Hints to bypass glitches in world of e-business

By CHERYL CURRID

The bane of running a small business is record-keeping.

It is a chore to keep receipts, account statements, invoices or any other paperwork showing separate business and personal expenses. While the digital world holds the promise of making it easier, that day has yet to come.

The online world is still experiencing growing pains. Certain characteristics of the e-world cause problems not found in the paper world.

For example, there's an annoying identification glitch in many online systems. Software used by banks, brokers and online merchants often identify you by your e-mail address. So, if you have both a personal and business account, it can confuse their systems.

In the race to put every customer service online, systems designers stumbled over this issue, even though it was solved long ago in legacy systems.

In most cases, an e-mail address is tied to one person and one type of account. If you have two personal accounts, there's usually no problem. But, if you have one business and one personal account, the system will go haywire.

If this happens to you, here's a simple solution. Create a second e-mail address, called an alias, that points to the same inbox as your main e-mail address. For example, if you use sue@smith.com for personal accounts and then create an alias suesmith@smith.com pointing to the same inbox, it will usually fix the problem. Of course, this assumes you have an e-mail system that will let you point multiple addresses to the same inbox.

But if you use one of the popular Web-based e-mail services, the name change technique won't work. Instead, you may have to set up two different e-mail names, one to communicate with your personal accounts and one for business.

This can make more work for you because you'll have separate inboxes. However, if you use an e-mail program that picks up mail from multiple boxes and puts it together, the process will be automated. Microsoft's Outlook, for example, will collect from multiple mailboxes.

Another slightly annoying problem for in the e-world is trying to find a real person to resolve an issue. Regrettably, some companies hide telephone numbers and addresses. Oh, they might be somewhere on the Web site, but often they are buried so far in the menus that it would take ditch digger to find them.

Then, to make matters worse, customer service people are tucked behind an interactive voice response system that requires a customer to punch in tons of numbers to find a real person.

There are a few shortcuts. For the missing telephone information, it is sometimes faster to go to a public phone directory like http://www.switchboard.com/ or http://www.infospace.com/ to find a company's main telephone number. And, of course, once you get the number, update your electronic address book in case you have to call back.

To deal with automated systems, try punching in a zero a few times or answer with options not on the menu. This will sometimes transfer you to a human being. It doesn't work with every system, but is worth a try.

When you do reach a human, get the name and extension or direct dial number so you don't have to suffer the next time.

Regular readers of this column know that I'm a big cheerleader of making smart use of technology to get a competitive edge in business. But the digital business world still needs better practices.

Until then, well just need to share our thoughts of how to work around the glitches.