I’ve been at work for 2 hours today and returned around 15 phone calls in response to email messages I received.

Since many of them are new prospects, they aren’t in CRM yet. I probably wasted an average of one minute looking up each person’s phone number since it was not in their email signature line. That easily translates into an hour of wasted time EVERY DAY.

When I see an e-mail signature with a phone number, I rejoice! Are you willing to set the example?

Does your phone receive email? If the person put their phone number in their email signature line, you can click the email to place the phone call.

Set an example by setting up your automatic email signature line to include your phone number. When you email someone, they can just tap on your phone number in your email signature line to call you.

I receive so many email messages that say, “Mike, call me!” and there is no number to click on. I can look up their number, but it would be so much faster if it was included in their email signature line.

Please post your comments on this blog.

There was no sensitive data on the iPad, just in case something like this ever happened. Security features are enabled anyway.

When I arrived hours later the receptionist said they hadn’t heard anything about any missing devices. I checked and now Find my iPhone showed the device’s location to be about 30 miles away, complete with an address and a satellite view of a residence.

I asked if they had any idea why my iPad would be at such and such address. The helpful person at the desk said, “Can you wait a moment? I need to call the owner of my company.”

I was told that the address was that of an employee whom they’d had other problems with before. They informed me that, after the phone call, the owner had actually driven to the home, recovered the iPad, and terminated the person on the spot. Hopefully the owner isn’t the kind of terminator that Arnold Schwarzenegger portrayed in the Sci-Fi movie. I told them not to fire the guy—maybe he is just trying to feed his family and losing his job wouldn’t help him. It was just nice to know I’d have the iPad back soon.

Your device can tell you, “I’ll be back!” with that thick German accent, “Ahl be bock!”

Turn on a locating service for your device today.

Please post your comments on this blog.

Would you exchange your executive desk for a podium to work? I doubt it, so why do you accept a single screen to use on your computer?

Ask someone you know with multiple monitors, “If someone offered you $1,000 to go back to one monitor for one year, would you do it?” Chances are very good they will answer, “No way!”

Please post your comments on this blog.

The main thing about an online service is to feel fairly certain they are secure.

The reason I suggest also making image backups daily is that, if your computer crashes, it is much faster to restore and get going again because your image backup already contains Windows, applications, and your data all in one backup.

Please post your comments on this blog.

Before I go any further, I want you to know that I never use the pen unless I first get permission from everyone in the group. It is up to you to make your own choices, and I just want everyone whose voice is being recorded to be aware that what they say will be in my notes. Not only what they say but also how they say it.

For example, I recently heard a wonderful presentation during which Patrick Lencioni spoke about some very important business ideas. I had my LiveScribe pen with me and was very tempted to use it. However, since I didn’t get to ask Patrick ahead of time if it was okay to record his presentation, I left the pen in my attaché case.

Another benefit of the pen is that when you connect it to your computer’s USB port you can upload all of the audio and even the handwritten notes into your computer. Not only can you share this information with your colleagues but you can even post it out on the Internet if you choose to. Another feature of having your notes and your computer is that you can use the search command. My print handwriting is not very good. My cursive writing is even worse. Even still, LiveScribe desktop is able to recognize many of my words when I search for them.

The pen does require special paper, but it is easy to print out my own and I’ve purchased notebooks that already have the special paper in them.

I’m not sure if a tool like this would benefit you. The investment is rather small if you want to give it a try. And no, LiveScribe is not paying me anything for recommending this tool. I just want you to be as productive as you want to be.

Please post your comments on this blog.

One benefit that I love is that my wrist and my tendons do not hurt the way they used to hurt all the time. I even carry an extra microphone on the road with me while I travel, which is about five days a week.

While on the road, I used to spend anywhere from two hours to four hours every day responding to e-mail messages. Now, thanks to voice recognition, I find that I’m able to respond to all the messages in less than an hour. This is great!

In the early days it would take a long time to train Dragon Naturally Speaking. While I have had to correct some of the recognition, it is amazing to me how quickly Dragon has learned my speaking pattern. Nor do I have to talk in a slow voice. In fact, I’m rattling along right now just as fast as I want to.

