Almost everyone that comes to POS Solutions tells me we are Mr Fix IT. Certainly this year we did something right.
I would like to think it was the careful preparation and planning that we did for the Season and New Year break that paid off. This period we know from experience the situation changes. People often don’t know how to handle it. So problems start up. Unfortunately suppliers in the industry don’t help by vanishing now. We however did not allow ourselves to be sidetracked into other issues. I took detailed notes last year of what happened. Then well in advance I had some software changes done in both the DOS and windows to reduce some of the issues that came up. I also contacted the major newspapers to ask them for what was happening. We carefully made sure we had much documentation in place. We also went over the CRM reports for last year to identified newsagencies that had problems. From that we made a list of potential problem sites. We then contacted each of these sites personally. Then we explained to them exactly what was needed!
The result was a 45% drop in support calls compared to last year.
Clearly we had a big advantage this year as we planned well our business strategy. This planning showed up many possible problems and situations that we resolved before they even came into being. Since these plans are not cast in concrete and can be amended, next year I hope we do better.
Note having said all of this we did get badly caught with the Fairfax changing the dates at the last-minute. In the industry like newsagencies where so much can be planned this last-minute change is inexcusable. I think that newsagents should get at least a few weeks warning of any change. If this could be done we could write scripts for newsagents and automatically update our clients programs so they don’t have to do it.
