Daniel

Why your customers know more than you think

If you are in business, putting your head in the sand doesn't work anymore. You need to be listening and talking to your customers, because if you aren't, they will be doing it with each other, and they won't be happy about it.

As a part of one of my day jobs, I need to read and summarize complaints about a particular automaker that are submitted to the NHTSA website in the US.

Reading a couple of hundred of these a month can be pretty soul destroying for an empathic person like me, as they almost always involve financial hardships, and occasionally injuries and even deaths. On the upside however,the process has opened my eyes to just how much communication goes on between a company's customers and how it impacts their view of the company.

Read more

Daniel

How a marathon can teach you about business.

Every year some friends and I participate in the Nagoya Marathon, well at least the 10 km fun run section.

Usually I do a little bit of training in the months before the race and as a result I usually finish in the top 20% of runners. This year though, I was really busy with various things and did basically no training, resulting in my worst ever time and putting me just inside the 70% mark.

While running the race this year, I noticed something very important - the flow of the race. Anyone who's done a lot of racing in scenarios with a lot of participants probably knows what I mean. It's the average pace of the race as a whole, and is very easy to spot once you know what you're looking for.

If you want to spot it, just ask yourself are most people moving away or towards you?

Read more

Daniel

Is your customer service costing you customers?

My wife and I were recently looking for baby beds on the Internet and we found two that we really liked, they looked good and the prices were very good.

Being Japanese, my wife is a little more into the group consensus than I am, and so she was looking around for comments and reviews on the two beds.

We found the usual stuff, and both of the beds were rated around the four and a half out of five mark. But one comment really stuck out to me. One person was saying that they had bought the bed and had it delivered to their house. When it arrived there, they opened it and found that it was broken. They then apparently immediately called the company asking what they should do to get a replacement or refund.

The support person on the other end asked them if they had a warranty card. The customer searched the box but there was no card, and support person informed them that there was nothing he could do without that card.

Obviously there's more to the story, but just the possible threat of us not being able to receive customer service without some obscure piece of paper on a several hundred dollar item was enough to convince my wife and I to go for the other bed.

For us the risk of getting a bad product is an acceptable risk to take, but the risk of getting no service or support on a product is not a risk we are prepared to take, and I'm confident that we are not alone in that thinking.

This is because customers in general are willing to accept a bad or faulty product if they can get good support for it, but they will be turned off even the most perfect product if it has a reputation for poor customer service or support.

At Ninja Forge, we know we aren't always perfect with our support but we do try to put a lot of effort into it, especially Mark. But I know we can do better. Right now we are planning out and designing a rebuild of the Ninja Forge site and something I've been giving a lot of thought to lately is how we can improve and streamline our support.

What about you? Is your customer support as good as it could be? Because if it's not, then it could be costing you sales, just like with our baby bed.

Daniel

Google fast flipping you out of revenue?

Not satisfied controlling almost every advertisement on almost every website in the world,Google has decided that it's going to cut the middleman out of its advertising revenue, the middleman being the content providers for the sites their advertising is on.

How are they going to do this? It appears to be through a new service under development in the Google Labs, called fast flip. Fast flip takes an image of a particular site, at this stage it appears to be only news, and then posts the image with their own advertising into the fast flip service.

Now, they don't usually show the full article and they are showing an image of the website and not content cut directly from the website, so there is probably just enough protection to be able to claim fair use of your site content while depriving you of any ad revenue for content. This is because a lot of the time you can get enough information from that snippet of your article to not need to actually click through to the full article. In my own browsing for example, I only clicked through to one article of the 20+ that I browsed. In almost every case, I didn't quite get the full article, but I got enough that it wasn't worth the hassle of loading another page to finish reading it.

With a newsfeed page with lots of links, we need to click through one link to get to the full article, but fast flip makes us click through two pages to get to the full article, one of which has half the article and Google's advertising.

So not only is it not faster, but Google is depriving the content producer of all revenue on their articles much, if not most of the time. I am fairly confident that this will do a damn good job of reducing the amount of useful content that is produced, because authors who aren't getting paid tend to stop writing anything that requires a serious investment of time and energy.

Google is really starting to look like one of those vines that strangles the tree that it is living on, killing both of them. Because the more that they try to chase profit at all costs, the more they are damaging the usefulness of the Internet, which in turn can't help but impact negatively on their profits.

Stian

NinjaBoard release is delayed

NinjaBoard were supposed to launch today and we really tried very hard to meet our own deadline. However after solid feedback from a selected group of testers, there's an clear demand for features like sub forums, proper acl, JomSocial integration, AEC integration and more. In addition to that we're not reached a state were NB is usable, yet. So the bad news is NB will release later than planned, the good news we're spending the extra time focusing on adding in the top requested features, improve the security, better performance and a smoother migration from NB 0.5.3.So instead of releasing a product that's incomplete.


Since NB is build completely on top of the Nooku Framework we have decided - after discussion with the Nooku Team - to release NB simultaneously with Nooku Framework 0.7. A release date for Nooku Framework 0.7 has not been set yet. The Nooku Team is currently working fiercely to get all the features in, some based on our own feedback, to make it a killer release. If you want to track their progress you can tune into the Nooku Framework on Sourceforge  or Ohloh and offcourse we will keep blogging out our progress.



Picture below is of the new "load parts of NB in regular module positions" feature that'll make integrating NB with your site even more fun. One of the features we're adding in to prove to you we're not delaying NB just to watch Scrubs all day long, but to make NB even more awesome!

NinjaBoard rounded dark separator-currentcolor hosted by Ember

More details and screenshots after the break.

Read more

<< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ... 21 >>