Richard's Blog

 Archive for the ‘Customer Support’ Category

A while ago I was filling out a questionnaire on disaster preparedness.  Some of the questions had to do with what happened if power was knocked out or other bad things happened to the office. I was trying to figure out appropriate responses  because we almost never have more than 2 people in one location at a time so the problems they were asking about were not really relevant.

This current storm and power outages somewhat illustrated that point. The magnitude of the damage from this storm was unexpected.  I was told that there were over 10 inches of snow in Connecticut and the previous October  high was perhaps 1 1/2 inches.  While there was some inconvenience to many Therap team members, essentially the major effect to customers was some loss of direct phone numbers for Therap team members, who all still had their cell phones. Live help and other support all operated virtually normally (or perhaps “normallywhich is  virtually”) . We will be reviewing how and where our IP phone system is based. But that was always considered a relatively low concern in our level of preparedness.

What this storm again showed was the benefits of distributed support. The benefits are on several levels. Because we have support team members throughout Connecticut and other States team members are on different parts of the power grid, so it is more likely that some people will always have power. Additionally, people can work from home and not have to drive in unsafe conditions.

I had recently bought my kids some apple computers. After all of my adult life in the PC world I had finally decided to give a Mac a try.

Actually my early computer experiences included fortran and a Data General MV8000. But those those were even before PC’s existed.

I had heard that Apple and Macbooks were great for kids and had good graphics.  But I think what had finally caused me to change was dealing with the service reps for all of the virus protection needed for pc’s.

What has most surprised me about Apple was their customer service. We purchased their $99 one-to-one support package. This gives us one year of unlimited one on one service.  We have now taken several classes.  Today my daughter put up her first web page.  So far its one page with a couple of you tube links to Miley Cyrus – but its a good learning experience.

What a difference this type of service from Apple has made in understanding how macs are different from PC’s and how to use their various features.

Once again, a high level of personal touch really makes a difference in customer support.

It seems almost everyday on the internet I am learning some new fear or concern about some concept or term I never heard of before.

For example, the other day I learned you can get “ghost banned” at Stumble Upon.  Basically if you give too many good reviews to websites created by the same people they start to assume you know each other and stop counting your reviews, but they apparently don’t tell you.

I was trying to think how this related to the rating systems we have in place for either Therap Ideas or the Global Template Library. It seems that there is a fundamental difference in how approvals and comments are approached at Therap because information and postings in Therap are date and time stamped and also have the name, agency and title of the person submitting.

If you really are concerned about getting ghost banned – I found a post on “How Not to Get Ghost Banned” on Stumble Uponl.

Today I read a blog post by Prem Kumar called Is Social CRM About Automated Relationship Building. He discussed a
fear that the term Social CRM might get disfigured to mean a set of tools that help businesses to eavesdrop & stalk on their leads, prospects & customers on the social web and thus push more targeted messages to them to lure them into buying more from the business, all the while reducing service costs by crowdsourcing it to the customer communities. The tools would still be the ones we envision, the purpose would be transmogrified. See how easy it would be fake a customer centric culture?

I read this post the day before we have 150 or so people coming together in Oregon to discuss how to improve use of an online service  (Therap) to provide better support in an environment where the ultimate service is provided face to face.  We are sending four therap team members to help present along with several of our more experienced users.

We are finding that the internet and social media must supplement personal relationships in this industry. Once people have met each other there is a higher comfort in sharing information and care plans and templates and ideas.

I had thought that perhaps its because our product is continually evolving and use agile programming and rapid prototyping that we spend so much time thinking about interactions with our users.  Perhaps its because we still know our customers by name – and in fact have visited the vast majority of our users -even in relatively remote locations like Kalispell, Montana or Scottsbluff, Nebraska.

Prem Kumar discussed how someone asked
how can social media marketing help him in sending coupons as part of his marketing campaigns. He started to explain about some successful mobile coupon technology value chain they had worked out between the business, the mobile service provider, the coupon distributor and whoever else.

While I think there is a place for all sorts of automation and in fact we use the internet to communicate with our customers and potential customers, it will be interesting to see  how social media, crowdsourcing and other really user interactive parts of the internet will evolve as large consumer product companies with advertising budgets in excess of $100 million annually start to use these tools.