Free Servosity Online Backup Trial! Click Here...
If you are from the Greenville / Upstate South Carolina area and are into IT, you likely know Damien Stevens, or at least the name of his company, Servosity.
Today, Servosity announced that in addition to their quality online / cloud backup solution, they will have Servosity DR Server and DR Desktop available! DR Server and DR Desktop are Disaster Recovery solutions that allow you to perform a Bare Metal Recovery to dissimilar physical hardware, recover VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines, and more.
Features:
- Bare Metal Recovery to Dissimilar hardware, VMWare, Hyper-V, and VirtualBox
- Local, Network, and Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery
- Purpose built for MSPs and IT Resellers
- No Hardware Required
- Geographically Redundant SAS-70 Type II Cloud
- Recover a server, desktop, or laptop in just minutes
- Disaster Recovery with snapshots to the Network and Cloud every 15 minutes
Happy Customers are Good Customers!
Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.
The quality and level of customer service has decreased in recent years and this has been driven home for me in the last few weeks causing me to reflect on my own personal definition of customer service. A couple of weeks ago, I helped a customer at McAbee’s Custom Carpet as he was picking up a piece of carpet he ordered a few days prior. This nice gentleman felt the need to tell me how Customer Service in our country was a dying trait and he was so glad to find a small entrepreneurial company that once again cared about providing customer service. Really? I guess I’ve taken this for granted… great service is what my father founded this business on nearly 50 years ago.
Just today I was met with having to deal with a local vendor that had managed to get me to the point of being very upset and disgusted with their lack of customer service… or even response. The ability to provide a high level of service requires both obligation and responsibility as I see it and somewhere between the two lays a level of comfort. It’s not a matter of control or money but rather a need to see through the problem to the pain trigger and address it head-on.
So many service providers these days are working for a large Corporation, whether larger than our Upstate SC business area or even Worldwide businesses and they are losing their hold on great customer service. If you even get to speak with an actual person, they tend to hide behind someone else in their pyramid of business (be it supervisor or manager) and they lack the ability to accept responsibility for wrong doing or making a situation better. They tend to pass-the-buck as we have all experienced and this tactic must be an attempt to where the customer down to the point that they no longer even care to pursue their point of concern. It just serves to enrage me!
Where does this leave us – the consumer? What leverage do we have when a product or contract of service goes astray? Does anybody really care? I think we are just beginning to see a change in customer service in our society. Take the banking industry for example: Bank of America announces that they will begin charging their customers to use their own debit cards. They must have known this would cause BoA customers to go elsewhere. Was it worth risking? I say bravo to the customers that find another bank with better customer service. When did it become customary to raise your profit margin by charging additional fees to your already existing customers?
As an entrepreneur with Homeland Secure IT, I’ve followed my own father’s footsteps in starting a business with my husband. My Dad instilled two business traits in my mind: quality and service and the two go hand in hand. I remember hearing him say, “When business becomes so large that you no longer care about one or the other, quality or service, you might as well give up and lock the door.” I’ve watched both Homeland Secure IT and McAbee’s Custom Carpet go to extremes to make certain that a customer is happy, even if it means losing money in the end. There is so much more than the dollar amount to a business venture, there’s reputation of service that will keep customers coming back again and again. If employees of large companies feel no obligation to the satisfaction of their product or service, what do they care if they see a customer walk in the door again? The only leverage I can find at times is the threat of internet reviews for a business and we need to take this more seriously. I know John and I are constantly looking to reviews on Yelp, Yahoo, Google, and other forums to see just what other consumers have experienced before we decide to invest in a business. Perhaps the time has come where we do not have to feel like an unheard voice among so many, your opinion matters!
The businesses I’m invested in will continue to provide top-notch service to our customers. I am a firm believer in my father’s theory, why would we continue to grow a business if we are not giving our community reason to support us?
Pamela Hoyt – Homeland Secure IT / McAbee’s Custom Carpet
@PamelaHoyt – http://www.facebook.com/PamelaMHoyt
Purrrrrrr
“Sorry, I can’t respond to my emails today as something has crashed on my computer, and my mouse seems to be missing…”
This cracks me up every time I see it. It’s from over on icanhascheezburger.com I believe, but was posted to someone’s facebook timeline today and made me smile all over again.
BTW: If you call us up to perform computer repair on this issue, I think my response would be, “I’m sorry, I can’t find anything wrong with it, it seems to be working purrrrrrfectly.”
Muahaha
In what is becoming way too common, the popular site, mysql.com was exploited, and used to distribute malware by redirecting visitors to another site this week.
Anyone browsing to mysql.com yesterday would have been redirected, and without even being prompted, then likely been exploited themselves by the software running on the rogue website which apparently looked for vulnerable browser plugins to use for an injection point.
