Three easy ways to boost your online presence

The internet is the first place people will go to find out more about you – or even just to find you – and a well-optimised website can help boost your credibility, tap you into a stream of free leads, and save valuable time by providing answers and information to curious customers.

In fact, according to Adweek, 81 percent of shoppers conduct online research before making a purchasing decision.

Put simply: if you’re serious about doing business in 2019 (and beyond), you need to be serious about managing your online presence.

Ensure your customers can always find you online with a great internet provider – learn more at Commander.

Access all hours

Consumers these days demand speed and convenience. They expect products, services or at least information at their fingertips and, whether or not you’re an ecommerce business, you’re limiting your market if you don’t have an online presence – the basic foundation of which is a website.

“The majority of consumers today choose to do business online at a time that suits them,” says Natalie Davies, General Manager of Customer Service at Commander. “At this point it’s like, if you’re not online, why aren’t you? What’s happening?

“It’s all about accessibility, it’s about being able to do exploration online around your products and your services, and it’s about having multiple contact channels. So, if you don’t have that presence it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to attract the consumers of today.”

Avoiding outage outrage

In this “service 24/7” era, a slow or interrupted internet connection can spell disaster in terms of your customer and user experience.

It’s not just your website or EFTPOS that could take a hit – in some cases when the internet shuts off, business shuts down.

“We run everything off the internet,” says ClickSend founder Matthew Larner, “so if it drops out, we lose our front door bell, our swipe cards don’t work, obviously no phones work – our whole business completely stops.

“We also have a lot of remote staff that work from home, so we need rock-solid internet to be able to communicate with our own team as well as with our customers.”

Since connecting to the NBN via “very reliable” fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology, Larner has noticed a lot of positive changes to the way they do business.

“We can send large files now with the NBN, so we can attach huge spreadsheets, bigger images, bigger videos,” he says. “Even just transferring files between each other – before we had to get a USB hard drive, plug it in to a computer, transfer files onto that, and then send it somewhere else to another office, so they could plug it in and download all the data. Now we just drag it into a chat or an email and we can send massive files within seconds.

“It’s had a huge impact in terms of costs, it saves a lot of time for our staff, and it’s a better return on investment, because you’ve got fewer staff and you can do things more efficiently. It allows us to expand globally too, because we can run a business from Perth in Australia and we can be talking to customers in the US and transferring data to them.”

Call for back-up

As a supplier of business-specific NBN services, Commander understands the critical importance of connection continuity. That’s why, in case of unavoidable outages, it provides its customers with static IPs, which act as a safety net for the 4G back-up.

Depending on the technology a business is using, other fall-back options are also available.

“If connectivity is absolutely critical – and I believe in small business it’s one of the non-negotiables – then we would want to make sure that a customer has a back-up or a diversion in place,” says Davies.

“That’s something we would always talk about upfront, so we’re determining what their needs are and then making sure we’ve got all of the right supports in place to ensure they’re not in a situation where they don’t have a connection.”

With the peace of mind of knowing they’re backed up, businesses such as ClickSend can stay focussed on more important things, such as seamless customer service and reaping the benefits of a super-fast, reliable connection.

“We’re a massive fan of the NBN,” says Larner. “I think it’s really great for Australian businesses and for business that want to compete on a global scale.”