Big Red Book sells six products in Ireland and Britain, including accountancy, payroll and customer relationship management ( CRM) packages. It will use the Davy BES funding to finance product development, including research into SaaS (software as a-service) models.

‘‘We have the second-most used accountancy software in the Irish SME sector, with over 15,500 registered users operating the software, running the books for in excess of 35,000 companies and sole traders,” said Marc O’Dwyer, managing director of Big Red Book.

‘‘We have an excellent relationship with BDO and it has an in-depth knowledge of the current challenges facing Irish SMEs. Furthermore, in the current tightening credit markets, BES is an alternative source of funding for SMEs – and BDO specialises in it.”

The consolidation wave that has created supersize media buying groups moved to the online advertising market last week as relative newcomer Electric Media acquired a large chunk of the assets of Sales Online, the largest and most established player in Irish online sales.

Simon Ferguson, founder of Sales Online, who has been something of an evangelist for online media for ten years, said he felt it was time to move to something new.

The recent series of moves grouping media planners and buyers into umbrella entities such as CoreMedia and Magna increased downward pressure on online advertising rates, Ferguson said, so it made sense to consolidate to protect online publishers.

In some cases, he said, online prices had been driven down 20 to 30 per cent in the past year, although he said premium sites had held their own better than this. ‘‘We’ve built the biggest advertising network in Ireland, also the biggest mobile network.

After doing it for ten years you start to ask yourself what else is out there,” said Ferguson.

‘‘Dermot Hanrahan [of Electric Media] and I started to talk last year about initiatives to grow this market.

Clearly there’s an opportunity to grow some share and we saw that there was space for a super brand that would protect the publishers and help them reinvest in their business.”

Hanrahan, who set up Electric Media in association with the Irish Times, said the enlarged business would allow agencies to book comprehensive web campaigns with a single phone call.

‘‘The web is the most fragmented medium out there, but no buyer has the time to make a hundred phone calls. This isn’t about getting prices up, it’s about being the most important supplier in the market. We should be able to populate an entire online schedule for almost any brand,” said Hanrahan.

Financial details were not disclosed. Electric Media is acquiring all the Sales Online sales contracts for 30 websites in the deal, plus four staff.

The sites transferred will include ebay.ie, O2, breakingnews.ie, examiner.ie and thepost.ie Electric Media will then represent more than 60 premium online brands including those it already had, such as ireland.com, ticketmaster.ie and entertainment.ie. Ferguson estimated that these represented 60 to 70 per cent of the overall market.

There are still no accurate figures for the scale of online spend here, but Hanrahan said he guessed it accounted for between 15 and 20 per cent of media spend in the past year.

Ferguson, who will not have a role in Electric Media, said he would make announcements about his own plans in the digital marketing area in the next few weeks. He said the Sales Online brand would survive in a different form, in that it would be used for technology sales business.

After the transfer of its sales business, Sales Online still retains a sizeable digital marketing business and Ferguson is also a director and 50 per cent shareholder of Refresh Digital Advertising, a brand and creative agency.

Twitter is like a night in a pub packed with the most connected people in the world. The conversation is often shallow, self-referential and predictable. Smart people like hearing themselves talk.

But that doesn’t matter.

Eventually, you’ll discover something in that conversation that makes you better informed and more connected than those unlucky enough not to be part of the Twitter family.

It is a democratic gathering of opposites. The celebrity engages with the celebrity-hater; the politician gets stuck in with the critic; the liberal just can’t stop talking to the conservative.

People on Twitter will also make you laugh. A lot.

The great myth about Twitter is that it is restricted to 140 characters.

But tweets can also carry links to blogs, newspapers, magazines, TV stations and photo agencies. Once you work out who to follow, Twitter becomes your personal news wire.

It is also your own personal newspaper. If you can offer the right links and a challenging voice, then others will follow you. You will create your own audience.

Twitter has made me a better journalist. There’s always someone out there who knows something I don’t, or who has a more authentic and immediate view of something which interests me. It is a family of eye-witnesses.

It is my first and last port of call now. It has become my own personal newswire, thanks to the links it provides to unlimited sources. It is also easy to filter and cross-check.

I operate on the assumption that it’s not what you say on Twitter that matters, but who you follow.

