Barking

In the current economic situation it is the companies that keep it simple (stupid) and streamline their processes who will be the winners.

When it comes to pricing this couldn’t be more true, and is often an area that is overlooked. At Tactile CRM we’re currently simplifying our pricing structure, to make it easier for current and prospective users to understand our pricing bands. We think this is important from a ‘user acquisition’ point of view (please excuse the buzzwords) as it will help us to sign up more paying users.

However, not everybody has the same reasoning. I recently tried to join the local gym when I moved to Oxford, and nowhere on their website do they display pricing (correct me if I am wrong, but I haven’t found it yet). As a result, Esporta made me give up some of my weekend to visit the gym where I was still not able to find out the costs – two people on reception didn’t know them, and after a 15 minute waiting to see ’someone’ I still hadn’t got any further and left.

I was quite happy to make an appointment to see somebody but nobody seemed that clued up – maybe a simple CRM system like Tactile CRM would have been a help.

Obviously I don’t know their pricing, but I’d imagine they are currently down about £1,200-£1,500 a year as my partner and I are now looking elsewhere. Hopefully my situation will have been a one off, but I have written to the manager out of courtesy to let them know what happened and given them a chance to redeem themselves.

I’m very much a believer that ex-customers are as important as those you currently have, as you can learn from them how to make your product/service better. That’s a blog post for another time though!

British Rail (or whatever they are called these days - National Rail, it turns out) are a great example of how this should work, the recently updated their ticket pricing from lord knows how many down to 3:

Thanks to Kai and Craig for the photos.

For those of you that are already on Twitter it will come as no surprise that I am a big fan:

For those of you that don’t know what Twitter is, it’s a website where you can easily update your ’status’ (i.e. what you are up to etc.). You can check out what I am up to by following my Twitter user jstride.

Although Twitter current has millions of users, it still hasn’t reached mass main stream adoption in the way that sites such as Facebook and MySpace have. However, it can still be a valuable business tool.

At Senokian we use Twitter in a few ways to try and make our lives a bit easier:

1. We created Twitter accounts for Tactile CRM (tactilecrm), and Resolve RM (resolverm), currently in beta, and post news and updates to them. It’s a central location that gets automatically updated using TwitterFeed, doesn’t take any extra work from us, but gives us another channel to customers. We’re not the only people that do this.
2. Resolve RM, our easy web-based customer care product integrates directly with Twitter. Whenever anyone raises a Senokian, Tactile CRM or, Resolve RM support query we get notified. This is great as we can get direct SMS updates and decrease our response time to queries.
3. We’ve recently launched a new website called Senokian Telephony. One of the features we have added is a ‘Call Me Back’ page so we can call customers back if they don’t want to call us. It only took five minutes, so we integrated it with Twitter. Now whenever somebody fills out the form we get an email, and a ‘tweet’ so we can jump straight on it.

Twitter has had some stability issues of late. They seem to be on top of it now, but I think for those of you who can think outside the box a little, it has some great uses to help your business.

My first task at Senokian was to research project management applications to try to find something which would help us organise our project more efficiently and effectively.

When looking for a system I was considering the following key criteria:

1. Support for multiple projects
2. Support for multiple users
3. Flexible management of milestones, to-do lists and tasks within a project with the ability to add dates to each
4. The ability to track time against tasks
5. The ability for clients to interact with the application

This list of criteria may appear relatively simple, however I was surprised that not one of the 10 applications I looked at in detail fulfilled them all.

Most surprising of all was that none of the applications appeared to allow a date to be added to milestones, to-do lists and tasks. You might wonder why all of these elements need a date, however on complex projects you cannot assume each to-do list or task within a milestone can be completed in any order. Without the ability to add these dates, you are left with the option to either not schedule every task or group of tasks as finely as you would like, or to create hundreds of milestones and to-do lists to try to gain this granularity of planning.

We eventually narrowed the choice to three potential systems:

• Intervals
• ActiveCollab, and
• the dreaded Basecamp

Intervals appeared to have good planning and time management capabilities and provided a high level of configurability. Their main product focus is clearly time recording and the provision of management information to be used for invoicing, however it did appear to over complicate the application and took the focus away from the project details. Furthermore there didn’t appear to be any provision for client access which was a desirable feature.

