Over a year ago thousands of PC’s were infected with a nasty little virus made by a small group known as “Rove Digital”. This troublesome little piece of malware decided to change the DNS settings of infected machines so that when users decided to search the internet, instead of getting legitimate results it instead redirected users to websites giving false, fake or dangerous information and products.

Fortunately last November the FBI working in collaboration with the Estonian police arrested a number of criminals in relation to this incident and to avoid a world wide meltdown of the internet the FBI has been running proxy servers to capture and filter infected traffic. This has given ISP’s and Anti-Virus companies time to deploy solutions and work-arounds to this incident.

Today the FBI have taken these temporary servers offline and have no intention of restarting them in the future. Although the infection should now have mostly been eradicated it is estimated that there may still be around 250,000 machines infected. The consequence is that these machines will, apparently, be unable to get online.

The chances are however, if you can read this, then you don’t have a problem!

If you want to see an animated map of the infection over this year you can find it at here.

For more in formation relating to the group set-up to combat this threat (DCWG) you can find it here.

If you have any IT queries or problems please feel free to contact me whereupon I would be delighted to offer any assistance that I can.

The Service Management Group have today released the results of an in-depth customer service survey that they recently completed, with a survey sample of over 100,000 people its definitely one to take a look at and not to be ignored. It shows a direct correlation between customer happiness and revenue generation.

Here are some of the findings:

Spend was shown to increase by almost 40% when customers were engaged and assisted.

£45 Billion in missed sales due to poor customer service.

Service levels drop throughout the day, directly impacting service.

London performs worst, with customers outside the capital considerably happier (although hardly ecstatic).

Men are more likely to complain.

Woman are generally happier and more likely to recommend and report a better experience.

Source:SMP

The full survey including in-depth analysis of the results and methodology can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/ServiceManagementGroup/smg-customer-satisfaction-index-uk

If you would like to talk about customer service, employee engagement or IT consultancy we would be delighted to talk to you.

Have you every wanted a simple email program that can send personalised emails to a group of established customers or contacts?

We all know that keeping customers up to date with our latest news and offers is an important part of maintaining a constructive and positive relationship. But the problem faced by so many of us is that with the amount of illegitimate spam arriving into peoples in-boxes daily its now becoming almost impossible to effectively communicate with our customers without it being captured by anti-spam software.

The Services & People Automatic Email-er is a very simple application that allows you to import a list of contacts from excel or any other piece of software that can output in CSV formatted files, it allows you to set-up a Salutation, Subject and Message body.

The application acts as if it was you sending the email, running from your PC and using your email account, sending messages between every one and five minutes. Due to this, and its none graphical nature it is unlikely to be picked up as SPAM and also not flag with your ISP.

This all circumvents the problem of using more complex problems of using a mass mailer, and in some cases avoids you needing to upload your valuable customer contact data to the internet if you are using a web based piece of software for this purpose.

The software is currently being trialled, but if you are interested let me know and we can see whether it will meet your requirements.