One of the guilty pleasures of Twitter is listening to people who don’t get it. It sounds like the nervous, mirthless laugh of a landlocked crowd mocking the approaching tide. Get in the boat – there’s room for everybody.

Mark Little is a former presenter of RTE’s Prime Time. He is currently on a year’s leave of absence from RTE to pursue a project on digital media and global journalism. He can be followed at www.twitter.com/marklittlenews

1. Don’t just broadcast – engage. Politicians who use social media to let everyone know what they think, but who don’t even respond to others’ views, are doing themselves no favours.

2. Do it yourself. I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: if you have a Twitter account, never let anyone else tweet on your behalf.

Without authenticity, your Twittering is valueless (at least, that’s what I told Tom yesterday when I offered to write this for him).

3. Don’t tweet and drink. Should be self-evident, but you’d be surprised how many are tempted. If you’re out for a drink, don’t even check your Twitter account for updates, lest ye be tempted to reply, however entertaining the results would be for the rest of us, and for the media (see numbers 9 and 10).

4. Argue by all means, but avoid being offensive. Respond with a pithy or sarcastic comment if you’re provoked, but be more measured than your critics.

5. Avoid giving your diary details – nothing to do with security, it’s just dull: ‘‘Just had a very productive meeting with a really worthy organisation’’ might be of interest to members of that worthy organisation and to both of the constituents who follow your Twitter feed, but not to the rest of us. Also, avoid inane greetings and sign-offs: ‘‘Morning Tweeps!” No-one cares.

Really, they don’t.

6. Don’t split your message over more than one tweet. This is simply bad Twitter etiquette. The value of Twitter is in the discipline required to say what you want to say in 140 characters or fewer. If you want to write an essay, use a blog.

7. Tempting though it is to insist on getting the last word in a Twitter exchange, it’s often more gracious to leave that to your critics.

8. Don’t block followers.

There are some morons out there who get off on sending abusive tweets, particularly to politicians. They wear the ‘‘blocked by an MP’’ badge with pride. Far better to ignore them completely.

Believe me, that will annoy them far more than blocking them will.

9. Always assume that whatever you tweet will be read by the news editor of the Daily Mail. Because that assumption will be correct.

Speak your tweets out loud, preferably to a third party, before you post. If you have any doubts about whether it will be misinterpreted, then err on the side of caution.

10. If you wake to find an army of reporters, photographers and camera crews outside your home, it could be a sign that you need to rethink your new media strategy.

Reprinted with permission from Tom Harris’s blog; www.tomharris. org.uk

1. Using an account purely for marketing or promotion

Twitter can be a very effective marketing tool. But there’s marketing and there’s marketing. Simply vomiting out ads or minor offers will limit your credibility.

2. Not posting your own Tweets

Setting up a Twitter account with your name and photo, and then getting some flunky to write bland ‘updates’ about where you are or what you’re doing is worse than not having an account. It shows contempt, and it’s completely obvious.

This often happens with accounts created by politicians, celebrities and certain other ‘important’ people. While Ryan Tubridy’s account (@TubridyRadio1) was written by RTE staff, he remained below 1,000 followers. Within two days of him starting to write his own tweets, his followers rating jumped to 3,000.

3. Sending repeated direct messages to people you don’t really know

By and large, Twitter is a public forum.

Sending someone a personal, direct message, alters the character of the communication. You’ll put someone you don’t know on the spot if you do it repeatedly.

4. Being widely abusive

People with opinions spice Twitter up. But there’s a difference between a challenging opinion and a purely abusive one. Foul-mouthed rants can sometimes be interesting, but are usually just boring.

5. Tweeting too much

Though daily Tweeting activity is good, a never-ending stream of updates (especially with links to other websites) is a big turn-off.

Unless you have some really compelling stuff to say, or unless there’s a major event unfolding upon which you’re commenting, two to three stand-alone tweets per hour are probably about as much as anyone wants to hear from you. That doesn’t include replies or other interactions.)

Five ways to make yourself a star

1. Don’t waste people’s time

If you want people to pay attention to what you’re saying, tweet something that either (a) people don’t know or (b) is an original take on something under discussion.

2. Have a speciality

If you’re an expert on something, let it be known. Although not everyone will share your passion for metallurgy, most people like to see a passion for something.

3. If you don’t have a speciality, at least show your character

Suppose you’re a mid-ranking marketing executive with no extra-curricular activities. Okay. But you might be funny or neurotic or obsessed with bumble bees.

