BerlinPacific.com Blog

There is nothing better when you have a web site than having powerful pages that speaks directly to their target audiences and are easy to find. A page that makes the customer want to take action - to click and buy or ask a sales rep for a meeting so they can buy.

We saw such a page today.

The page was great. It showed another way for people to save money and time and lots of it. Exactly the type of thing we care about here. We wanted to learn more and integrate it if possible with our toolkit.

Unfortunately when you try to contact them you run into multiple sales roadblocks.

One of if not the top rule of web marketing is - make it easy for the person to buy. This was not easy - and it wasn’t even simply the fault of the web page’s design.

There was an image that looks like a button. Nothing happens when you click on it. Still it might make you think contacting someone is as easy a clicking a button. You would be wrong. You might even feel misled.

The button instructs you to contact your account rep or call the 800#.

1. When you call the 800# you get directed to a phone tree. Problems include
a. You do not get directed straight to sales OR a receptionist. But you’re calling because you want to learn more and speak with an account exec. Ideally they should have a number going straight to sales.
b. There is no option to speak to sales. They should add one.
c. There is no option to speak to the operator/receptionist. They should add one.
d. Pressing 0 did nothing helpful. They should have it direct to a receptionist.
e. By pushing random buttons to search the directory you to can be directed to someone’s mailbox to leave a message. It takes a couple tries
2. The contact form asked for a verification code (presumably for spam prevention,) but the page didn’t have one visible. Therefore there appears to be a high risk that filling it out will lead to the form not working.
3. You can try e-mailing the customer service department, but not sales.

Just by calling the 800# a potential client will get the impression that the firm is either out of business, not a real company, anonymous and unfriendly, an evil bureaucracy like The Phone Company, not interested in clients, or all of the above. However everyone at the firm seems really nice, so they’re giving a misleading impression.

Just as the receptionist is one of the most important people at many firms as he or she makes new people feel at home, the phone tree is also a receptionist. The receptionist and phone tree is your Ambassador to the world. No one likes an unfriendly undiplomatic ambassador. People often complain about big company phone trees, especially when they want support from a company.

It would be interesting to know if they have any statistics in their PBX on how many calls hit the main #? Have they been compared with how many calls are answered by a person or if a VM is left? There could be a big discrepancy.

We got a fascinating piece of spam today from free wifi robin dot com. It brings up interesting security concerns. Their product helps one get on wifi networks, it is unethical and looks very slick. Not the kind of free we recommend.

Basically the $160 solution will crack WEP WiFi networks. Due to the crummy nature of the encryption, capturing enough WEP traffic will allow anyone to crack the WEP encryption in 20 minutes. This means if your network uses WEP it can be cracked, exposing your machines. Apparently this wifi cracker also has a powerful antenna, so it can connect over a wide radius.

The way to solve this is to not use WEP, but WPA.

This bring up the problem of whether WPA can be cracked. It can, but it takes a while. (WPA2 AES is the best encryption - however, and takes the longest, and may not be easily crackable.)

What basically happens is that the cracker will monitor your encrypted connection and force you to re-authenticate. When you re-authenticate, which you probably won’t notice, that data can be saved to the hackers computer and cracked at their leisure. Basically they’ll run a brute force attack - trying every possible combination. It may take a while, but today’s computer are very powerful. One can even use graphics cards to speed up processing. Any password less than ten characters might be easy to crack that way. (Most people use only the 26 lowercase letters and ten numbers to make a password, therefore a password of 6 characters is one of only 2,000,000,000 combination’s. From a computer’s perspective this isn’t very many combinations.)

One is advised to use long passcodes - longer the better.
Passphrases are good -
itwasadarkandstormynight would probably work.

If you want to keep people off your Wi-Fi, don’t use WEP use WPA2 AES, or WPA and create a longer password.

We’re uploading different document to the site Scribd.

Visibility and Vendor Cost Management How to find hidden savings in your services spend. It relates to Telecom Expense Management, but also IT support and maintenance contract costs, Waste and Recycling Costs, Credit Card processing costs, etc

Vendor Cost Management for C Level Officers It uses Telecom Expense Management as an example, but also mentions our practices Private Jet Management and Maintenance Costs, Freight and Shipping Costs, Utility Costs / Power Costs

We also uploaded our simple overview of Visibility and Managing Recurring IT Costs It relates especially to Telecom Expense Management, and IT support and maintenance contract costs but the general principles relates to vendor costs in general.

They’re a pretty amazing repository of documents.

-Anders

We had a previous post on free collaboration tools,
http://berlinpacific.com/blog2/2009/09/23/free-collaboration-tools/

Mikogo is an excellent product.

The one downside was that it was wasn’t compatible with the Mac.

Cross Loop’s product is.
http://www.crossloop.com/

The only down side with cross loop is that it requires an install, but it will help with remote cross platform collaboration. (Mikogo only requires that the host install the program - other people can just run a program.) I’m not a heave user, so I don’t know how reliable it is. But I know people who use it a lot.