Being old. This is the story of Connected, one of the oldest digital agencies in the UK. We are writing this during our 20th year. Surviving 20 years in the digital space is by far our greatest achievement. In a world where most digital agencies don’t even make it to their 5th birthday, lasting 20 […]
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Peerless WordPress Support. 296 WordPress Tickets Solved, 20hr Response, 100% Client Satisfaction. September saw a 40% jump in support tickets from August. And we felt the strain, with a slower first response time. We reached 85% of all support tickets inside the magic 24hrs, and 70% were responded to in under 8hrs. Not a bad […]
Being an agency. The recent rise of “happiness” seems to be taking over organisations keen to find productivity gains and competitive advantage Led by companies such as Google, Virgin, Zappos and even governments, the drive to create jolly, mindful working environments seems to be the latest management fad. But is it all it’s cracked up […]
Being a WordPress Agency. A small 7% increase in charges to maintain our peerless level of service. A heady cocktail of rising staff cost, poor FX rates and some excellent productivity improvements and automation has kept our 2017 price review in the “reasonable” category Of course, the fall-out from Brexit has been one of the […]
Being happy. So many folk in the digital world seem to regard 60 hour weeks and limited sleep as something to be proud of. We disagree, strongly. If you’re working more than 40 hours a week then there is something fundamentally wrong with your work schedule. We’ve learned a lot by tracking time vs efficiency […]
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Peerless WordPress Support. 211 WordPress Support Tickets, 7h15m Response, 100% Client Satisfaction. The summer lull continues, with the quietest month for WordPress support since, erm … last year. We got to nearly 95% of all tickets inside 24 hours with half picked up in less than an hour. With nearly 4,000 WordPress support issues cleared […]
The future. Unloved by Gen Y and Z, it’s hard to imagine the mainstream survival of the tablet. When the tablet first appeared, 6 years ago, most industry pundits laughed it off under the general premise of: It’s hard to see anybody who needs a laptop buying an iPad, and I can’t see people using […]
Running a WordPress Agency. A quick peek at our CEO’s iPhone As a team of two dozen digital nomads, we’re firmly in the “mobile-first” camp. Here’s what our CEO, Martin Dower relies on to keep him organised, and sane. I’ve been remote-first since the 1990’s and mobile-first for almost a decade. I have used, abused […]
Peerless WordPress Support. 328 WordPress Support Tickets, 12 hrs Response, 100% Client Satisfaction. Summer’s here: Fewer tickets, slower initial interaction but still top of the world for client satisfaction We got to 90% of all tickets inside 24 hours with over half picked up inside the magic first-hour. The overall ticket volume has dropped 20% […]
Agency Management 101. The greatest achievement any business can shoot for is longevity – and to achieve that you need to work with excellent, sustainable and profitable clients. Despite what you might think, there are no “bad clients”, just poor relations. One man’s nightmare client is another’s dreamboat. The agency world is full of horror […]
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Staying in front. As we begin our third Internet decade, is it seemingly getting harder to keep pace? Often referred to as “disruption”, the sheer pace of change in everything from software to transportation is starting to stress folks out over the age of 35. It’s easy to see why it’s confusing when the world’s […]
Read More… from The Salmon of Doubt: And how to avoid being a luddite
Peerless WordPress Support. For the last five years we’ve openly published our support performance and client satisfaction. It’s how *we* measure how good our WordPress support service is. We support a mixture of mid-sized clients and they all get broadly the same level of service – and they’re all supported through our Zendesk-based helpdesk. We […]
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Being an agency In a financial world driven by hyper-speed software automation, it seems not everyone sees the benefits We live in a world where computer systems now do much of the drudgery of manual admin. So why do we persist in keeping suppliers waiting for invoices to be settled? There was a good reason […]
Read More… from Why suppliers should be paid in 7 days, not 70 days!
Peerless WordPress Support. 413 WordPress Support Tickets, 7.3 hrs Response, 100% Client Satisfaction. A near identical month to May in terms of workload, but with an improved response time. We managed to respond to 92% of all support tickets inside 24 hrs, with over 40% picked up within the first hour. So far this year, […]
The Workplace Re-Imagined. You might be busy, but are you usefully productive? Many office-based staff are living-out a pointless existence, working 40 hours a week in a pointless 9 to 9 routine. It seems as if we are still labouring under a pre-21st century pretense of how work is done! But, in a world increasingly […]
A mobile world When was the last time you downloaded a new app onto your smartphone or tablet? In mid-2008, Apple created the “App Store” as a third-party app development and distribution network. But is it now game-over? The idea was simple, and unusual, for Apple – they had started shipping millions of smart hardware […]
Peerless WordPress Support. One thousand support interactions, four hundred WordPress support tickets and one hundred percent client satisfaction. That’s pretty good numbers and we’re rightly proud of them. So far this year, we’ve dealt with almost 3,000 support tickets with an average response time of well under a day. […]
Social Media as an agency communication channel. Since we joined Twitter in 2009 we’ve acquired 20,000+ followers and sent out 5,000+ Tweets. Wow! Quite clearly, its a significant communications channel for Connected. And here’s how we use it; this is our crib sheet. And in the beginning It was a wet, dark December afternoon in […]
Read More… from Hitting 20k followers on Twitter: A milestone
Peerless WordPress Support. 554 WordPress Support Tickets, 9.6 hrs Response, 100% Client Satisfaction. Despite being another month of over 500 support tickets, on balance it was a stress-free and steady month. Almost half of the tickets were picked up inside an hour and a whopping 88% were dealt with in under 24 hours. We are […]
Being a 20 Year Old Digital Agency, by Martin Dower, Founder & CEO. A 20 year old digital agency is kinda rare in an industry that only appeared in the 1990s. We’re frequently asked how we’ve done it, how we’ve prospered over 3 decades. I know we’ve influenced the business models, ideas and cultures used […]