Trend Micro’s smart web filtering may have caught this and stopped it, but one thing is for sure… Doing everything you can to protect yourself from this type of exploit is more important than ever.
You should always insure you are running up-to-date and mainstream/quality anti-virus software (Such as Trend Micro), and also keep your operating system (whether Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X or even linux), browser, and all support software such as Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader and JAVA, as well as Microsoft Office fully updated!
Another thing you should consider is backups! With the cost of USB hard drives at an all time low, and online backup (Like our Servosity offering) being an easy install, configuration and affordable, there is no excuse to not have backups.
Should you need assistance in the Greenville / Upstate SC area determining what you or your business needs, please contact us at 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com. We provide sales of Trend Micro, Symantect & McAfee anti-virus protection, virus cleanup & removal, and can handle your computer service & computer repair tasks!
Our preferred vendor Nexlink, has an “Upgrade Ready” line of computers that makes perfect sense for businesses who may want to save some money when they initially purchase, but down the road, increase the “horsepower” of their computer without replacing the entire system, or changing out the processor.
For example, if you purchased a business computer system from us with the Intel Core i3 2102 processor, you can later purchase a “Processor Performance Upgrade” from us too, and it does not involve even opening the machine.
We would visit your business, or you could optionally bring the computer to us, and we would apply a product key from Intel that would accomplish the following:
- Increase frequency by 500 Mhz
- Improves performance when downloading, editing and viewing photos, videos and music so you can multitask more effectively
- Works more efficiently while running complex applications
Even the Intel Pentium C6x2 processor family can be upgraded with an increase of 600 Mhz!
The update is affordable and fast!
If you would like more information about the Intel Processor Performance Upgrade, please call us at 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com
Homeland Secure IT will be closed this coming Monday, September 5th for Labor Day…
Should you need computer service, computer repair, or network support during this time, please email us at info@homelandsecureit.com or call 864.990.4748 – Leaving a message will result in that voice mail being sent to all of us here.
We hope that you and your family will have a great labor day weekend, and keep it safe!
This sticker needs to go on every server room door...
“Tampering with this network equipment may result in an ass whoopin’ you’ll never forget”… Makes me laugh every time I see it! I bet every IT professional would love to see this sticker on every server room door. How much money would be saved on computer, network & server service, repair or support, especially if someone actually was beat down for messing with equipment.
Recently, Staples Business Depot did the unthinkable, they sold computers that had been returned, and the hard drives contained the previous owner’s private information according to an article on the www.cbc.ca news site which states, “Staples resold laptops with customer data, audit finds“.
The article goes on to say that 54 of the 149 computers tested that were ready to be resold, had banking, tax, social insurance, health, academic and passport information…. Also, that consumer data was found on devices in 15 of the 17 stores audited destined to be resold.
How did this happen? It is likely, a person returned a computer for repairs and possibly, due to the terms of one of the extended warranties, it was replaced instead. Then that Staples either wiped and reloaded it, or sent it off to the factory for repairs, either way, it was then put back into inventory, with the data of the former owner.
The moral of this story is, if you are a consumer or end user and return a computer, insure the company physically destroys your drive, or better yet, let’s you keep the drive (you may have to pay 100 dollars or so for that) and YOU destroy it or retain it for backup purposes.
If you run a service depot or you are a reseller that may offer used or refurbished computers for sale, consider simply replacing the hard drive, rather than attempting a ‘secure wipe’. Services like those offered by ShredDisk in Greenville, SC, will go to your location and shred the hard drive onsite!
It is partially due to the security concerns that Homeland Secure IT does not offer used computers or servers for sale. Nor do we offer used hard drives. If you bring in a computer for repair or service and it ends up being not worth the repairs, we dispose of the hard drive in a secure manner. Make sure your computer support professional does too!
Best of the Upstate 2011 – Computer Service Provider
Please write-in Homeland Secure IT for Computer Service Provider
We believe that Homeland Secure IT is the best Computer Service Provider in the Upstate, and we are hoping you do too!
Therefore, we humbly request that you click on the Greenville News “Best of the Upstate 2011″ logo on the left and take a moment to vote for us!
Our category is item #9, “Computer Service Provider”, please write-in “Homeland Secure IT”.
I believe you can vote daily from June 19th through July 10th…
Thank you so much for your support!
John & Pamela Hoyt
I’m going to just post this link….. I leave it up to you to read it, or not. Believe it, or not.
http://gizmodo.com/5803498/apple-to-customer-service-dont-help-our-customers-with-malware
There is a further link from that page: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apple-to-support-reps-do-not-attempt-to-remove-malware/3362
If you happen to feel your Mac is infected – seek a professional computer service provider’s input.
