Going Google Across the 50 States: North Carolina based American Support relies on Docs, Sites and Chat to run its business

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Matt Zemon, President of American Support, headquartered in North Carolina. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

At American Support, we provide back office services to over 400 cable, phone and internet franchises in 29 states. Our services include billing and subscriber management along with 24/7 customer care and technical support.

When I originally founded the company in 2006 we had a joint venture with a Philippines-based call center to provide customer service at a reasonable cost to our clients. In the first couple years of business it became evident that our clients and their subscribers wanted to have American-based customer service. Our clients were not happy with the off-shore customer service we were providing and we were having difficulties winning new business. As a customer service outsourcer the challenge was finding a way to provide the American customer service they desired at a price point they could afford.

To save our business we ended up rethinking our business model and looking to the cloud to drive down costs and increase our efficiency. The first change was migrating to a call center in the cloud platform which enabled us to recruit, train and route calls to rural American home-based employees who needed and wanted the work. With this technology solution in place we began bringing our call center jobs back to America. As of May of last year we are a 100% American customer service organization.

The second change was moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps in 2009, which allowed us to more efficiently and effectively collaborate with our employees and clients spread out across the United States.

Today we maintain a small office in North Carolina and a technical assistance center and network operations center in Montana. The rest of our management team is spread out between Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Georgia and Nebraska. Our entire customer support team works from home.

Tools that fostered collaboration were absolutely essential to running our business. Each manager and their team really live in the Google Apps environment. All of their meetings are done through Google Docs and video chats. I’ve never met 90% of our employees in person. Every meeting agenda is built off of a doc with everyone logged into the same doc at the same time, taking notes and keeping track of next steps as we move along through the meeting agenda. Plus, our clients across the country have started getting used to the value of moving away from attachments to using Google Docs. Working together internally and externally is so much easier when we’re always sure we’re looking at the most current document and you can collaborate on it in real-time.

Google Sites is also a key aspect of our business operations. We create a custom site for each of our clients that contains the most frequently asked questions, their unique policies and procedures, and other useful information for our teams. Sites allows us to keep all information in one place that everyone on the team can update and reference.

We had initially looked at Google Apps for its 25 GB of mail and shared calendars, but it’s Google Sites, Docs and Talk that allow us to communicate successfully and efficiently so that we can support customers with a team all over the country. We attribute our successful collaboration and the ability to run a coast-to-coast virtual team to our use of Google Apps.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps Team

Top Tips on Cloud Computing

A far off reality only a few years ago, today cloud computing has become mainstream. However, many small business owners we meet are still unclear about what cloud computing is and, more importantly, how it can benefit their business. If you're in this camp, you're not alone. A recent survey of European IT Heads by Portio Research found that 56% were not familiar with cloud computing.

Cloud computing, or software as a service (SaaS), is when IT software and services are delivered over the web and through a browser. This transfers the responsibility for IT maintenance, software upgrades and any system issues onto the service provider, allowing enterprises like yours to focus on your core business instead of your infrastructure. That's why the cloud is especially appealing to small-to-medium sized businesses, which often have a smaller workforce and less capacity for time-consuming and expensive IT maintenance.

To help you get more familiar with this concept that can streamline and improve your business operations, we've put together the following 10 things to consider when getting started in the cloud:

• Moving to the cloud is easy: The transfer of business information into the cloud is very straightforward. There is no need to install new hardware or software as everything is run by the cloud provider.

• Cost savings could be higher than you anticipate: Businesses that move to the cloud can make savings on many different levels - IT hardware and software expenditure is cut dramatically and fewer staff or support resources are needed for IT maintenance. Last September, analyst group IDC estimated that business can instantly reduce their IT spend by approx. 54% by moving to a cloud based solution.*

• Improved productivity: One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that employees can access documents and emails whilst away from the office. If your business demands mobility and flexibility or you have staff keen to extend their use of home or remote working, the cloud could be a straightforward and affordable way of addressing these needs.
  

• Greater level of security: Cloud computing can be more secure than traditional IT. It's all about economies of scale - many established cloud suppliers employ leading security experts, invest vast amounts of money into securing their applications and develop technology beyond the means of any small business. In addition, the risk of losing confidential data on a laptop or a USB stick is also diminished, as everything is stored in the cloud and not on your devices. (Last year a survey from CREDANT Technologies found that 55,843 mobile phones and 6,193 other devices, such as laptops, had been left in the back of London black cabs over the previous six months.** In November 2009, it found that New Yorkers forget on average around 5,000 mobile phones and more than 500 other handheld devices, including iPods, laptops and memory sticks, in the back of taxis, every month.***)

• Manage the cultural adjustment: Today's employees expect to have the same technology at work that they enjoy at home. Google designs its applications with users in mind and many staff will already be familiar with Google Mail and Google Docs. However, internal communication about the change of service and in-house training sessions will help staff to feel more comfortable using the new technology.