Let it out. Whatever you do, don’t tweet about what a nice girl Cheryl Cole is.

4. Answer people who tweet you

If you tweet someone, it’s nice to get a response and vice-versa. One or two kind or meaningful responses will lead to goodwill.

This will probably lead to people retweeting your updates to a wider audience.

5. Don’t follow too many people

One of the crudest ways of getting followers is to start clicking furiously away on people to follow. But if these people tweet regularly, you will have difficulty keeping up.

Twitter has brought in a ‘lists’ system, allowing you to cluster different classes of people into different Twitter streams, but it all becomes hard work.

Setting up an account

It is easy to set up a Twitter account.

Simply visitTwitter.com and ‘sign up’ (for free).You will be asked to supply the usual details (name and e-mail).You can set your privacy level by choosing whether everyone sees your account or just people you approve. (Most people allow their accounts to be publicly accessible.)

You can set up as many accounts as you wish, although you will need a different e-mail address for each account. Unlike a web domain, you do not have to ‘prove’ that you are who you say you are. So if the name Brian Cowen is still available (it is not), you can use that as your account name.

You will be asked what name you would like your account to appear as. Many people choose their own name (eg @adrian weckler), while some choose their business’s name. You will also be given the option of providing a short description of yourself or your company. Finally, you will be given the options of uploading a photo and supplying a web address, if you have them.

For a step-by-step video tutorial on how to set up a Twitter account, see our special instruction video blog at www.yourtech.ie

Starting off: be brief

They say that brevity is the soul of wit. As if Twitter didn’t trust us to observe this, it has imposed a 140-character (about 20 words) limit on the length of any one tweet. This forces one to get to the point rather quickly. Once you type your point out, hit update.

Your tweet will appear in the ‘Twitter stream’ (the list of tweets) of anyone following you.

Following people

Twitter is a two-way street: you follow people and they follow you. To follow people, you can use the ‘find people’ search box at the top of the page.

Once you’ve found someone you know or recognise, you will be able to see who they follow and who is following them. You can follow any one of these people and any one of their followers.

Once you follow someone, their updates will appear in your Twitter stream.

Being followed

Once you begin to follow people, some (or all) of them will follow you back. That means that whatever you write or tweet will appear in their Twitter streams. Amassing followers is important to some people and not important to others.

If you own an emerging business and would like to spread the word about something, the more followers you have, the better. Once you get going on Twitter, you will find that you will occasionally get followers from people and places you have no connection with .Some of these will be spam followers, designed to get you to click on links or to buy services. Typically, these will have images of an attractive girl or a celebrity.

Sharing links

One of the things that Twitter is now used most for is sharing references to news stories. Typically, people see a news story, mention it in a tweet, and post a weblink for further reading on the internet (usually a news website or a blog).

It’s not just news links that are popular. Local events or impressive photographs are often heavily linked to.

‘Re-tweeting’

One of the biggest compliments you can be paid on Twitter is to be re-tweeted. This means that someone else thinks that your update is worthy of being heard by his or her own circle of followers.

When you start to use the service more, you will find things worth re-tweeting yourself. Sometimes it is a news story, an article or an event that you think is important. Other times, it may simply be an observation on something that you think is especially poignant or articulate.

Re-tweeting is one of the ways that news travels so quickly on Twitter: if one person with 100 followers tweets about a minister resigning, several people will retweet that post. Within minutes, thousands, or even tens of thousands, of people will see the original item.

It is considered to be a required courtesy to acknowledge the source of an item you wish to re-tweet. Re-tweeting is also a valuable exercise, insofar as it alerts other people to a potentially interesting person (the original tweeter) that they may wish to follow themselves.

Using Twitter for pictures

Unlike Facebook, you cannot post pictures directly to Twitter.

What most people do is use one of a number of Twitter-friendly websites. Two popular services are Twitpic.com and Y frog.com. Y frog also allows you to post videos. Botha re free.

Further controls over your privacy

Sometimes, you may not wish to include individuals in your Twitter updates. But if the y choose to follow you, what can you do? You have an option of blocking them from your Twitter stream.

That means they cannot see what you are saying, unless someone else that they follow re-tweets what you have said. Blocking someone carries the risk that the blocked person will complain or, if you are well know, will boast about it.

