Millie doesn’t have time to worry about cybercrime; she’s trying to run her business. But she knows that faster attacks, more files held for ransom, and a snake pit of malicious code doing the rounds are all putting her increasingly mobile business at risk. Luckily for Millie, her IT manager is switched on to endpoint protection, keeping her business safe from data corruption, data breaches and data loss. Here’s what happened one day in the life of Thoroughly Mobile Millie.

08:00 hours – Millie avoids opening a phishing email

As Millie unwinds after her gym workout, she takes 20 minutes over a coffee to check her emails.  In the midst of them, she finds one from her malware and virus detection software app, warning her against a potential threat. Not recognising the sender, she chooses to blacklist the email.

Smart decision.

Had it not been for the real-time detection model her IT manager set up, in a millisecond, she could’ve exposed her business and contacts to data corruption via the latest evolution of email attack.

Unlike traditional detection models, this endpoint protection module uses file pattern and predictive behaviour recognition, scanning all emails superfast, protecting the business without slowing down Millie’s busy day.

At the same time, Millie’s IT manager is able to access the app’s Web-based portal to manage and report on the entire company’s activities, without having to worry about onsite server hardware or software, and the hassles of managing daily signatures or updates.

09:00 hours – Millie arrives in the office to discover an employee has lost their iPad

It’s what we all dread. Losing a laptop, smartphone or tablet with sensitive customer data – not to mention business data. Every year, thousands of business devices are lost or stolen, exposing organisations to the risk of data breaches, fines from the ICO – damaging business reputations and customer confidence.

However, with their endpoint protection set-up, Millie’s IT manager quickly steps in to lockdown the device and wipe sensitive data. He’s easily able to monitor and secure activity without compromising the mortified employee’s privacy.

11:00 hours – Millie welcomes three new recruits, already governed by endpoint protection

Millie’s business is flexible. It has to be. So as employee numbers grows, contract and grow again, their endpoint protection scales accordingly. This keeps her business secure and compliant with data governance and industry regulations.

And it’s all managed by her IT manager, from one central point. He’s also supported with out-of-the-box advanced system reporting, automated report generation, delivery and proactive metric-based backup management.

12:00 hours – Millie travels to a meeting with her lawyers, and needs to access files on the way

In the taxi on the way to meeting with her lawyer, Millie and a colleague need to make some last-minute changes to a document. A quick Skype for Business message exchange with a colleague in the office directs them to the file, which they access, collaborate on with their office-based colleague, amend and save. Changes are effected immediately and accessible across the business, to both office and remote workers alike. It’s also backed up. This means Millie’s business continues to work at the speed required, they’re productive and there’s no need to waste their IT manager’s budget or time – support costs are minimised.

13:00 hours – Lawyers can get the information they need quickly – with the Legal Hold application

Finding the right data you need quickly is no easy task for any legal team. With the best endpoint protection package for the business, Millie’s IT manager has made data retrieval fast and secure.

With compliant seven-year archiving and eDiscovery, the information the lawyers need is found quickly, saving Millie further the need to pay for costly consultants, legal services and third party tools. It automates and centralises backup and search of data across devices. So IT and legal teams can easily identify, collect, preserver and review potential data internally.

16:00 hours – Millie’s management team reviews their ISO 27001 compliance requirements

With the case meeting out of the way, Millie heads back to the office for a compliance meeting with her management team. To help them keep customers and win new business in an increasingly competitive business environment, Mille is keen to assure her customers of her business commitment to keeping their data secure.

Using the same backup package that protects business critical information of more than four million other corporate users, Millie is able to provide that guarantee with ISO 27001 data security protection.  Advanced encryption and other top-level security procedures and protocols safeguard her business data at all times – during transmission, storage and recovery.

22:30 hours – With endpoint protection, Millie and her IT manager have peace of mind

Safe in the knowledge that the business is protected 24/7, Millie and her IT manager can get a good night’s sleep. (Even though someone, somewhere, is working out a new way to disrupt this…)

£230million. At its worst, that’s how much last winter’s weather was *estimated to cost UK small-medium businesses in a single day. A frustrating **two-fifths of those businesses are now likely to fail in the next two years. A cloud backup and Disaster Recovery solution can stop this happening to your organisation. Here’s how.

“It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us; in joy we face the storm and defy it”~ Amelia Barr

According to telecoms provider, Daisy Group plc, nearly a third (31%) of UK businesses have been affected by bad weather over the last two years. Transport problems, power cuts or broadband and phone line failures are all to blame. Last year, bad weather prevented an estimated three million UK workers from completing their normal work responsibilities.

That’s a pretty gloomy picture, right?

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The sunshine behind the cloud: cloud backup and disaster recovery

With cloud backup and disaster recovery in place, the impact of the weather fades dramatically. Why? Because, as long as you have access to the Internet via broadband or 3/4G wireless connections, you can keep up communications and proceed with business as usual – albeit maybe with limited capabilities initially. But either way, your telephone, email, internet connection, power, data and servers are all accessible and under control.

