In the mid-80’s I took my second tech job, at a company called Silicon Graphics, Inc. SGI, before it officially contracted its name to “SGI”, was a fantastic place to grow and learn. It was intense and focused, and my modest technical know-how in Unix, TCP/IP Networking, and Computer Hardware matched well as the company…
I had an interesting discussion this weekend about computers and devices and Internet of Things. I’m still sorting out how exactly to articulate this, and then this morning this great example from Marco Arment came to my news feed: From Redesigning Overcast’s Apple Watch app – Marco.org: It’s unwise and futile to try to shove…
It looks like Apple have been doing some thinking about the challenges of a growing developer community. In their fashion, they aren’t telling us much, but at least the change to WWDC ticket sales process and promised availability of session videos during the conference were good steps. Now they have quietly announced a series of…
I feel for Eric Reis. He seems compelled to say, in every talk, right in the beginning, “Lean is not ‘cheap’!” I’m sure it’s because he gets hit with this constantly. Just yesterday I was reading about Education startups and a well-regarded startup founder and investor was quoted as saying that startups in the Education…
You want the virtuous cycle, or the vicious one?
The key is to create a virtuous cycle of great support, product improvement, and customer loyalty & recommendations. It’s a virtuous cycle of good will. Here are the steps:
Tech Support folks should also be friendly and like helping people. They should be communicative both inside the organization and with customers. Dont just expect your team to “be professional”. That admonition is at the core of the wooden, scripted responses that frustrate customers.
This recent research is shows the difference you can get when focusing on resolving problems: The study found that customers from each company are generally satisfied with hold times, ease of reaching an agent and agent professionalism. In contrast, there was a significant difference in the percentage of customers who reported their problem was solved:…
Twitter is getting another big wave of adoption and many people are asking again what it’s for. How could short broadcasted text messages limited to 140 characters be useful? What utility could it possible have? For tech support organizations I think it’s very useful, in two primary ways: for “eavesdropping” on people who are talking…
Check out the post by Jon Mountjoy on the feedback request from Apple after getting his Macbook Pro serviced at the Apple Store. The folks at Apple have done a very nice job on this process. Compare it to what you do. How does your feedback process make your customers feel? An interesting example is…
Spam in Twitter is becoming a problem. Full 75% of my new followers yesterday were some kind of crass commercial, “I’ll show you how to twitter for money” or “check out my new multi-level marketing scheme.” But some folks are using twitter for their business in some useful and interesting way. The latest I’ve learned…