Barking

So after reading Michael Arrington’s article on why voicemail is dead I thought I’d think about how I use mine.

I’ve come across Spinvox before - it’s a service that converts voicemail (speech) to SMS and/or email, and decided to sign up for the trial today. I’m one of those people that is fairly good at responding to email, but not so much at voicemail. So the idea of having my voicemail direct in my inbox as an SMS means I can respond things to things much quicker.

After signing up (thanks Whatleydude) I had a few SMS based issues caused by my mobile operator and had to call up Spinvox customer service. I spoke to a really nice chap called Craig who gave me some really helpful pointers to ask T-Mobile, spoke to them, and called back Spinvox a few hours later. I spoke to Craig (he remembered who I was), said he’d make a couple of changes and give me call back when they were done. I’ve heard this before and so was pleasently surprised when he called back later to let me know it was all fixed.

I happened to be away from my phone when it happened so he left me a voicemail that was converted to text and SMS’d and emailed to me. It all works perfectly now!

This is exactly how customer service should work. Slick, personal, quick and efficent. I never once felt like the problems were my fault, and everything was resolved satisfactorily and beyond my expectactions.

I’ve learnt a lot from my dealings with Spinvox in a day and will be taking away a lot of what I have experienced to put into the way we deal with things both for Tactile CRM and Resolve RM.

Once again, thanks Craig and Whatelydude at Spinvox, you’ve restored my faith in customer service, you have a great product and given me lots to think about.

With everything that is going on here at Senokian with the build of Resolve RM and the ongoing day to day work with Tactile CRM, I haven’t been able to follow Carsonified’s build of their Matt application as closely as I would have liked.

I think it’s an interesting project to build an application in four days and see how it grows.

Obviously it won’t start/end in that period, they will have spent a fair amount of planning things before hand and will have to deal with ongoing support, maintenance, and development (if it is a success) of the application. But I like the process of documenting things in the same way that we are doing so here at Senokian for the build/launch of Resolve RM in our ‘Diary of yet another startup!‘.

So far they have been busy with the app, but I hope next week there will be more information on the launch, PR and marketing side of the application and how that has gone. So far they only mentioned the embargoing of content to various blogs, and Ryan getting people to digg articles. This is an area I am particularly interested in and would hope to see more about in the coming weeks.

Good work Carsonites. I hope it all falls into place. Here’s the timelapse video of one of their days work (the Carsonified website seems fairly slow at the moment):

Matt Week - Day One Time Lapse from Carsonified on Vimeo.

I’m not an angry man and it takes a lot to irritate me, but O2 have managed it today.

Rewind a few weeks to the announcement by Apple that the 3G iPhone is being launched on the 11th July. I patiently waited for O2 to update their website, and registered to be kept updated (nothing has been emailed to me as of the 1st July). In the meantime I happened to be passing by my local O2 store after finding out other stores were pre-credit checking for the iPhone launch.

First bit of rubbish customer service by O2. It was a lunch time and there were four customers in the Coventy store. Two members of staff were on duty with a third on their lunch break. If I was running a retail store I’d schedule shifts so that staff lunches were not over the main lunch period of 12-2pm. That’s what happened when I worked at Waitrose.

So after a wait of 20 minutes I finally spoke to a lady and explained that I wanted to open a new business account for the iPhone with four handsets, pre-credit check so that I didn’t have to hand around on the launch date and what would I need to do:

Sorry sir, you can’t do that

Now I know that is not true, and explained that other people had been able to do it. She begrudginly walked off to ‘ask her manager’ who was hiding out the back of the store and not dealing with customers when it was busy.

She returned, said ‘oh yeah we can, you’ll have to come back on the 1st of July’. I asked her what I would need and she told me the various bits of paperwork I would need.

Fast forward to today. I rang the O2 store in Coventry, asked if I could come in and pre-credit check for a business account, and double checked the paperwork I would need. The man I spoke to on the phone confirmed the paperwork and said I could come in today and do it. I double checked this would be OK for the business account and was assured this was the case.

