He loves a Camera!!
Steve Leon, New Business Manager, presented to the Hainault Business Park Ltd, the first Industrial Business Improvement District in Southern England.
Setup to promote Businesses in the Hainault Business Park and surrounding area, HBP meets regularly to network and share ideas, opportunities and experience.
Since its inception, HBP Ltd have improved security with CCTV, introduced free recycling for the Park and helped to maintain employment in the area by attracting new Businesses to the Park.
UNS are proud to be members and have worked with several of the Businesses on Park to reduce their IT support costs, improve reliability and benefit from fast efficient broadband with our BlueSky service.
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- Why don’t our customers come back to us after we quote?
- What’s our success rate on quotes to orders?
- How many prospects do we have to call to get an appointment?
- How many face to face appointments do our sales team actually do?
- What does our business pipeline look like?
These can be thorny and often difficult subjects to tackle, and many times result in a guess or assumption. This is frustrating and potentially very dangerous in a difficult economy.
A good CRM system can help tackle these issues head-on, focus your approach to your business, and produce tangible improvements in opportunities closed, customers retained, and maximise the effective time spent in front of potential new clients.
So what can a good CRM system do for your business?
The benefits of a good CRM are many; however these are the most important.
- Automate follow up so whenever you quote you are prompted to call the customer back and don’t leave it to chance.
- Simplify and speed up the time it takes to produce a quote or proposal using automatically completed templates from Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc., allowing you to handle more potential opportunities.
- Quickly track all outstanding sales, their value and stage, to see exactly what your business pipeline is like.
- Produce reports instantly on how many appointments are completed to the value of orders so you can see precisely what your “hit rate” is and act accordingly.
- Produce targeted mail-shots to specific customer types in minutes, providing focus and ensuring that you maintain regular contact.
- Improve customer service with access to the complete history of the customer. Emails, Documents, Quotes, Sales and meetings all recorded in one place and available on PC, notebook or Mobile.
The questions you should ask is not “Should I have a CRM package?” but “How quickly can I get a CRM system in place?”
Offering free CRM audits to see how it can help you, UNS are a Platinum partner for SuperOffice, a leading mid-market package, available with in the cloud or on premis versions. Why not call and find out how your business could benefit from CRM…..I bet your competitors probably are!!
]]>Here. I’ll attempt to answer some of those questions, and separate some of the hype from the fact.
“What is Cloud?”
Much hype exists about the cloud, and if you ask 10 different people you’ll probably get 10 different answers!! However it’s quite simple as far as I’m concerned, it’s linking to resources, applications and data using the Internet. That’s it.
We’ve all been using cloud for years in the form of Hotmail, YouTube, Gmail, iVault, Facebook and any number of other services we come to know and love (or hate depending on your opinion) that let us share information via a browser, mobile or an installed application.
There are however three main types of could that we implement with our clients:
Public:
This is using publicly available services to share and distribute your data. Services like those above are public cloud services and are often free, or have a low monthly fee for storage or use. In addition there are many public cloud data-centres where you can provision Servers and Storage in minutes and just pay for what you use.
Public cloud has some great advantages such as:
- Quick implementation
- Low cost
- Can be scaled to meet your needs
Private:
Private cloud is providing applications, data and resources to a limited number of users (usually internal business users) behind a firewall, quite often using your own hardware in a data-centre.
This has some key differences from public cloud such as:
- You have much more control over the infrastructure.
- Full control over the application that run on the servers.
- More tailored customisation of applications to suit your business.
Hybrid:
More and more now, we are implementing a mixture of both of these models, known as Hybrid cloud, to give companies large and small the flexibility to benefit from cloud. This could mean using one of our data-centre partners to rent “private” server resource that can host your own applications on, or using mixtures of cloud based services with legacy applications still running on site, such as your accounts package for example. In short, you may not get rid of all your on-site servers, but reduce the number or management of them significantly.
The recent launch of Office 365, Microsoft’s hosted email, conferencing and CRM solution is a great example of how we implement Hybrid solutions. The client often still has a Server on-site to run Sage Accounts for example, whilst all email is hosted in the cloud, removing much of the administration headache, and allowing access to shared documents, emails, web conferencing and CRM from the office, on their iPhone, Blackberry, iPad or Android Tablet. This gives SMB’s in particular great flexibility and agility, allowing them to compete with much larger businesses, and add or remove users as needed.
Security
Probably the most common question we are asked is “is the cloud secure?”. In truth, the reality is that the vast majority of services are secure, often more so than your current on-site services.
Microsoft spent over $2bn on securing their cloud platform, and I would guess that most SMB’s couldn’t spend a fraction of what they actually need to implement a truly secure local Network.
Our experience shows that security, if implemented correctly at the outset is very good in the cloud and should not hold you back from deciding to take the plunge.
Conclusion
In short I see no reasons why SMB’s should not be embracing the cloud. It can provide some fantastic advantages that let you compete with much bigger companies, and can reduce your operating costs too.
Consider carefully the implications of cloud, particularly in regard to your broadband connection. We often have to provide enhanced services to support cloud, and if overlooked this can be a “gotch ya”.
