May is the time for change. Spring has sprung. Kids are graduating from high school and college. Brides are preparing for June weddings. Some pre-COVID activities are coming back. But it has been tough for a lot of people this past year.
For example, my son and his wife are trying for a third time to have their wedding ceremony. The first time COVID shut down everything. The second time, a few days before the wedding ceremony and a week after their first shot, both came down with COVID. Maybe the third time will be the charm.
Each time, they’ve had to adapt and approach the situation differently. Also, communication with all attendees as early as possible was key so plane and hotel reservations could be cancelled. The vendors also needed to be notified so reimbursements or credits could be made. And, of course, honeymoon plans had to be cancelled.
The same thing happens in business and in the computer world. Small adjustments and changes occur frequently in most businesses. If you don’t keep up with these small adjustments and changes, you may find your business headed in the wrong direction. Regulations, security, policies and procedures need revision constantly.
In addition to adapting quickly, there must be ongoing communication with your clients and customers in layman’s terms to keep them informed of any adjustments or changes that occur in your business that may affect them.
One recent example of a sudden change that affected several clients was ATT/Bellsouth/Yahoo changing how third party apps (i.e. Outlook) retrieves email from the email servers. Suddenly, passwords quit working in Outlook but worked correctly if using a browser.
This is how the issue ultimately had to be resolved. My client had me login to ATT’s website with their password, then go to their profile on ATT’s website, scroll down and generate the security key. Once they had the security key, they had to go to Outlook and use that security key as their password.
It took over two hours to find the fix for this issue, but you can click here save some time searching for a solution.
ATT could have done a better job by adapting and approaching this issue differently. It would have been better if ATT had been more proactive and notified the their clients multiple times with an email clearly outlining in layman’s terms what needed to be done and when it needed to be done.
They also could have made the process of searching for the solution on their website much easier by linking the search terms “password” and “security key”. If they had done that, then when someone searched on “password”, they also would have found “security key” which was the most important part of getting this issue resolved.
I’m sure they didn’t intend this to be so difficult to resolve. But by not communicating this issue more effectively with their customers, they made what could have been an easy to resolve issue very difficult.
Now think about your business.
Are you consistently staying on top of the little things in your business? Are you communicating on a consistent basis with your customers and clients to make sure they don’t run into any “surprise” issues with your business?
Being consistently proactive, adapting quickly and communicating more effectively with your customers will keep you and your business on course…and your customers happy.
All the best and stay well,
Jim Nay
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