Using a Twitter client

Once you start tweeting regularly, you might find the use of a Twitter ‘client’ handy. A Twitter client is a software program that lays out your Twitter streams in a more attractive way.

Instead of having to click on different parts of your Twitter web page to see replies or direct messages, these are laid out in different columns for easy reading.

It is also an application in its own right, rather than an internet web page.

The most popular Twitter client is Tweetdeck (www.tweetdeck.com). Other popular ones include T whirl (www.twhirl.com) and Brizzly (www.brizzly.com).

Security on Twitter

Over the past few months, there have been several waves of phishing attacks on Twitter.

Typically, this is where you get a ‘direct message’ such as : ‘‘ha ha! This you?” from someone you appear to know that asks you to click on a weblink.

When you click the link, you are asked to input your Twitter account name and password to ‘verify’ your authenticity.

That is simply a way for the hacker to get private information that you may have contained in your account.

If you fall prey to this tactic, the hacker will then send direct messages to all of your contacts, in the hope that they will repeat the cycle.

If this happens to you, change your Twitter password.

Facebook’s European director of operations, Colm Long, will give a talk in Donegal this week at which he will stress the importance of using the internet to promote business. Long is among several high profile guest speakers at Donegal Enterprise Week.

They include Doug Richards from BBC’s Dragons’ Den and celebrity chef Richard Corrigan. The latter will launch the Donegal Food Initiative, aimed at encouraging food producers to develop their business.

Long, a Derry native with a Donegal grandfather, will offer tips for fledgling and existing businesses at a seminar on raising online awareness. He believes that Facebook and other online applications are a great way for business to market themselves and increase their reach in a target market.

‘‘Facebook pages help to get your business visible online for free,” he said. ‘‘They lower the ‘barrier to entry’ for marketing and selling products online, starting with fan pages for a business.

‘‘I’d also recommend that small firms try out some ads on our site that are cost-effective, and can be designed to reach people in a certain geographic area – or for a certain age bracket or with particular interests.

‘‘There are also loads of free tools available online to promote your business, such as great tracking tools that allow you to measure every euro spent and see where your customers are coming from. With search engines like Google, you can optimise your web presence without spending a fortune,” he said.

Long said he also recommended the use of Twitter, GoogleMaps and Google Local, to enhance customer building.

More than two million Irish people bank online, but only 10,000 to 20,000 customers of utility providers opt for online billing. Ireland’s poor take-up of paperless billing prompted entrepreneur Alan Coleman to develop a website that allows consumers to manage all bills online. After four years of work, GetitKeepit.com launches in Ireland tomorrow.

It is now raising €750,000 in funds and expects to complete this in the next six to eight weeks.

Coleman said he had hoped to get the company developed as far as possible without having to seek funding.

‘‘We’re right in the middle of our first round of financing and we are working with Enterprise Ireland and a number of private investors and VC funds. It’s looking promising,” he said.

‘‘Typically, your first funding round is a seed round where you’re actually building your product, proving your concept, getting your first customer. We’ve built our product and got our first customer, so we’ve almost skipped a stage,” he added.

Coleman and business partner Jim Hannan left high-powered jobs to go full time with the business. For the last seven years, Coleman ran a European sales team for Accenture, driving a business with revenues of €100 million. Before that he worked in business development at software company Macalla. Hannan is the former chief technical architect for RTE.

‘‘We both felt the opportunity for this business was strong and we took a decision to leave our comfortable jobs,” said Coleman.

The website will allow consumers to gather, manage and analyse all their utility bills for the top ten service providers in the Irish market. Once a customer signs up,GetitKeepit.com can sign up the customer for paperless billing for a range of utility bills.

‘‘We then retrieve all of your bills – old ones and current ones – said Coleman. ‘‘We analyse them and gather them together, so it is easy for consumers to go to one place, look at their utility bills and ultimately pay them.”

Utility providers such as ESB and Bord Gáis have so far failed to get customers to sign up for online billing.

‘‘Most service providers find that around 1 to 2 per cent of their customers are on paperless billing, and some of them less,” said Coleman. GetitKeepit.com aims to sign up 40,000 customers in the next year.

‘‘If you enjoy online banking and the access and convenience it affords, we’re trying to provide a product that’s comparable in terms of giving you access to personal administration, starting with home bills,” said Coleman. ‘‘But ultimately we describe the product as your smart postbox because we can do this for other classes of documents as well, like credit card bills and insurance details.