If you need any further information, or would like to book a meeting to discuss cloud services in more detail then please give us a call on 0845 024315 or email info@uniquenetworks.co.uk
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What’s Office 365?
Its familiar Microsoft Office collaboration and productivity tools delivered through the cloud. Everyone can work together easily with anywhere access to email, web conferencing, documents, and calendars. It includes business-class security and is backed by Microsoft. Whether you are a small business or multinational enterprise, Office 365 offers plans designed to fit your organisation’s unique needs. All from as little as £6 per month per users.
To find out more about Office 365, or to arrange a FREE trail call us now on 0845 4024315 or email info@uniquenetworks.co.uk
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At Unique we feel it’s essential to offer our clients the freedom of choice to decide where they truly feel they need our support. We recognise that not everyone wants ‘all their eggs in one basket’ OR they just want an ‘add-on’…OR budget constraints mean they pick the absolute essentials they require for their IT support.
For this reason we have launched our A’La Carte offering, allowing you to select the individual services as and when you require them. This includes Backup, AV, Anti-Spam, PCI Compliance and more.
Take a look at our A’ La Carte Services Menu.
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In these Blog’s I’ll aim to provide a source for practical knowledge on running IT in small and mid-market businesses. This will be gleaned from 15 years experience as MD of a successful IT support and service company, and most importantly from the projects we’ve undertaken, and our clients feedback.
I aim to cover everything from Finance and budgeting for IT, to selecting the right solutions, tips and tricks for well known products, through to clearing up (in my view) some over hyped terms such as Cloud Computing.
Let’s start though with something we are more and more frequently being asked about, and are often working on for our clients….Backup and Data Security.
Over the years, the amount of storage we’re all using has grown massively, and with it the cost and time involved in securing our data. It’s often the case now, even in small businesses, that a traditional backup to tape, on a File Server for example, is not completing overnight as it used to, or needs two tapes, defeating the object of automatic backup, as some poor sole has to change it manually!
On PC’s and notebooks, users often don’t bother at all or forget, and risk losing vital Company data. It’s a fact that 40% of businesses that lose data and are out of action for 7 days, don’t survive.
Add to this the fact that storage need is only increasing, and many businesses are presented with a major issue.
Some ideas
- We’ve been working with our clients to provide simple, cost effective off-site backup with iVault, a totally automated, secure, Off-site backup solution we host for them. It can work on Servers, PC’s Notebooks, Apple, Windows, Linux and can include emails, photos, documents, databases and more. It’s quick to setup, fully automatic and totally secure. Data can be restored via a web browser of the software, and it eliminates the cost and hassle of tapes for a small monthly fee.
- Disk to Disk is now pretty standard and simple to implement. Many backup packages can backup to network attached disk, which is relatively cheap, reliable and easy to setup. This means that your live data is sent to a network disk, then can be backed up to tape from there. That part can take as long as it needs to as it’s not “live” so doesn’t affect performance. Data can be restored quickly from the disk, as you’re not having to hunt for backup tapes and wait for them to load.
- For smaller amounts of data there are secure, encrypted USB hard drives no bigger than a smart phone. Most modern backup software will backup to these disks, and you could have two, one left on site and a one you swap it with each night and take off-site. Alternatively one can be used with a notebook or PC to provide “user” data backup.
One benefit now is that storage has become much less expensive, so it’s now possible to provide ample amounts of disk based backup, and then compliment that with iVault Off-site for total peace of mind. There’s no need to risk losing your data anymore.
Click for more information or call us on 0845 402 4315. Email sales@uniquenetworks.co.uk
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Unique are pleased to announce our continued participation in the Microsoft AER program. For 5 years now, we’ve been offering specialist knowledge of Microsoft Educational licensing to provide the complete package of solutions to our academic clients.
Microsoft are renowned for their commitment to the educational market, providing discounted licenses and customised agreements that provide fantastic value and allow you to maximise your budgets. For more information, or to have someone speak with you about your establishments needs, give us a call or email aer@uniquenetworks.co.uk
]]>It’s a fact that a PC costs 3-5 times more to manage than buy! Running your PC estate is an expensive, time consuming task and first generation VDI has traditionally been simply too expensive for most organisations.
Now all that has changed with Unique and Citrix. We are now able to bring you all the benefits of Virtual Desktop Technology for less than a new PC….Yes less than £600 (25+ users).
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No expensive SAN needed
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No expensive and complicated licensing
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Runs on Standard commodity servers
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Built in High Availability
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Utilise existing PC’s…no need to upgrade
For more information or a free demonstration call us now on 0845 4024315 or email vdi@uniquenetworks.co.uk
Download the datasheet now
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Here at Unique we can now turn your website into an iphone or mobile ready solution.
The iphone version of our site is now online and ready for testing, just enter our normal URL www.uniquenetworks.co.uk into your iphone or Blackberry. Rather than zooming to find links and menus, you will now see the site runs as an easy to use APP.
Drop us a line if you’d like more info in how to turn your website into a mobile ready solution.
]]>Call Helen Newstead on 0845 402 4315 or email hnewstead@uniquenetworks.co.uk for more information and a FREE comparison.
Click here for further info
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