Sage Blog

On Wednesday we had some of the team from the Carbon Trust in our Newcastle office. They are launching the Best Advice campaign and, calling on local businesses to cut their energy costs by between 20% – 30%, by signing-up for a free Carbon Survey.

Paul Stobart, our UK CEO, launched the Best Advice campaign in Newcastle by speaking to the media and the campaign is also backed by leading business groups, politicians and a range of successful companies across the country.

Since 2006, the Carbon Trust has delivered over £180m in energy savings to British businesses through its Carbon Surveys.  The Carbon Trust estimates that British businesses currently spending between £50,000 and £3m on their annual energy bills, could reduce their collective energy spend by more than £3bn by implementing energy saving actions of the type specified in Carbon Trust surveys.  

How can your business be more energy efficient? 

Now and in the future businesses need to consider three key steps in addressing energy efficiency:

• Changing behaviour (e.g. encouraging staff to switch off lighting, heating and machinery when not in use)
• Installing energy efficiency controls and settings (to automatically turn off machinery and equipment when it’s not in use)
• Upgrading old, energy intensive equipment with new energy efficient models (e.g. replacing old boilers, and lighting)

 What tips and tricks could you use?

 Switch lights off in empty rooms

• You could cut your lighting costs by as much as 15%, just by making sure you turn lights off in rooms and corridors that aren’t being used

Don’t turn up the heating unless you really need to

• Try to keep your thermostat at 19°C. Your heating costs will go up by 8% each time you increase the temperature by just one degree

Maintain your equipment properly

• If you don’t regularly check your heating equipment, you could be adding as much as 10% to your heating bill without knowing it

Vending machines v kettles

• It is cheaper to provide a kettle for staff who work outside normal business hours than to continue to run a drinks vending machine during these times

Standby

• A single computer and monitor left on 24 hours a day will cost over £50 a year. Switching them off out of hours and enabling standby features could reduce this to £15 a year each and prolong the lifespan of equipment

Lighten up

• Replacing high wattage filament lamps or tungsten halogen lamps with compact fluorescent lamps or metal halide lamps will give energy savings of 65-75%

Find and fix compressed air leaks

• Compressed air leaking through a single 3mm hole could cost you nearly £700 per year in energy costs

Motors and drives

• Swapping a single 10kW motor running at 25% loading for a 2.5kW motor running at full load can save around £300/year
• Leaving electric motors running over weekends across the year could cost over £2,000 per motor
• Lowering the speed of a motor by just 20% can produce an energy saving of up to 50%.

Leigh Thompson, Corporate Social Responsibility team

This week we’re launching a blog for Sage Developers .

The Sage 200 R&D Team and the Developer Support team will be using the blog to improve communication and engagement with our developer community.   We’ll be posting a variety of hints and tips, how-to’s and new ideas that will help developers get more out of Sage.

The blog will also be used to reach out to the developer community early in the design stage of new developments to get feedback and help shape the future of the Sage 200 product.

We’ve already put up a series of posts about getting the most out of the powerful workspace feature in Sage 200, so if you are a developer, or are interested in the future development of Sage products why not take a look? 

If you have comments about any of the posts or want to see us cover something specific, then just let us know!

www.sage.co.uk/devblog

Mike Goodwin, Sage 200 R&D Team

If you’re reading this blog then you may be a regular visitor to the Sage Blog, or more likely you’ll have been directed here by a tweet.

My inspiration to write this blog came from reading an article in the BA Business Life magazine whilst I was flying last week. I read the statistic that 27% of UK SME’s use twitter. Doing a quick piece of math, 27% of 1.4 million businesses registered for VAT equals 460,000 SME businesses using twitter in the UK today…  and this number would rise to well over 1 million if you include businesses who are not VAT registered.

There is a readymade network out here that the SME can leverage, not only to share information about their business, but to set up trading network and build their brand. What’s more the buzz word in industry today is globalisation, more and more businesses are trading overseas and twitter plays to this as you’ll see in the example below, as it has no boundaries.

As a social networking tool Twitter has had a bit of a meteoric rise to fame with between 3 and 6 million users from all walks of life, with some very notable participants in the likes of Bill Gates and Barak Obama, although I’m not sure the latter writes his own tweets.