‘‘There is a wide range of important information we are receiving from many different channels and providers, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep on top of all this information.”

Coleman said he was trying to appeal to people who are disorganised. ‘‘The whole inspiration for me around three years ago was driven out of a deep personal frustration of being time-poor and unable to deal with personal administration in an easy way.”

The company has been able to tap into some impressive advice.

‘‘We made a point of trying to source people with the best experience in Ireland and abroad in terms of driving online businesses,” said Coleman.

The GetitKeepit advisory board includes Colm Long, online operations director for Facebook in Europe; Ian Rosarius, British Telecom wholesale chief information officer; and a senior investment banker with Merrill Lynch.

‘‘I think all of them were genuinely impressed with the business model and what we had managed to build,” said Coleman. ‘‘They are very supportive of indigenous business and the concept of the knowledge economy. We’d like to think GetitKeepit encapsulates that type of business.”

The firm has set its sights on Britain and will launch there in the summer. It has patents pending on the business model in the US. The service is free to consumers, so it needs the support of utility companies to generate revenue.

‘‘How we make money is we sign agreements with the service providers where we will share in the benefit that they glean from having people turn off post and packaging. If it costs €1 a month to post out bills, we get a percentage of the saving made from the customer going online.”

The company expects to move into profitability in two years. It has just signed up its first service provider, a large mobile phone operator, and Coleman is confident that more will follow.

‘‘We have a very strong pipeline.

We’ve engaged with all the service providers in the market and had a positive reaction from all of them,” he said.

The company will not invest heavily in marketing, but expects service providers will promote the site to benefit from a switch by customers to paperless billing.

When Chris Clark came to Ireland to take up his current job, he did not expect that more Irish people would think of BT as a Dublin department store than the global telecoms giant he worked for.

Three years on, and a week after his 41st birthday, he no longer worries.

As chief executive of BT Ireland, Clark has put an end to the company’s status as a perennial loss-maker. At last, he has turned the former Esat, which has eaten up more than €1 billion since BT acquired it in 1999, into a cash generator.

‘‘It’s certainly not time to get out the champagne and celebrate,” he said. ‘‘We are making good progress but there’s a lot more to do.” It’s been an eventful three years.

Last summer saw Clark take the highest-profile decision of his tenure when BT quit the residential telecoms market, signing over its 80,000 fixed-line customers to Vodafone.

The move was seen as a sensible one, as BT had always struggled to make an impact in the consumer market. Despite having a high profile around the world – and especially in Britain and the North – the company found its consumer offering in the Republic stuck in a rut as little more than a re-seller of Eircom’s services.

‘‘In reality, the consumer market for us in the Republic has always been relatively small in terms of contribution to the business. That was quite misunderstood, which, to be honest, we have only ourselves to blame for, ” he said.

It fell to Clark to decide that it was time to focus instead on BT’s core global business – providing networks, IT and communications services to the business and corporate market.

‘‘A single catchword I’d use is focus,” he said. ‘‘We’ve been working quite hard locally on what we’re good at – from a customer perspective – and making a series of really bold and brave decisions in recent years to refocus the business in the Republic.

‘‘The thing that surprised me most in my early months was the perception of BT in the Republic market. Having worked for BT in the UK, Asia and the States, BT is perceived differently in different geographies. But on the whole, BT would be very much seen as a leading global ICT [information and communications technology] company.

‘‘So I guess I thought when I came to Dublin it would be the same, but actually what struck me very quickly – and I can see why – was what I’d call the Esat legacy.

The perception was that we were really a consumer business.” Not any more. ‘‘We’ve managed to differentiate ourselves from a lot of the competition. One of our true differentiators is we are a true global company in this marketplace.”

According to Clark, the money is in selling high-end networked services to Ireland’s biggest companies – banks, multinational pharmaceutical and IT giants and three of the four mobile networks, whose calls are routed through BT’s infrastructure.

He said BT still provided services to consumers, citing the example of those who transferred to Vodafone last year. ‘‘Vodafone is using our network infrastructure and, ironically, we are investing more euros in it than before – just not on the marketing side.” In addition, BT won the contract to provide the 999 or 112 emergency service last year.