ActiveCollab looked very shiny and feature packed, again with good planning and time management capabilities. However their pricing model was different to the majority of the applications as it followed the more traditional model of licensing the software rather than paying a subscription for a hosted service. Moreover, it results in the hassle of having to organise hosting for the application and paying extra for updates and support.

Basecamp is probably one of the most well known online project management applications providing good all round functionality. Some of the task planning features did appear slightly illogical, for example not being able to assign dates to tasks, however their model does appear to based around having many milestones with attached to-do lists which isn’t ideal. The time management elements are very well integrated into tasks which I can see being useful.

After considering these three options we reluctantly went for Basecamp. It is the best of a bad bunch in my opinion. It does provide a relatively painless way to do most of the things we want to get out of a application however it also tells me that there may be a market for a project management application which gives more flexibility in managing tasks.

We’ll be reviewing this decision over the coming months, but for the moment it ’scratches an itch’.

‘Customer Service’ has been on my mind for a while recently. It’s something that is important to us all and something (if I am brutally honest) that hasn’t been as great as it should have been over the last 18 months whilst I was ill.

All of this is changing, we’re building Resolve RM, a tool specifically designed to help you give great customer service, we’ve taken on a new project manager (who is helping to give me more time), and the feedback so far has been great.

I’ve also noticed that I have started writing more about customer service: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

So, drum roll please: I’ve added a new category to the blog and will be writing more about these as well as collecting other people’s experiences.

I’d love to hear your experiences and feedback, drop me an email to jake . stride [ at ] senokian . com, or catch me on Twitter.

Thanks to Joe Shlabotnik for the picture too.

Just so people don’t think Coventry is all bad (there are some good bits) I’d thought I’d write about an excellent bit of food related service I received on Friday.

I had a meeting on Friday in London with a new client to finalise the specification for a new job that we are starting this week. As I had some time to kill I decided I would pop over the road to a little sandwich shop, called Loafers, that I have been to on a few occasions previously. Normally their service is excellent, stuff is freshly made, and service is with a smile. Today the service was exceptional.

The gentleman that served me is of a similar age to myself, was very cheerful when I arrived and asked me what I wanted. I ask for a bacon sandwich, to which he replied of course that’s no problem. As he wandered I off I casually asked him if I could have crispy bacon as I don’t like it when it’s not. I expected a ‘I’ll see what I’ve got’, the answer was actually, ‘of course I’ll go and make some now’. I couldn’t believe it! I’d have been happy with what I would have got but the nice man went above and beyond.

When they arrived, the bread was super fresh, the perfect amount of brown sauce was present and there was lots of bacon. A first class bacon butty and I will certainly be going back.

As I was leaving I thanked the man and wished him a nice day (I always try to with people), he seemed somewhat taken aback and seemed genuinely surprised that I said that. He sincerely returned the comment and I believe we’ll both have a better day for it. I know I did.

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.

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.

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 already publish our roadmap of features - those that we are working on, and have already released; but we wanted to give you more say over what we do. After all, Tactile CRM is built for you.

We’ve set up a new page on the excellent Uservoice system (shown below) where you can add new feature requests and vote on those made by others. We’ll then take your suggestions to influence the way we develop Tactile CRM.

We’ll also give credit where credit is due. If you suggest a feature that we implement, we’ll give you an extra month for free (if you are on a paying plan) and give you a mention in the newsletter and blog post when we announce it.

Normally I hate phoning large companies and getting put through their phone systems. T-Mobile is an ideal example of this - everytime I call them they make me listen to their menu options, push 3 or 4 numbers and then I get put straight through to the business team who have no idea which buttons I have pressed.

Today was different though. I called Black Horse for the first time, they asked me 3 simple questions which I answered by voice instead of key presses. It got every single one right first time even in the car, on the motorway, and on handsfree. Once I had done that a nice lady answered the phone - ‘Hi Mr Stride’, I was taken back at first but I assume from my date of birth and phone number they were able to verify who I was.

The rest of the converstation was very much in taken in awe at how well the IVR had worked and that they knew who I was before I even spoke to a person.

Well done Black Horse, an excellent example of using technology just the right amount, not losing the personal touch, and not irritating your customers.