An hour later I arrived at the store. Same story - busy at lunch with a long queue. I had anticipated this and needed to do some banking. I did this, came back half an hour later and the queue had gone.

I explained to the man what I wanted to do, he sat me down and began the process.

Next mistake he tried to credit check me as a personal user.

The man then had to ring his manager (who was off), couldn’t get through, rang the Birmingham branch, the person wasn’t available and waited for a call back. 30 minutes later after lots of waiting and trying different numbers he finally spoke to another colleague who dis-interestingly said it wasn’t possible.

The young man explained that they had been told about the pre-credit/iPhone process yesterday and that they hadn’t received all the relevent training.

At this point I have wasted a good 2 hours of time, got fairly frustrated and feel like 02 don’t want the £4,000 they are going to make from me.

I find it hard to beleive that the second time round O2 are still disorganised, don’t have a process in place for the iPhone sale and generally can’t be bothered to take my money or make their (and my) life a bit easier by doing things in advanced.

Right now I’m feeling like a really can’t be bother switching to O2 and the iPhone  isn’t really worth all the hassle. I have been chasing O2, wasted my time, put up with rude staff and had to deal with a lack of competence and training.

If I could get the iPhone on another network I certain would (Orange’s customer service was fantastic when I was with them), at the moment it’s doubtful I will get one at all. Right now, O2 your organisation and customer service is awful.

I get a lot of speculative CVs through the post?! and email from various people.

This in itself isn’t a problem -  we have an area on our website that explains what we like to see in an application, details of student placements, and what it is like working with us. We pay attention to detail, although we’re not quite this bad. We are also very firm with recruitment agencies as we get a lot of irritating calls and haven’t had any good experiences with them (a sentiment echo’d by many).

Normally I deal with each one and respond with an email. Today was different. I got a random CV from a student, covering letter and all, that didn’t once include their email address. Now it just so happens that we don’t have any student placements at present, but with only a phone/mobile number I have no way to contact them unless I ring, which I don’t want to.

Moral of the story: if you’re going to speculatively apply for a job with us, at lease include your email address.

I made the trip to London on Friday afternoon for this month’s MiniBar. As always an excellent event, and I as I arrived a bit early (well an hour) I got to have a really good chat with Christian before hand and get some interesting ideas for marketing Tactile CRM.

I had a chat and dinner with Kai (a friend from university) from Webconverger (a great product with big potential I think); an interesting converstation with somebody who wanted $15m to model London in 3D on the web to then plonk geodata on it. Not sure of the viability of it and thought a Google Maps mashup might be a good starting ground to prove that it works. Nick Halstead from fav.or.it was also there (I first met him at Fuel Conference on the Sun Startup Essentials stand), he had some interesting ideas for marketing/sales as well as managing to have a stack of free drinks various people brought over for him when they went to the bar due to a mix up!

I met and spoke to loads of other interseting people, failed dismally trying to do a qik stream of one of the talks, but got an old fashion photo (below) of the guys from School of Everything presenting on stage.

The event was sponsored by Channel 4, and Matt Locke gave a quick couple of minutes to introduce the program they are working on. I first saw Matt Locke when I visited the Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle and the stuff he is in involved in with Channel 4 looks/sounds pretty cool.

Unfortunately I am not around for the next one, but keep an eye out on the meet us category of the blog for when we are next there.

UPDATE: Kai managed to video some of it:

My new set of moo cards arrived today, they aren’t my main business cards, more for social acquaintances I meet at events and friends etc. I thought I’d have a bit of fun with them this time. So as I always seem to make the coffee and Greg doesn’t let me code any more they say:

I’m the coffee boy at senokian.com, tactilecrm.com
& resolverm.com. Sometimes I’m allowed to code, but
not often. Mainly I work on marketing and biz stuff.
My name is Jake Stride, please keep in touch.
On the blower: +44 xxxx xxxxxx | Twitter: jstride
Email & GTalk: jake dot stride at senokian dot com

This is what the front and backs look like:

The more I think about what we are trying to do with Resolve RM (and indeed our other products), the more I realise that we need to be extraordinary as a company. Not just from the products that we offer, but the level of support and attention we give each and every customer.