Clark’s strategic offensive means he must juggle two very different jobs – running BT’s corporate focused business in the Republic as well as its consumer and business offering in the North, effectively a smaller version of BT’s core British business. He describes his lot as complex but rewarding.

‘‘If there is such a thing as a normal week, my time tends to be split.

I tend to do a couple of days in Belfast, a couple of days in Dublin and a day a week somewhere else. That could be Cork, it could be Derry, it could be London.”

But does his focus on the corporate market in the Republic mean that BT is in danger of backing a horse that will struggle as corporate customers slash spending in response to the economic meltdown?

According to Clark, businesses know that putting off investment now is more expensive in the long run.

‘‘You can freeze investment in networks and IT for a period of time, but you have to keep investing, otherwise everything’s going to collapse on you. It’s the same for us in our own investments and networks.

You have to keep investing – otherwise you’ll really feel the issue in two or three years’ time.”

He also offers reassurance on BT’s long-term plans in Ireland to the company’s 3,000 staff based here.

‘‘While we would certainly recognise that Ireland faces challenges, they’re all different in every country in which we operate. It’s not a case of, ‘We can’t work out what we’re going to do in that market, so let’s get out of here’.

‘‘We’ve got a very clear view of what we can do in the market. We think there are opportunities and also there are going to be challenges.

‘‘But we’re confident we have the strategy that will bring benefit to the business overall.”

He dismissed the idea of BT joining the group of global businesses that think it wiser to turn their backs on Ireland. ‘‘BT is very committed to Ireland. One of the great benefits of our partnership with Vodafone is that this is us investing for the long term as well.”

He said that working for a global business and having regular contact with peers in other countries helped put Ireland’s current woes in perspective.

‘‘There are common issues [across different countries], but there are also local issues. I do think that,18months ago, there was a very negative view of Ireland in the international community. I genuinely think though that Ireland has done a lot since then to give reason to be more positive.”

But he warns of a tough few years ahead.

‘‘There is no doubt that Ireland, like many countries, faces big challenges. It’s not going to be easy. I certainly don’t think it will be a quick rebound, if there is a rebound at all. I actually think talk of a rebound is slightly wishful thinking.

‘‘I’m not saying we won’t move into GDP growth. I have every confidence that we will at some stage, but I don’t think the world is going back to where it was.

‘‘Now that might feel a bit dramatic, and I’m not just referring to Ireland, I mean generally. This is far more deep rooted than a lot of people say – whether they feel it is a different matter, of course. That presents challenges, but I think it presents more opportunities than challenges for us.”

From his own perspective, however, there are pleasing signs of customers continuing to invest and what he sees as the ‘‘positive’’ development of Eircom being acquired by Singapore’s STT.

‘‘Whether one competes with them or collaborates with them, we do live in a complex industry. A strong former incumbent is important, so, in many ways, I absolutely welcome the purchase by STT.”

And after three years and achieving the breakthrough of generating profits, is there much left to achieve in Ireland and is it time to consider a job elsewhere within the group, which he joined in 1991?

‘‘I’m very relaxed about these things. That said, I’ve always said internally and externally that people can be in roles too long. It’s good for businesses to have a fresh perspective.

Now I’m not saying whether that’s three years or five, but I do think you need a fresh pair of eyes. We all get tied to decisions we’ve taken.”

He is keen nonetheless to pass on credit to the ‘‘very strong team’’ he has around him.

‘‘As a leader, you can only do three things. You can set the strategy, you can set the tone and you can build a team around you to help you deliver.

‘‘The success of any single individual is more about what happens after they’ve left than while they’re in the role.

‘‘In those contexts, we have made some bold strategic decisions, particularly in the Republic market, and at this stage they’re proving successful for customers, employees and shareholders alike.”

Clark is also careful to remember that not all the decisions facing him are his to take.

‘‘My role, and what I do, is not totally in my own hands – it’s in both my wife’s and my boss’s. I joke about it but it’s true. I think most people who are in senior positions know that to be the truth.”

The software will provide the management team with business intelligence information and will also cater for home offices and mobile sales staff.

‘‘This will make a positive impact on our stock and order management and ensure we reduce stock wastage to as close to zero as possible. We also expect to achieve a 4-5 per cent improvement in our key customer service index,” said Tristan Geoghegan, finance manager of La Rousse Foods.