Armstrong Bell Blog - Page 2

Financial investors are often advised to ‘only invest what they are prepared to lose’ – and that’s a good adage for your company’s data too, only I would suggest...

I once stayed in a hotel in London owned by one of the big chains. In my room were stickers everywhere assuring me that the reason I had no coat hangers/drinks glasses/hand towels was because they...

How long is acceptable for your business to be without an internet connection or without access to email? With a 4G backup connection there is no need for you ever to be without a connection now,...

We’ve always been very open about our pricing. It’s on our website - £45.00 per user per month. And that’s because that’s exactly how our service works - once the...

When I worked for another IT business several years ago now, as engineers we were given a target to sales worth 50% of their annual contract value to each client. So a client with a £10k a...

A question to ask of any IT Support service is if issues with your technology – such as email, printers or internet down for a long period - have affected your customers. If it does then it...

One of my favourite films is Minority Report – others include Life of Brian and Planes, Trains & Automobiles – you like what you like, eh? Minority Report is a film set in the not...

If you look at the home screen of your phone, how many apps do you have on there? Dozens, hundreds? If it’s your own personal device then that’s one thing, but on a business phone you...

We provide IT support services at a fixed monthly fee – but as well as requests for day to day support we often get more complex problems and projects put our way. This week we had a client...

When I started out in IT disks were floppy, screens were as deep as they were wide and backups were saved onto tape cartridges that had to be either taken offsite or placed in a fireproof safe so...

Part of our standard service for customers with more than 20 machines is to asset label all of their IT kit and maintain an asset list for them. This means they know exactly what equipment they...

Imagine that every night a team of burglars arrives at your house, they spread out some testing the windows, others the doors, all looking for an entry point into which they can stream....

There are many, many quality marks in use across different industries, and the most useful ones are those that even those who are not in an industry would recognise the mark – a good example...

I read a newspaper article this week lamenting the death of the customer telephone helpline. If you call many companies now you simply get a recorded message noting that:     Due to...

If we had to name two words that have come into their own over the past 12 months, I would propose Zoom and Teams would be good suggestions. Zoom is a fantastic product, but Teams has an advantage...

Control and Shift are recruiting – it’s been on the horizon for some time, but we are now at a point where we have advertised a new IT Support Engineer position. We put the ad out on...

We had a busy Thursday afternoon recently – we gained three new clients after 13:00 that day. That hardly ever happens...OK, that never, ever happens! All three were word of mouth referrals...

How valuable is your time? It might be that you know an exact figure for that – an hourly rate – or you may just know that on the basis there’s never enough hours in the day,...

This Christmas, the team at Armstrong Bell have chosen to support KEMP Hospice by donating the money we usually would have spent on sending Christmas cards to our clients. We’re more...

This week I visited a shop called Mr Pretzel with my daughter – have a guess as to what I was ordering? And guess what they had run out of? Yes Mr Pretzel… had run out of pretzels....