Armstrong Bell Blog - Page 2

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....

Control and Shift work with a number of teams of consultants who need to work closely together but are based at separate locations. It’s never been easier for teams to have a central...

Do you use more than one screen with your computer? If you do, maybe you have had the same experience as myself, which is that I can never go back to using just one screen! It genuinely seems that...

The security of our data has never been more important or more under attack – in recent years massive amounts of time and resource have gone into implementing systems to protect against...

When speaking to potential clients, they will often ask with a slightly heavy heart – do you do Macs? Their hesitation is because Apple Mac computers have long been a bit out of line with...