I have to admit when I tried it first time round, I was unimpressed… how can it possibly be of any use? How do I know who to follow? How do I get followers? What could I talk about? and how could I say it in only 140 characters?

Today, I’m a convert, I use twitter every day, it’s an excellent source of news and information on just about any topic. For me it allows me to keep my finger on the pulse of IT and Business information as well as to share information about Sage as well as my other passions with people who have chosen to follow me.

When I say share information with people who have chosen to follow me, the twitter network leverages the six degrees of separation principle well, so if one of my follower’s re-tweet’s my tweet, then all of their followers get to see my tweet, and so on.

To give you an example of how this works, I tweeted a link to my last blog on the secret to successful innovation then I watched what happened… even though I only have a few hundred followers myself, within the first hour, my original tweet had an audience of over 30,000 people. Within a couple of days my blog had gone around the world and turned up on other sites such as Innovation America,  it also stimulated others to reuse parts of my blog in their own innovation blog a way to keep the message alive and a complement indeed.

I was amazed by what had happened here… one piece of information, seen by a huge audience across the globe and recycled a second and third time, what’s more it increased network traffic on sage.co.uk and on average people looked at 8 pages in addition to the one they were directed to… and all from a single tweet… the power of social networking truly is amazing.

I would strongly encourage all of the SME’s reading this to think about how you might use the power of social/business networking to benefit your business. Twitter is just one part of what you need, it’s a tool to build your network, headline key information and lead people to your business. When they get there they need to find a website, or a blog with more meaningful and relevant information.

I don’t propose to tell you how to get going with twitter in this blog as it has been covered by many  people already… although you might find this link useful from CIO online and this link from Social SmallBiz who offer great advice to SME’s or our own guide to social media for small businesses.

Give it a try, other than a little of your time and effort, it’s free… and you might be as amazed with the results as I was.

Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/_stuartlynn

Written by Stuart Lynn, Head of R&D, Sage Mid Market Division

In the spirit of Valentines Day we asked our colleagues to share their top tips for showing customers that they care.

What do you think? Is there something else that your business is doing that you’d like to share or something you love (or hate) as a consumer of service?

Stephen Douglas – Customer Services coach

To show the customer you care, remember your customers’ names.
Whenever you have contact with your customers — whether it’s in person, or by phone, fax, or e-mail — always use their names. When you do so, the business experience becomes personal. And when the business experience becomes personal, your customers become vested in the relationship and thereby become your friend. When you use the customers’ names, they become as concerned about your success as you are. Taken from Business Week.

Laura Bowie – Sage 50 Accounts Technical Support

Treat each customer the way you would want to be treated. Let them know what is going on and reassure them if needed. Each customer is as important as the next so make them feel that way.

Joanne Johnston – Marketing executive

Its about listening but also about keeping the up the communication (whether its good news or bad!)

Sarah Dearden

Take ownership

Seems like a simple thing yet it is something that upsets customers the most. There is nothing more upsetting for customers than when someone doesn’t follow through with their actions .

Keith Office – Senior developer

My rule was, and still is, never promise anything that you can’t reasonably expect to deliver. Confidence/Trust takes time to build up but can take seconds to destroy.

Ronald Langston – Test Technician

Don’t tell the customer what you cannot do, instead offer them solutions, or alternatives. Have a true “Can Do” attitude when dealing with every customer

Jamie Harris – Customer Services Advisor

A slight change to the old classic. ‘A customer is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get.’ Stay flexible, tailor yourself, and your solution to the customers needs.

Mandy Filson – Brand Manager

My response echoes much of what’s been posted already – as a customer it’s about feeling listened to, being treated as an individual and being made to feel special. But for me it’s also about feeling that the person delivering the service/experience is happy in what they’re doing and feels empowered to bring some of their own personality into their role.

For example, I recently called a well-known appliance manufacturer because my dishwasher had broken down. I explained the problem to the very nice man on the other end of the phone and confess I was a bit fed up at the thought of having no dishwasher for a few days. He took all the details, gave me an idea of what the problem might be, apologised that he couldn’t send an engneer until the following week and then without hesitation suggested that I nipped out and bought a few pairs of Marigolds as it looked like I’d be doing quite a bit of washing up over the weekend!

With that one line he made me laugh, diffused any frustration I may have felt about the delay in the engineer visiting and left me with a very positive feeling about the individual and the company. However, I still hate washing up!

Lisa Graveling – UK PR Manager

Good service involves anticipating your customers’ needs before they even know what they want.

Paul Waters  - Programme Manager

I agree with Lisa – it’s about listening to your customers and then making sure you actually understand what it is that they are saying. It’s about understanding customer pain points and delivering solutions to address these.

Acquiring, engaging with and converting customers online is essential for any business these days. Here in Online Retail at Sage it’s no different.  We spend a huge amount of time measuring conversion through the Sage Store – how many people visit the site, what business software and services they look at, what they buy… and what they choose not buy!

It’s vital for us that our customers have the best possible experience when visiting the Sage Store, so looking into the reasons why people choose to leave the site without buying is key.  Measuring conversion allows you to fine-tune your website to maximise the number of visitors that convert – whether it’s downloading a file, accessing useful information, capturing data, an online sale or calling a number.

When looking at conversion, start with your web analytics.  Conversion rate is the % of visitors that complete the ‘goal’ of your website.

Here at Sage we use Google Analytics, but most web analytics tools will allow you to measure conversion.

Setting up conversion goals

Firstly, identify the objective of your website – what do you want your visitors to do, and what experience do you want them to have?  Is it to provide your customers with helpful information, generate leads, capture data, or sell your products?  This is your conversion goal, and your website might have more than one.

Secondly, identify the steps in your website that a person has to take to complete a goal.  It’s likely to be a series of web pages in your site, so make a note of the URL (web address) of each page. These URLs form your conversion path. For example, your conversion path could be:

Home page - Contact Us - Data Capture form - Form submitted

Once you have identified these steps set up your conversion goal by entering the URLs of each page of your conversion path into your web analytics tool.  The ‘goal’ itself will be the final page of your conversion path.

Once the URLs for each stage are assembled data will be start to be collected, and after a week or so you’ll be able to see your conversion rate.  This data will also form a conversion funnel, which allows you to visualise which pages people are ‘drop out’ of before converting.

Google Analytics Conversion Funnel

This is where the real work begins! The funnel lets you see areas of weakness in your conversion path, where potentially huge opportunities lie to convert more people.  If you address these weaknesses you can reduce drop-out from your website and convert more people.

What should I look out for?

The obvious sign is high exit rates from pages in your conversion path.  Exit rate is the % visitors that decided to leave your website from that page, and will be visible in your conversion funnel with [exit].  What’s causing them to leave the page?  Poor usability? Unclear calls to action? Confusing information? Distracting links to other pages? Closely examine the page in question and look for potential causes.

Another sign could be high time on page.  Why are people spending so long on a page?  Unclear next steps?  Confusing information? Asking them to fill in too much information?  Have a close look at the pages.

Visitors navigating to other pages on your website can also be a distraction and reduce conversion.  Are you presenting them with a whole host of links when there is only one or two you actually want them to follow?  Take a look.

How can I improve conversion?

Once you’ve identified potential problem areas in your site try make some changes and then measure the impact they have.  Try tweaking copy, images, navigation, page layout, calls to action – and closely monitor the results in your conversion funnel.

For example, we removed the navigation from the later stages of the Sage Store checkout to reduce the number of links away from the checkout.  The outcome? We reduced drop-out by about 5%.

An excellent tool to help test changes you make to your site is Google Website Optimiser. It’s completely free, and lets you measure the effect of changes you make to pages in your website.

First, create different versions of the pages in your conversion path (with some of the changes above made), then make them live, add some code, and enter their URLs into Website Optimiser.  It then randomly serves up the different versions to visitors, and over time analyses the results for each page version. You can then see which version of your page converts best.  It’s quite technical stuff but your web developers should be able to help! Find out more.

However, don’t stop at that – constantly tweak, test and optimise your website to get the best results.  Give it a try and see if you can improve conversion through your website.

Iain Ramsay, Marketing & Operations Manager, Sage UK Online Retail