It seems that having a fast computer, and lots of chip memory known as RAM will help the computer recognize voices even better. I carry a very fast laptop with 8 GB of RAM memory and I run 64-bit Windows 7. The voice recognition is fabulous. I’ve also talked to other Dragon users who have much smaller machines and they have very good luck as well. In fact, I even have a Dragon app on my phone.

The tip I learned from a doctor friend who uses Dragon to record all his patient notes was to buy a small microphone that has an on and off switch on it. That way I can avoid having to give the commands “wake up” and “go to sleep” when I want dragon to pay attention to me or not.

I could go on and on about the benefits of voice recognition, but I would rather you go out and try it for yourself. In closing, here are the two most important things I’ve learned to make Dragon the most effective:

• I think about what I’m going to say before I say it so that I can talk in complete sentences.
• I look away from the screen while I’m talking to avoid being distracted.

Please post your comments on this blog.

You may not be surprised that you can cancel those old T1 lines and get four times the speed for half of the price with a new connection.

This is also a reason to avoid those “long term” agreements for your Internet connectivity.

Two of my clients have experienced dramatically higher speeds for the same investment in the past week alone.

Please post your comments on this blog.

• Use bulleted lists instead of paragraphs
• Do not tell the story, just the ending
• Keep messages to 4 lines or less

Please post your comments on this blog.

• PayPal API
• Google Checkout API
• Amazon
• Authorize.net API

Most of the API’s allow your customers to have the feeling that they stayed on your site and never left. Although, the final check out phase—when your customer enters their cardholder data—will take place outside of your web server. This can save you an enormous amount of money on your PCI DSS compliance.

Please post your comments on this blog.

Do you, as an executive, wish companies could get to know a little about who you are? I cannot imagine doing business without a CRM in place.

Another issue is how valuable your time is. Representatives have to read enormous scripts with everything from disclaimers to special offers for you? Maybe they will lose their job if they fail to read them all to you.

Then there are the profuse apologies about being sorry for messing up, sorry for putting you on hold, sorry they have to leave you on hold a little bit longer, sorry for not getting back from hold soon enough, sorry for the problem you experienced, sorry for apologizing so often, etc. Sometimes these are mixed in with a plethora of excuses, defenses, and justifications. This extra talk just interferes with you wanting to have as short of a call as possible.

Another notable moment is when the representative asks, “Do you have something to write with?” What kind of customers do these poor customer service representatives who support business professionals have to deal with on a daily basis that don’t have a pen and paper, if not a computer, handy at all times?

And we all know about the dreaded hand-off, the hold times, and the many other problems that lead executives to dread calling customer service or technical support.

Two things I know:

• You, as an executive, are busy – too busy to deal with long winded seemingly unhelpful technical service representatives.
• I have tremendous compassion for the representatives. They are in, what seems to me, one of the most thankless and unpleasant jobs in the world. I certainly appreciate their efforts and my heart goes out to them.

Maybe the answer is to allow people to qualify themselves somehow. Maybe if you have been a customer for more than 5 years you get to call a secret phone number where representatives don’t have to read long scripts and you can just get an issue resolved quickly. Maybe if you’ve always paid your bill on time they won’t ask if you have a pen and paper handy.

Maybe there will be an option:

• Press 1 if you want to speak to a representative that will apologize to you every other sentence or
• Press 2 if you already know how sorry we are for your inconvenience and you just want us to solve the problem so you can get on with your life.

I think my favorite customer service experience is when I call my airline. If you fly often, then you have an unpublished number to phone customer service. There is less time on hold and the representatives handle the call professionally. Hooray!

Is it possible for credit card companies, mobile phone providers, insurance companies, and other organizations to have tiered customer service that allow some customers to have a better experience?

At the same time, when I need help at the airport counter, I’ve learned to avoid the first class because the first class customers seem to be high maintenance compared to the rest of the customers. Consequently, the first class line can move at a crawl compared to the other lines.

Furthermore, I wonder if the bad customer service keeps executives and IT professionals alike from getting issues resolved that affect their IT security. If contacting “customer service” is deemed so unpleasant that you will settle for low security, that is a big issue.

Since we cannot change other companies, I’d love to know success you’ve had that improves customer service!

Please post your comments on this blog.