To kick us off, we caught up with Jay McCormack. Jay works in the Bradford offices for BT Marketing Solutions.
Hi Jay, can you tell us a bit about your role and how long you’ve been at BT?
I'm a New Media Telesales Executive and I’ve been with BT since October 2010, it’s my job to speak with SMEs on a daily basis to help them improve their web presence.
A typical day for me is to start around 9:10am after dropping my daughter at nursery and planning my day, I would normally speak with about 60-70 customers a day about improving their business online and I enjoy a spot of snooker during my lunch break.
What do you enjoy most about your job?
That would have to be speaking to lots of new people and getting to know more about different business industries and the day to day running of these businesses.
We're after some of that expert knowledge now.. What do you think are the key things that make a good website?
There are a few key things I think are important when creating a website:
Make sure it is user friendly - There’s nothing more frustrating than having to click around a website for 5 minutes, trying to find a particular service or even a product if you’re buying online. It is really important that sites are easy for customers to use and find their way around.
Add new content - Content on the site is vitally important, you want to get found by search engines and you also want potential customers to believe in your business like I’m sure you believe in your business and in order to achieve that, you have to keep your site updated and fresh with relevant content.
Include a testimonials page & gallery - Using a page dedicated to testimonials for work you’ve carried out for other customers work really well on websites, customers love reading about what a good job the business has done and having a gallery allows them to see that for themselves. All that makes them much more likely to pick up the phone or send you an enquiry!
You must get asked lots of questions when talking to all those customers, what is the question you get asked the most?
The most frequent question we get asked I would say is, “I want to control my own website, can I do that with BT’s websites?” The answer to that is yes, we give you training and supporting documentation on how to update your website and interact with customers as well as ensuring the website stays user friendly and search engine friendly.
If you could give one piece of advice to SMEs wanting to improve their web presence, what would it be?
My top tip for any SME is to make sure that as a business they stand out from their competition, if they were a customer looking for their business would they honestly choose their own over their competitors?
And when you are not helping businesses get online, what do you spend your time doing?
Outside of my working life I have a gorgeous fiancé and we have a 4 year old daughter as well as a hamster, cat, and a dog called rowan so spending time with my family on a weekend going for walks is great! I’m also a football coach for a local under 11’s football team and recently achieved my Level 1 coaching badge through the FA!!
Crumbs! Well done you, we’ll know who to speak to if we are looking for coaching then. Do you have an interesting fact about you that you can share with us?
An interesting fact about me is....As a BT Sports Relief Ambassador, I have recently been to the BT Centre in London and had lunch with David Walliams and Richard Arnold (from GMTV)...it was fantastic!
Sounds fantastic indeed! We'll be catching up with Jay again soon with some more news from his BT Sports Relief Ambassador role... watch this space!
If you'd like to speak to Jay or one of his colleagues, you can take advantage of our free 15 minute web review.
And if you'd like to see some of the websites we've recently created, why not take a look at our portfolio?
