Devizes Solutions Small Business Blog

Breaking up is hard to do…well – American Express sucks at CRM

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 02:19:18 +0000

A quick tale of how American Express created a very angry ex-customer who will never use them again, let me set the scene.

A change is gonna come – What’s new at DevizesSolutions.com

Wed, 27 May 2009 15:58:23 +0000

If you’ve been a regular visitor to DevizesSolutions.com in the past couple months you will have seen a number of changes to the site. For everyone else here are a list of new features that have been added in the last six weeks.

Don’t tear it down – Accepting and accommodating information silos

Mon, 18 May 2009 21:10:05 +0000

OK, I've had this post sat simmering for quite a while, time to get it off my chest. I recently read a white paper by Sheryl Kingstone of the Yankee Group published through InformationWeek entitled 'SMBs Must Eliminate Information Silos to Improve the Customer Experience' (registration required). It was an interesting read stressing the importance to small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) of having a single source of information and fully integrated systems such that information is complete, consistent and always up to date,

Open source smackdown Drupal vs. Joomla – Attending BarCampBirmingham

Mon, 11 May 2009 17:49:30 +0000

On Saturday May 2nd I attended a rather unconventional conference at the Innovation Depot. BarCampBirmingham is in its third year and by all accounts is hitting its stride. I estimate there were over one hundred attendees and more than twenty sponsors.

What makes the conference unusual is that the presentation schedule is made up on the day by attendees requesting a presentation on a given subject and others offering to present what they know. This necessitates that the presentations themselves are short and somewhat improvised. The essential idea is to provide a forum for the local tech community to meet and share information from the bleeding edge of new technology and innovation. As an admitted noob, I had been curious to see one of these unconferences in action, wondering if it would actually work or descend into chaos. But what really drew me to attend was the preconference discussion