be surprised. I know there is another Tamara Field who writes books on ‘milk and soy intollerence’. I see some interviews I have made over the years, and testimonials I have made for products our company uses. But, what if I wanted to have at least a little control over what shows up in the top 10 for my name in Google?

This brings me to an interesting article I read in one of my favorite business magazines this week: Smart Money. It talked about how you can buy your own domain name (i.e. tamarafield.com) and use it to start a blog. If you edit this blog about 2-3x a week will it will most likely show up in the top 10 when someone googles your name. Great idea!! Thank goodness I bought my name (tamarafield.com) a while ago. So I will try this and see how it works and get back to you.

BTW this tip can come in really handy for those of you who have some ‘bad information’ on you that you want to move down on the search engines. Just start a blog using your domain name, keep it current (remember Google likes new information) and you might just finally have some control of what shows up when your name is googled!!

Final Note…

We celebrated Christmas here at home in Austin this year as with most years. The weather here is around 50-60 degrees this time of year, perfect weather, in my opinion, for Christmas. We cooked a Turducken (Turkey, stuffed with a Duck, stuffed with a chicken). (We’re not vegetarians I’m afraid). It was delicious! You should try it sometime!!

Remember if there is anything you want to ask the owner, then do! Email: asktheowner(at)apollohosting.com.

Here’s hoping your holiday was all that you expected and more!!

Regards,

Tamara Field
President
Apollo Hosting, Inc.

CIDB – Great Idea Just Taken Too Far!

We have always had a good CRM program (written mostly in-house) to track our customer’s history.  But, we never have had a distinct code to use for each customer (many accounts have more than one domain name so we couldn’t use that). So one of our managers came up with the CIDB which stands for Customer Information DataBase. It is a great idea and is helping our customers get help faster and with more accuracy. The reason is that if a customer calls in that that phone call or chat or HD ticket should be kept as a record for future discussions with Customer Support. It helps Tech Support put the puzzle together faster so to speak and help the customer faster. The CIDB helps make this cross reference happen.

We are happy to say that the CIDB is still alive and well and working better everyday. Unfortunately we made a bad decision about a month and a half ago to use the CIDB to limit the amount of phone calls each account was allowed. For example if you have a Value Plan you are allowed fewer calls than say a VPS customer. It sounded great in theory in practice it really was not a good idea at all. I had a bad taste in my mouth about the whole implementation of the CIDB in this manner. It’s sad to hear customers say that they need to get everything in on this phone conversation since they aren’t allowed any more phone calls this month based on their plan allotment!

I’m happy to announce that our policy of using a customers CIDB number to limit support calls was short lived. We are now back to the old days when a customer no matter how large or how small is allowed equal support. Sometimes innovation doesn’t really mean it makes the most sense.

Yes owner’s do make mistakes. I went along with using the CIDB to limit phone calls because I thought in the long run it would benefit all our customers. Fewer phone calls, most issues resolved faster. But it just wasn’t right and like I said before left a bad taste in my mouth. Well, trust your first instincts owners! 

To our customers:

I sincerely apologize going along with using the CIDB to limit customer phone call allotments. It was a bad idea and one that I would never have gone along with had I stuck to the origins of Apollo Hosting and it’s vision of putting the customer first. The good news is you will see a dramatic turn around in our customer support. We are already seeing a dramatic drop in the time Help Desk tickets are resolved (I am hoping for an average 2 hour turn around and we’re almost there). And the wait times on the phones are much, much better. Like I mentioned in an earlier blog I noticed that the time-out on our online chat was set to 1.5 minutes (outrageous really). That is fixed now and you should be able to get through via chat much more quickly now without being sent to an online form.

Keep this in mind:

This is not meant to tout our strengths but I just want to remind our customers of one thing. Many other hosting companies don’t have a live chat on their site at all. They have focused more on Help Desk tickets and phone calls. We are not going to remove our live chat. We have too many overseas customers who depend on the live support they get via our chat. So if you enjoy having the option to chat live with customer support without having to call (during business hours only for most companies) then stick with Apollo! You probably won’t get that option with one of the other guys.

Tamara Field
President
Apollo Hosting, Inc.