Web Tools Worth Buying
As a small business, Norada expects a lot from the Web services it uses to get work done. Even free services that aren't critical to our operations, such as RSS readers, are expected to perform reliably with little or no care and feeding required; a couple of burps or ill-timed hiccups in one of these throwaway apps and the bookmark gets deleted.
Web tools we actually pay to use are held to a higher standard: they are expected to perform nearly flawlessly all day, every day. Before signing up for a service that will cost us hard-earned cash, we spend a lot of time looking at competitors, evaluating features and making sure we understand the upside and downside of using the product.
Being a Web service company ourselves, we're probably a bit savvier than most small businesses when it comes to sorting the good stuff from the bad. As a result, there have been few surprises with the reliability and usability of the Web-based tools we've embedded in our day-to-day business.
We selected our IP-PBX provider, RingCentral, because they provided exactly what we wanted at what we considered a fair price compared to other hosted and non-hosted alternatives. We've been able to consolidate all our voicemail and fax services (including routing and call forwarding) in an online rather than on-premise location, which means everyone has access wherever they happen to be working. As a service business, our call volumes fluctuate; we only pay for what we use, and the solution scales to our needs. While we have the technical skills in house to manage our own PBX, we chose to outsource and keep those technical assets focused on our core business.
We've been a PayPal customer since the early days of the service, and it's become the payment method of choice for nearly 40 percent of our customers. Even though Norada and Solve360 have been around for a while and we've demonstrated we're honest and upstanding corporate citizens, we understand that some customers might be a bit anxious about handing over their credit card numbers to us. In those cases, PayPal serves as the trusted arms-length payment processor, and the fees we pay are lower than traditional credit card rates.
You'd have a hard time prying the Audiovox 6600 Pocket PCs from the oversized belt clips of Norada's technical folks. Going for lunch or beers with a staffer who has one of these strapped to his waist, you'll hear a stream of chirps, tweets, TV show theme song excerpts and other quirky audible confirmations that yes, indeed, the Solve360 production servers are operating within established parameters. In addition to receiving SMS alerts, the technical wizards use them as wireless magic wands to monitor system performance from a user perspective, over the public IP network.
Each of these solutions lets us work faster and smarter, and ultimately helps us make money. The only other mission-critical Web service in our shop is Solve360, which we use to manage all our communication and collaboration, customer relationship management, file sharing and scheduling. If this wasn't our business, it's one of the first things (along with accounting and legal) that we'd be looking at outsourcing to a company like Norada.