Such a resilient cloud disaster recovery set-up means that, if disaster strikes, you’re ahead of the game. And the faster you get your business back in business, the less your reputation and finances suffer.

Speed: as fast as Hermes, the winged messenger

In the event of a disaster, cloud technology is fast. It reduces recovery times from hours or days to just minutes. Remote access to backed up data means, amongst other things, you no longer have to physically transfer tapes to offsite stand-by sites. You can also recover servers and applications much more quickly, significantly limiting business downtime – which you want to avoid like the plague. The longer you’re unable to operate, the more damaging it is for your business – both financially, and for your reputation.

Guaranteed: as wise as Athena, goddess of wisdom

It’s smart to make sure you have a guarantee behind your data and IT systems recovery. A simple automated appliance can: sit on your server and capture snapshots of it; convert them into virtual rescue images; test their integrity; and test invocation and rescue. This daily process will ensure your business continuity through a disaster.

But make sure you get a convincing SLA and guaranteed 30-day transition period, so your systems are fully tested in your environment before switching back fully to your usual system.

Security – as controlled as Zeus, king of the gods

Your server snapshots should be protected during capture, transfer and storage with encryption and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technologies. However, for the highest possible protection of your data and systems, what you really want is a service provider that is overlaid end-to-end ISO 27001 security processes, which are independently audited.

Reliability – as steady as wine-loving Bacchus is not!

The cloud is reliable. It avoids introducing risk through human error as it eliminates many of the complex, manual steps that traditional recovery solutions require.

Cost – as accurate as Artemis’s hunting bow

The cloud makes the most of your financial investment. You don’t need to pay for your own hardware just for it to sit idle.

Scalability – as smart in business as Hermes, god of trade

Cloud solutions are easily scalable, so you can expand or contract recovery capabilities on demand, without having to pay for services you don’t need. This is a massive benefit for SMBs.

Accessible – as accessible as Aphrodite’s skirts, but in a good way

Because you don’t need to make a massive investment in hardware or in-house specialised recovery knowledge, cloud services (the good ones) put SMBs in a position to adopt an enterprise-level solution that otherwise would be beyond their reach. So not only do cloud solutions require less financial and resourcing investment, they also enable SMBs to achieve the same type of recovery times, recovery points and security levels as large enterprises.

Your entire business in the cloud: phones, emails and calendars

Cloud backup and disaster recovery will give you the confidence that you can maintain business some form of business continuity, no matter the weather. But ultimately, you can run your entire business from the cloud.

All your phone settings, call routings, apps and configurations are saved remotely, in the cloud, so you can still access and manage your phone system from any location with an Internet connection. Unlike the early days of Voice over Internet Protocol, when users could only access a VoIP network from a computer, today you can access it from business handsets and any mobile device with an Internet connection.

The same goes for your email and calendar. For example, with the Microsoft Office 365 suite of cloud solutions, you can access your email, calendar and contacts from any device. You can even conference or collaborate on files with your teams in real time, regardless of physical location. So, if you’ve had to disperse your teams to locations that aren’t your primary site, your people can still keep working and communicating in way that should appear seamless to clients and customers.

The cloud can also provide resilience for your internet connection, with failover that ensures that if one internet connection fails for whatever reason, you will maintain a seamless connection, ensuring business as usual – even wirelessly with 3 and 4G.

To find out how our business continuity/disaster recovery solutions work, check out this two-minute video:

A practical guide to achieving real-world business excellence

Introduction

Sustainable profitable growth – well above market average – is a goal of many businesses. Research by Bain & Co pointed to most businesses aiming to outgrow their market by a factor of two to one, with profits of four times the average. Yet only ten per cent of businesses ever achieve their stated goal.

Too many businesses take short-term, inappropriate actions in a vain attempt to succeed. The most tempting and most common is to book ‘bad’ profits, often at the expense of the customer. Examples abound: the mobile phone provider that offers lower prices to new customers only; the airline that charges you to sit next to your partner or children; the car rental company that charges punitive refilling fees; the bank that charges excessive fees for a letter; the insurance company that quibbles over settling a legitimate claim.

Studies show that typical businesses book between 25% and 50% of bad profits. Booking bad profits at the expense of the customer – at best delivers short term benefits only – at worst it creates long-term resentment and brand damage, stifling longer-term profitable growth. Put another way, if you treat customers badly today, you do not deserve nor will you receive their loyalty.

Work by Bain & Co shows causal links between high customer loyalty and high profitable growth. Across multiple industries and varying sizes of enterprise – those with high loyalty scores outperformed their competitors by a wide margin.

Seven Steps to Driving Customer Loyalty

Satisfaction is not the same as loyalty. Nor is loyalty only about customer service.

