How Technology Gives Smaller Businesses a Bigger Advantage

By Jason Deign

The way Matthew Fincham handled a life insurance request for a thousand-year-old says it all about what makes small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) special.

When the 36-year-old consultant at Executive Planning International Life Insurance (EPILI), in Aurora, Ontario, was asked to cover a client's children who were apparently born in 1009 and 2995, it was clear the client was just having a bad day at the keyboard.

A quick personal e-mail from Matthew, son of EPILI's founder Paul W Fincham, quickly resolved the matter. A bigger company might not have done such a good job, however. Getting dates wrong is the sort of human error that might cause problems in a heavily automated system.

And the typically impersonal response the client might have got from a bigger insurer would probably not have gone down well. Most of EPILI's clients are high-net-worth individuals who value special treatment.

Customer retention

That may be why EPILI, with just seven full-time employees, has a customer retention record most other companies could not even dream of. "We have a thing called persistency, which is the percentage of policies that remain in force without lapsing or being replaced," says Fincham.

"Ours is pretty much 100 percent. I have only had one person leave in 16 years, and that was due to financial hardship—the client had to cancel almost everything she had not to go bankrupt."

Much of this success is down to the old-school values of honesty, trust, and personal service that Paul Fincham built the business on in the 1960s and 70s. His son's contribution has been to use technology to build on those values in a fashion which is typical of many SMBs globally.

"I can take a call in my car and unless you heard the noise of the wind you would not know I was not in the office."

— Matthew Fincham, consultant, Executive Planning International Life Insurance

While employees in many larger businesses tend to hide behind their voicemail and e-mail systems, at EPILI, like many other customer-conscious SMBs, technology has been tailored to make it easier to get hold of staff at any time.

Single number

"Clearcable configured a 560 Series Unified Communications system with single number reach, so my phone rings at the same time as my office phone," says Matthew Fincham.

"It means I can take a call in my car and unless you heard the noise of the wind you would not know I was not in the office."

The illusion is strengthened by the fact that he can log onto the office network remotely via VPN.

During a recent three-week break in Florida, he says, he was able to deal with client issues and important new business, including selling and closing an employee benefits package, thanks to his Cisco IP SoftPhone.

And he can even keep tabs on office security while he is away, thanks to a wireless IP camera fitted with a motion detector which sends him five-second clips by e-mail whenever it is activated.

Smart business

What is perhaps surprising is that all these features come from a single system and a single vendor… and one that until recently was barely known in the SMB world. Cisco got serious about the SMB market in 2005, with a range of products specifically targeted at the sector.

This was followed in 2007 with the development of a Smart Business Communications System and a specific channel partner certification process for SMBs.

Now small business is considered one of the 30 market adjacencies that will generate growth for Cisco in the future, and has a dedicated range of products ranging from routers and switches through security and surveillance devices to wireless and network storage technologies.

There is no doubt that the sector has a sizeable demand for technology. SMBs are said to make up about 99 percent of all businesses worldwide, generating up to half of the world's gross domestic product.

Right technologies

Their technology needs are usually not very sophisticated, but even the smallest business nowadays needs access to IT for simple processes such as order taking and book-keeping.

And as EPILI's experience demonstrates, the right use of the right technologies can really transform the way SMBs do business and gain the edge over larger competitors.

Ticking off the benefits of Unified Communications, Fincham notes that before EPILI got the Cisco equipment its long-distance telephone bills were of the order of CAD$1200 a month.

With the 560 Series, the company now uses Session Initiation Protocol routing to send all its calls through an Internet connection managed by the service provider TeraGo Networks. "This year our total bill for outbound calls, after eight months, is $97," he says.

For a small business battling it out against much larger rivals, that sort of boost is a big, big deal.