Barking

I wrote a guest post on the Sun Startup Essentials Blog about the recent Digital Mission to New York that Tactile CRM took part in.

Is that too many acronyms for a Tuesday morning? If so, allow me to translate - ‘We’re off to Future of Web Apps thanks to Sun Startup Essentials‘.

We’re part of the excellent Startup Essentials program from Sun designed specifically to help startups get off the ground rapidly and at lower cost. We’ve taken advantage of some of the excellent discounts on hardware, and are going to be looking into to their expertise when it comes to some nifty hardware/software configuration/optimisation too.

We’ve won a stand to exhibit Tactile CRM at FOWA London next week and are now busy planning what to do on the stand. Our neighbouring stand, Fav.or.it have an awesome Lego Death Star to build, and I am hearing rumours of some beach and hawian shirt action from Stewart at Sun. So what do we have?

We’re still planning at the moment, but needless to say Denver the Tactile CRM dragon will be making a reappearance, we’ll have some beer, a demo of Tactile CRM, and more. So watch this space!

I sign up to, trial and test a higher than usual number of products on the web. Most are easy signups and not too onerous.

We’ve taken this to heart with our Tactile CRM product. You can sign up for the product for free, no credit card details required, and it’s free for as long as you like.

Here are the details we ask for if you sign up for the free version of Tactile CRM:

OK, it’s not the shortest sign up, but we need all those details to set up a new account - it’s not us trying to do data capture. The main point is we don’t ask for your card details on the free trial. 

We want people to start using Tactile CRM, try the product and give us feedback.

As a start-up this feedback and exposure is just as important as the people that sign up for the paying plans. We really do want people to use the product and actively pursue feedback and suggestions we receive, so giving users an extra barrier to entry, such as entering credit card details is a no-no.

So sign up forms like the following from Apple’s Mobile Me is silly in my opinion:

I wanted to give the Mobile Me ‘Exchange for the rest of us’ feature a try with my email (I already have IMAP and wanted to see if it improved on it).

The old .mac service let you have a free trial without this step and I gave it a go. However, I can’t be bothered to complete the above form as I am likely to forget to cancel the trial if I don’t want to carry on.

I’m sure Apple aren’t worried about little old Jake not signing up, but for some of the smaller fish like ourselves we want as many people as we can get.

I have been keeping this under my belt for a week or so, but I was really pleased that Tactile CRM has been accepted onto the 2008 Digital Mission to New York. Full details are on the Chin Wag website, TechCrunch UK have done an initial post on it (they are one of the media partners), and the press release is here.

I’ve been trying to stalk follow people on Twitter that are going. So far I have found the following - companies & people with Twitter accounts first (those with two people have the person representing them on the digital mission first):

• B View
• Headshift - Christoph Schmaltz
• Huddle - Alistair Mitchell & Andy McLoughlin
• idiomag - Andrew Davies
• KMP - Bill Darling & Paul Fabretti
• Mippin - Scott Beaumont
• Quick TV - Nick Bell
• Smarkets - Jason Trost
• Sweemo
• Tactile CRM - Me (Jake Stride)
• Tempero - Dominic Sparkes (not sure this is the right Twitter account, could be this one [update: it's not!] too)
• Ugame - Sam Matthews
• UnLtdWorld - Albert Nardelli
• Veedow - Fabio De Bernardi
• World TV - Alx Klive
• Harvest Digital
• Head London
• Market Sentinel
• Littleloud
• Slicethepie

DM on Twitter or email me jake dot stride [at] senokian dot com if I have missed you off.

It’s been a long time coming, but Paul our new project manager started at the beginning of the week.

I’d been trying to find somebody for about 3 months before Paul applied, and nobody prior to him was up to scratch. He had to give eight weeks notice, but it’s been worth the wait as already this week he has taken a huge workload off me.

Some of you may remember Paul from when he worked with us as a Shell STEP student a few years back. We set him off into the big wide World and he’s returned better for it, to manage our ongoing projects.

There’s a cheesy photo of him below, and he’s introduced himself below. He’s also putting together a few blog posts about his first week here and some of the issues we have trying to put some simple web-based project management systems in place this week.

Hmm, writing the following paragraph felt quite a lot like having to write a personal statement for UCAS applications all over again…

Hi, my name is Paul Bain and I’m the new Project Manager at Senokian. I’m one of the strange sorts of people who actually likes to organise complicated projects and work with large numbers of clients. I first worked with Senokian as a Shell STEP student a few years ago and enjoyed it so much that I decided to come back after gaining experience in systems development and support working for a large debt management charity.

So there you have it!

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 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.

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!