Satisfaction is a poor measure of customer loyalty. Satisfaction is about doing the basics right, having good products, fixing or eliminating errors, or being friendly. In many ways, satisfaction is a hygiene factor (as described by Maslow in his Hierarchy of Needs). Bain provided further evidence of the lack of correlation between satisfaction and loyalty with micro-level research; with one client 85% of their lost customers reported being satisfied with the service they had been receiving – yet they still left.

In order to achieve high levels of customer loyalty, a business needs to be able to delight or ‘wow’ its customers. This means doing one of two things: 1) delivering exceptional products well or 2) delivering good products exceptionally. Executives need to take a clinical look at their own products and their own service delivery to assess how well they match up to these two tests.

The process of achieving superior loyalty (and hence superior profits and growth) can be broken down into seven steps:

1. Identify the most attractive segments and understand their needs. Most businesses begin by selling ‘anything’ to ‘anyone’. They evolve and become more focused in their approach, yet many find it hard to resist the temptation for easy revenues and easy profits – by selling ‘almost anything’ to ‘almost anyone’. Identifying the most attractive slices of the market (biggest opportunity, best fit, most profitable, least competitive, closest to core…) is the vital first step if a reputation for being exceptional is to be achieved.
2. Design differentially better value propositions. Once you have a clear idea of your ideal segments, then having an equally clear idea of the customers’ needs is next. Designing products that are clearly better than the current competition at addressing the discovered needs is theoretically simple – but requires strong leadership to push through.
3. Acquire new target customers. This is the normal process of marketing and sales – albeit more targeted and focussed than before steps one and two.
4. Deliver superior customer experience. Delivering exception service goes beyond simply responding to customers’ requests and fixing problems. The requirement is to delight, surprise and wow the customer. Implementing changes in front-line functions that can follow through on this is extremely difficult – not least because it is difficult to get timely feedback and to measure how well you are doing. Certainly, the changes required will touch many aspects of the business from recruitment, training, incentives, management and leadership.
5. Grow share of wallet for target customers. A customer who is delighted with one product or service from you is much more likely to buy another. And without the overhead of having to re-acquire the customer for subsequent products, the overall profitability of the business increases.
6. Drive loyalty and retention. As customers stay longer, the life-time value you receive from them increases – as does the level of referral. We can all understand how this lack of attrition provides the foundation for growth.
7. Retain more profit to out invest and outgrow the competition. Loyal customers, spending more – combined with lower acquisition costs – results in more profit. These profits can be used to innovate, enter new markets, develop brand power – and accelerate past the competition.

Using Net Promoter Score to measure and drive progress

“Have I treated you in a way that deserves your loyalty…?”

Loyalty is hard to measure. Most business functions rely upon Key Performance Indicators developed over hundreds of years that are understood, bench-marked and proven. Tools for managing profit have strict standards; all businesses follow them and are able to compare their own results with their peers. If we accept that loyalty is a driver of long term profit – then a way to measure loyalty is critical – such a measure would be a powerful ‘leading indicator’ on any balanced scorecard.

We have already dismissed customer satisfaction as a valid measure. This, amongst other things, led Bain, Satmetrix and Fred Reichheld to develop a loyalty measure called Net Promoter Score (NPS). The purpose of NPS is to measure how well a business and its employees treat their customers – and – provide micro-level feedback as to make the necessary changes to improve the score (by which we mean improve loyalty).

Net Promoter is:

• An operating metric that describes the health of the customer balance sheet
• A leading (as opposed to lagging) indicator of growth on a ‘Balanced Score Card’ (see related article on Balanced Score Cards)
• A way to provide a singular focus for the business to focus on customer experience improvement
• A diagnostic tool for understanding opportunities to improve at the ‘Moments of Truth’ (as described by Jan Carlzon in his book of the same name).
• An enabler for creating a closed-loop process that can improve the customer relationship

Net Promoter is not:

• A replacement for other types of research, which can probe specific areas or provide deeper qualitative insight.
• A reason to wait until customers complain before addressing their issues with the experience.
• A metric that will improve before the right changes are made in the customer experience and they have had time to perceive the changes
• A substitute for institutional passion around improving the customer experience.

NPS methodology relies on just two questions:

• How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?
• What can we do to improve what we do?

The first question is powerfully simple – it probes both the rational (head) and the irrational (heart) of the customer. Before answering, the customer has to think about their own reputation and credibility. You only have to think about a personal situation where someone might ask you to recommend the best restaurant to take a special guest to – or your advice on a great school for their child. The questions make you stop and think; you only recommend if you’re sure.

In order to provide a global benchmark, the responses to NPS surveys must be on a fixed scale of zero to ten (not one to ten), where zero means ‘very unlikely’ and ten means ‘very likely’. The responses a categorised into those who are:

• Promoters – score 9 or 10
• Neutrals – score 7, or 8
• Detractors – score 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6

To calculate your NPS simply subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters (the Neutrals are ignored).

The result is expressed as a percentage and range from -100% through to 100%. It is not uncommon for negative scores to pervade certain industries; scores of over 70% are considered to be world-class.