support

In any business, and probably more in a small business, the word “service” conjours up many different ideas in any given person’s mind.

In just the same way that no two people view the same business in the same way, so no two people have exactly the same idea of what service is.

We tend to compartmentalise and differentiate into “types” of service these days – and of course, it may be that the whole point of your business IS to provide a service.

In any sense, however, all aspects of any business are involved with service.  Even when selling products over the net, without a single customer facing employee, you’re still in service.

In a nutshell, service is the catch-all term given to the art of satisfying customer expectation.  Nothing more, and nothing less.  I say art, because despite what all those posh business schools try to teach, it isn’t a science.  There is no formula that can be globally applied, or which will produce the same results for any given business.

From this, we can infer immediately that service is personal.  Not personal in a one on one way, though that’s certainly part of it, but personal in the sense of “human” – designed by one human, or group of humans, to meet the needs of another human, or group of humans.

But, what IS service?  How do you DO service?  And how do you know if you’re getting service right?

In an article yesterday, I spoke of the latest figures in an ONS snaphot.  I also made mention of the fact that any government, present, or future, in the UK needs to bring small business on board like never before.

One of the key reasons for this is that some 98% of business in the UK is a small business – employing no more than 49 staff, and typically with turnover of between coppers, and a few million a year.
 

The philosophy as to why small business should be encouraged is well established – and is not rooted, as many have come to believe, in the outright capitalism of the 80’s and 90’s.

Whilst there is nothing at all wrong in making a profit, and trust me, I am as capitalist at heart as I am anything else, there is, and needs to be, more to it than the pure pursuit of revenue at any cost.

I know my “Rule Number One” states that you are in business to make money, no other reason.  That’s true, as reasons go, but like any reason, it needs conditions to survive.  I’m not saying, all of a sudden that making money shouldn’t be what you’re all about – but I am expanding upon that theory.

Only those living in total isolation from society can possibly have any reason NOT to be aware that Microsoft has just released its newest operating system into general sale.

Windows 7 has arrived in all its various flavours – from uber-basic to well, probably what most of us would expect to be in an operating system.

As always for these things, there’s no “one box” solution from where you are to where Microsoft want you to be.

By this I mean there are decisions and choices depending upon what OS you are running now, whether or not your current machine will support the requirements, and so on.  You cannot, in effect, “just buy” Windows 7, and move on.
 

In reality, most business in the UK, and a fair number of consumers, will come to Windows 7 much as they did the disastrous Vista – via purchase of a new machine.  It will, then, be foisted upon you without so much as a nod – much as the disastrous Vista was.

For me, anyway, the general point of computers and software is that it gets out of the way and lets you do what you need to.

Computers, the internet, and all the related paraphernalia are there to serve our need for information, ultimately – whether storing, retrieving, or manipulating.

I want to talk here about what is, to my mind, one of the best, most underrated, understated, pieces of software ever to come out of Redmond.  It is, for once, a Miscrosoft product that does pretty well exactly what it says it does, and a bit more besides.  Quite a bit more, in fact.

It is Microsoft One Note.  It was released to us mere mortals as a lesser part of some of the Office 2003 suites, now in 2007 guise, and is available “stand-alone” – that is, has the Office branding and functionality, but can be used without any other Office components installed.

At its heart, it is essentially something known as a free form database.  It is capable, easily, of recording your notes – by voice, tablet, video, and yes, even by typing.  It can take whole webpages, and store them.  In fact any data you use on your computer can be intserted into One Note.