So Whuffie is an important part of that plan.

I first came across Whuffie at the Fuel Conference, after Tara Hunt gave another one of her excellent presentations (the slides are available on the Fuel blog post I wrote).

In short Whuffie is the term Cory Doctrow uses in this book ‘down and out in the magic kingdom‘ for a replacement currency. A person’s Whuffie is a measurement of their overall reputation and goes up and down depending upon their actions (good or bad).

We can then apply this to Senokian, our products, and how we deal with people to give them an amazing experience which they will hopefully want to share and tell people about.

One of the problems we have traditionally had at Senokian has been dealing with customer support. We’ve been so busy with our work that sometimes we overlooked the support queue and forget to get back to people (that’s when we were using the old EGS based system).

It lead to me getting emails from customers along the lines of: ‘I submitted ticket #123 but haven’t heard anything for a while, what’s happening?’. Giving people a response and keeping them updated is a key part to our Whuffie based strategy and one that we are still trying to perfect (although we are getting better).

With the launch of Tactile CRM I realised we needed something better. We spent a lot of time looking around for a good, easy to use customer support system. All we could come up with were the expensive Remedy type systems, or the excellent, but fairly-difficult-interface-and-install-wise RT.

We played around with RT for a while and tried to give it a go, but it was just too overwhelming (and akward to set up), even for a software company such as ourselves. The idea of Resolve RM was planted and we decided to give it a proper think.

So Resolve RM was born - our Whuffie application. But there’s more to it than that. We realised we need to increase the amount of Whuffie we had at Senokian, but whilst we were at it, we thought we could help other people increase their Whuffie too. A Whuffie BOGOF if you will.

So we decided to build Resolve RM as an addition to our product range so that other people can make Whuffie too. We’ll keep you posted on how it goes!

We successfully launched Tactile CRM earlier this year and have lots of nice people onboard - thanks to everyone who is using it.

Work has now begun on our second application in the suite, Resolve RM, and we will be writing about the process of launching it on this blog. No holds bar’d, the good the bad and the ugly, warts and all, etc. etc.

The idea isn’t new, there are plenty of resources out there, Ryan Carson blogged about selling Drop Send, and put together a Web App, Guy Kawaski wrote about building a web app for about $12,000, I came across an interesting post title ‘Diary of a Failed Startup‘ yesterday, the list goes on.

What we aim to do is talk about our day to day problems, solutions, issues etc. that we come across and how we deal with them. We’ll also be applying things we learnt launching Tactile CRM.

This may be a resource for anybody interested in what we do, looking for tips, ideas, and pitfalls/mistakes we make along the way, or it may be of no interest to anybody. Time will tell.

Well trying to get the latest Tactile CRM newsletter sorted has lead me to buying my first windows machine in who knows how long (about 9 years I think). It is preloaded with Vista business, and apart from the arduous process of getting it started the first time (about 40 minutes for pre-installed windows to work out what it wanted to do, and the HP software too) seems OK.

It’s not going to replace the MacBook as a ‘no-holds-bar’d-on-the-move-desktop-replacement-machine’, but is certainly useful on the train due to its small size (it happily fits on the seat back trays you get on the Virgin trains, unlike the MacBook).

The main probelms I have with it so far are the sensitivity of the mouse, which I will be able to fix, and the huge power cable you get with it. Why design a nice small laptop, only to include a standard HP power supply that practically doubles the size of the thing!

I’m trying to steer clear of Vsta as much as possible, but will try to install Leopard (OS X) on it over the weekend and see what happens with that (note to self, find the restore procedure for the laptop before starting). In the meantime, here is my current screen shot of OS X Leopard on the HP 2133:

I saw this sign outside of my local pub. Brought a smile to my face: