We all know most TV is pretty banal, but every now and then something comes along that provides insight, makes you think. So if you ever wondered what it’s really like to be the boss, you need to watch the latest episode of House. They’ve done an excellent job (based on my experience, anyway) capturing [...]
Read More Academia, business support, customer service, entrepreneurI had an interesting experience the other day at my local BJ’s (it’s like Sam’s Club and Costco). I had finished loading my items into my car, and was returning the cart to the corral, when I passed an employee gathering carts to reload the stack at the entrance. He had already gathered the carts [...]
Read More business support, customer serviceThe Future of Web Apps conference is so right up my alley it’s almost stupid that I couldn’t attend. Web development with a focus on business: customer service, driving traffic, marketing, sales… It’s essentially the event for geeks who want to go from the basement to the corner office. Fortunately, Ryan Carson and the team [...]
Read More business support, content sharing, customer service, entrepreneur, expo, marketing, software development, usabilityWhen I was a Comcast customer, the cable quality itself was decent but everything around it sucked. Everything cost way too much. FYI, all the prices you see them advertise — you know, the ones that actually sound reasonable? — are introductory rates, and skyrocket after 6-12 months (though I hear you can keep them [...]
Read More customer service, customer service failAs an email-based backup service, Fwd:Vault ran into spam filters pretty quickly. Most of this can be mitigated with proper server configuration and getting records in the right places (i.e. abuse.net). From there it’s simply a matter of reminding users to check the spam folder when things are missing. However through the tribulations of one [...]
Read More business support, crappy coding, customer service, fwdvault, spam, tech supportThe guys from big G never cease to amaze me. I was deleting an old coupon message from Pro Flowers today and accidentally hit the “Report Spam” button instead of “Delete”, and was greeting with this: I thought unsubscribing from legitimate mailing lists was already pretty easy, but Google decided that one step was still [...]
Read More customer service, usability, user interfacesAn effective business always remembers that their relationship with a client is a two-way street. If the client isn’t holding up their end of the bargain, the company can and should drop them. This is called firing your customers. The discussion surrounding this notion, both pro and con, is pretty vast, and I recommend you [...]
Read More business support, customer service, marketingDave Ramsey is a fantastic businessman with an approach to businesses and finances that eschews what works over what’s hot. Given Wall Street’s track record of late, I’d say that’s a really good thing. He’s got a good regular column called Dave Says, answering questions about personal finance and business (with a focus on entrepreneurs [...]
Read More business support, customer service, entrepreneurI’ve been working furiously on the back end logic for Fwd:Vault for the past few weeks, specifically the logic that processes incoming messages/attachments, archiving them in the system, or returning stored data per user request. As I got into the final nitty gritty, I confronted a serious design issue: should the system use one email [...]
Read More business support, customer service, fwdvault, startups, usabilityI’ve learned that one of the biggest office-cluttering offenders when you run a company is receipts. The government wants to see them for tax purposes, so you hold onto every last one to save every last dollar. The problem, of course, is that you’ll collect a crap ton of these stupid little bits of paper [...]
Read More coding theory, customer service