Regular readers here will be aware that I bang on about customer service on this blog from time to time (occasionally to my cost)!
For that reason, I was delighted to read Joel Spolsky’s comprehensive post on Remarkable Customer Service this morning.
Everyone in business needs to read this post.
Some quotes from it:
Most people’s experience with tech support and customer service comes from airlines, telephone companies, cable companies, and ISPs, all of whom provide generally awful customer service. It’s so bad you don’t even bother calling any more, do you?… when someone does call, look at it as a great opportunity to create fanatically devoted customer, one who will prattle on and on about what a great job you did.
It’s completely natural to have trouble saying “It’s my fault.†That’s human. But those three words are going to make your angry customers much happier. So you’re going to have to say them. And you’re going to have to sound like you mean it…. You may think that admitting fault is a strict no-no that can get you sued. This is nonsense. The way to avoid getting sued is not to have people who are mad at you. The best way to do this is to admit fault and fix the damn problem.
There is only one way to survive angry customers emotionally: you have to realize that they’re not angry at you; they’re angry at your business, and you just happen to be a convenient representative of that business.
Read the whole post. Adopt Joel’s customer service principles and watch your sales increase.
Having read it I almost wish I were a software developer so I could be one of Joel’s customers for his FogBugz bug tracking system. Almost!
I spotted over on the Web 2.0 Ireland blog that Saul Klein (Saul is VP of Skype, a Founding Partner of The Accelerator Group (TAG - an active early-stage investment and advisory network, and has recently been appointed to Index Ventures) is proposing a European techstars/ycomibinator type facility.
Saul says:
this is really a call to arms: for first-time European entrepreneurs to let us know what they need to improve their chances of global success and for serial entrepreneurs and investors to figure out how we can better support the best ideas and talent.
He goes on to say:
But in Europe we now have some advantages of our own:
- world-class talent within the EU and in our orbit including Israel, Russia and South Africa
- proportionally more 20-29 year old science & technology graduates in 10 European countries than the US
- available startup capital like never before and experienced investors keen to back daring ideas to create global businesses
- a generation of experienced European entrepreneurs ready to offer a support network
- successful role model companies in capitals across Europe
- cultures that are attuned to thinking global and acting local
Finally Saul says:
Right now, I’ve love your feedback.
Let me know;
- what you think,
- who you’d want to be involved,
- how we should go about finding the right talent,
- who should we be telling about it,
- how should the model work best,
- if your an entrepreneur what you would need,
This sounds like a great idea especially for anyone in startup right now, and kudos to Saul for pitching it.
I came across Conor O’Neill’s blog post about his vasectomy today. It was on his personal blog, which I am not subscribed to, so I missed it when he posted it originally last month.
I came across it today when looking over the posts in the Best Blog Post category in the Irish Blog Awards.
Read it if you have a sense of humour and a strong stomach (or if you are female and sadistic!).
Eddie Hobbs gave the keynote address at the recent it@cork conference.
It was a wide-ranging, interesting and very topical talk.
This afternoon I published a recording of his address on the it@cork blog. It is 55 minutes long (including the q & a at the end) but well worth taking the time to listen to.
Joost is the new application from the makers of Skype which streams TV over the Internet to your computer.
I went to download the Windows version of Joost the other day, to try installing it in my Parallels VM (don’t bother - it doesn’t work) when I saw the following:
Finally, Joost for Mac has been released! Wohoo!
I downloaded Joost and ran it on the Mac.
It was a bit of a disappointment, I have to say. I wasn’t keen on it starting up in full screen mode but that is only a minor annoyance and quickly changed in the Preferences. The biggest letdown is the number of times the video stopped and started as it struggled to download the next chunk of the program.
My Internet connection is 3mb with a 20:1 contention ratio. I was watching on a Sunday morning so all should have been quiet and still the program couldn’t download the video fast enough. This makes for an irritating viewing experience.
I don’t know if this problem is peculiar to the Mac version or it is an issue with Joost in general. If it is not Mac specific, it needs to be fixed somehow or watching TV programs on the computer through Joost won’t catch on.
Bernie pointed out that the number of subscribers to this blog went over the 1,000 mark yesterday.
He also correctly deduced that this is due to FeedBurner’s taking Google Reader’s (now published) numbers into account in its statistics.
Everyone who uses FeedBurner will have seen a nice spike in their numbers yesterday as Google made the subscriber numbers available. Shame, I was hoping the sudden surge in my subscriptions would guarantee me a free pint at the upcoming Irish Blog Awards!
I see Stowe Boyd started a conversation on this topic as well when he saw his numbers go up.
UPDATE: Darren over at ProBlogger says that Google Reader has now overtaken Bloglines as the most popular RSS reader of the ProBlogger site. My own stats also show Google Reader ahead of Bloglines with Google Reader at 31% and Bloglines at 16%.
Recent Comments