• A more collaborative way of working: Using cloud computing applications, people can work more closely together, accessing and working in the same documents in real time - without the need for hundreds of emails with attachments. Improved knowledge sharing and communication encourages creativity amongst your employees which can help drive the business forward.

• Flexibility to scale up or scale down your business: Cloud based "pay as you go" style services allow you to easily increase your use of cloud services as your business grows, or decrease your spend if you need to temporarily scale down.

• Employees of tomorrow: Look at how teenagers interact - on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace - all cloud environments. These teenagers will soon become employees, accustomed to collaborating online and accessing their data from any mobile device at hand, not expecting to work in one location and from 9 to 5.

• Your business resiliency can be improved: Cloud computing providers should not only offer 24/7 support but also the increased resiliency and redundancy afforded by multiple data centres to ensure your information is always available. This means that you experience less downtime than when managing IT in-house, and any problems can be solved far quicker by being fixed centrally. IDC estimates that businesses operating in the cloud achieve 97% greater IT reliability.*

• More choice: In contrast to traditional IT models which can involve expensive software licenses and long lock-in contracts, the cloud model offers far more flexibility. You can switch provider far more easily and regularly in order to get the best experience and value for money. However, it is important to check with your cloud provider as to how you retrieve data from their cloud should you choose to switch in the future.

*IDC White Paper sponsored by salesforce.com, Force.com Cloud Platform Drives Huge Time To Market and Cost Savings, Doc # 219965, September 2009
** CREDANT Technologies London taxi survey 2008
*** CREDANT Technologies New York taxi survey 2009

Posted by Malgosia Rigoli, Small Business Blog Team

Custom shoes made possible with custom AdWords campaigns

Mike Knapp and Michael Fox had always dreamed of founding a start-up. Jodie Fox (Michael’s wife) had always loved custom-made shoes. When her friends started asking her to design shoes for them and to bring these handmade shoes back from her travels, she, Mike and Michael saw a business opportunity. The trio founded their online custom shoe design company Shoes of Prey to share the design experience with the rest of the world.

The business first took flight in Australia, where the founders live and their company is headquartered. Their first customers were trusted friends, who tested the online creation tool and proudly wore their personalized designs. The ability to create custom shoes quickly went viral. It seemed that with each step they took, the initial testers received questions about where they found their fabulous footwear. Soon strangers began making purchases, and when the website spread to overseas locations, the team began offering different currencies to allow for international sales.

The team had already created an AdWords account to promote Shoes of Prey to online customers in Australia. As they expanded internationally, they created new AdWords campaigns targeted at English-speaking countries with currencies they could process. They used AdWords location-targeting to show ads in new locations: Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S. Michael says, “Despite being based in Australia, it took only a matter of days for our first orders to start coming in from the other side of the world. It was exciting to see!”

Currently, about 10 percent of Shoes of Prey’s shoe sales come from AdWords customers—and about 40 percent of those sales are from international buyers. One of the main reasons they’ve been successful in reaching international audiences is the ease with which they can edit ad texts for each location. “Gift certificates have been really popular on our site,” Michael says. “So we use AdWords to promote our gift certificates. Key events for us are Mother's Day, Valentine's Day and Christmas.”

Michael then uses Google Insights for Search to identify each country’s peak search traffic dates for these occasions. “We time specific AdWords campaigns to target each of these events. Mother's Day is on a different day in different countries, so AdWords lets us run ads at different times of the year for the various countries, and edit the ads so they speak to users in those countries. For example, we’ll mention the price of our shoes in euro in Ireland and in dollars in the U.S.”

After only a year of operation, the founders have hired three new employees and have formed partnerships with local firms in Japan and Russia to localize their offering in those markets. “Early on in the life of our business, AdWords showed us the potential our business has for growth outside Australia, so we now offer Japanese and Russian versions of our website, complete with local marketing and customer support in those markets,” says Michael.

With AdWords, Michael, Jodie and Mike have been able to share their passion for custom shoes with international customers who share their love for customization. Their next step is to inspire all shoe lovers to design their own footwear. Michael tells us: “We're starting to experiment with the Google Display Network to help us find those first customers while they're browsing the web.” And they’ll continue to use AdWords location targeting and ad text customization to reach new international customers who might not know just how much fun designing shoes can be!

Posted by Maren Bean, Sr. Associate, Ads Communications