More stuff by: Daniel

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.

Daniel

Ninja Theme launches:

Want to design a template?



Our sister site, Ninja Theme, home to the Ninja's Joomla Template club has finally come out of soft launch mode and has now officially launched. As you would expect from us, NT is a not your
standard Template Club as we have been listening to the complaints and suggestions at other template clubs and have decided to try something different that
we hope people will like.

 
Every month, in addition to a regular template, we will crowdsource a design which we will
then produce. What does crowdsource mean? We want community members to submit
designs, and then the rest of the community will vote on those
designs, and then we will develop the winner as chosen by the
community. 
 
All you need to submit is a template design in a decent sized .jpg
file. If you are the winner then we will need either a PSD or,
preferably, a layered Fireworks PNG file and the NT team will take care of all the
PHP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript required.


We also have a nice pile of prizes for the winner. Thanks to generous sponsorship of Mauritius Connection
this month, the cash portion of this month's prize will be $300 USD,
plus $500 in life memberships at Ninja Forge and Ninja Theme. Then we also have a free one year SEO Club members forum access at Alledia, valued at $99 to give away to our winner. To top it all off, the good folk at Joomla Training have thrown in a ticket to a Joomla training class worth $349. If that wasn't enough we also have thrown in a year of hosting at Ninja Hosting, with the package of your choice worth up to $480. So we have over $1700 in cash and prizes for the winner.
 
Then on top of that is the brag factor of being able to point to a few hundred or
even thousand sites around the web and say 'that's my design', you will also get an entry
in our leader board, and a full page on the demo site for you to
advertise your blog, business or services, or just put up a big photo of your Mum
if you like, whatever you like. You will even get a link in the footer of the template
itself. So lots of SEO and link love as a nice bit of icing on top for
a designer to get their name out there.


The above mentioned  Crowdsourcing Design Competition, our first for 2009, and in fact first ever, is sponsored by Mauritius Connection a great place for Mauritius deals and holidays, and also their sister site, Caribbean Connection, an equally fantastic place for information about the Caribbean. As a result the Theme for the design is a holiday, or holiday services site, preferably a tropical theme, but others may be acceptable.
 
We will also be making this template a free template, so anyone
can make use of it if they wish.  So we can expect this one to be seen
far and wide.


The competition is open to anyone who wants to try,  even people from other template
clubs or extension developers.  We don't mind at all. We are just
looking for quality designs.


If your design doesn't make the cut, don't worry, as you can fine tune
it, and resubmit it into as many competitions as you like until you do
win. So no efforts are wasted.


Entries for this month close on the last day of January, a scant 2 weeks away. But remember you ONLY need the design, no coding is necessary, just an image.


We will then hold voting on the first week of February (and announce
the next theme), and produce the winning design for a March 1st
release, or earlier.
 
So let's all get our design hats on, and see what we can come up with!
Daniel

Nothing to see here (anymore)

Link: http://www.pseudorant.com/page-removed/

It seems Paul has removed his post after receiving, what I must assume, was the exact opposite sort of feedback to what he wanted.

I have removed this post because of the amount of misinterpretation people have read into it. After being verbally lynched by developers and members of the OSD community who feel I have wronged them by sharing my opinions, I have decided it is best to forget the whole thing,

This has been a very eye opening experience for me. The mob mentality of some of the people involved in this is disturbing to say the least. This has left me with an entirely different impression than the one I had when I originally wrote this post.

To those I have offended so extremely you have my sincere apologies, but please look at the way you handle these types of issues and ask yourself if maybe your actions are a little extreme at times.

I am not sure what misinterpretation there was. Being told you are greedy and make them sick by someone is pretty clear cut to me, not a lot to misinterpret there.

Again with the pity call "lynched by developers and members of the OSD community who feel I have wronged them by sharing my opinions"

He shares his it's ok, but if anyone disagrees and shares their opinions then they are part of a disturbing mob mentality.

Paul, sharing opinions and insulting people are two different things.

You got a 'mob' because you made a wide range and far reaching insult that offended a lot of people. Make a post saying any "AAAA type/race/religion/job people make me sick" and you would get the same reaction from that community.

There is a saying I love that is appropriate here.

If you get kicked out of one bar. It's probably the bar's fault.
But if you get kicked out of every bar. The problem isn't with the bars.

You can decide which group you belong in.

The worst thing though is that this apology is not one at all, it's just a cop out to avoid further offense.

The whole post is trying to point the blame back on the developers, their "mob mentality", "Verbal Lynching ..[for].. sharing my opinions" and saying they should "please look at the way you handle these types of issues and ask yourself if maybe your actions are a little extreme at times"

He didn't do anything wrong by personally insulting people. Everyone just overreacted and he is the victim here. :yes:

I wonder if the comments had all been applauding him and tearing down commercial OSDs would he have pulled the post citing a mob mentality, misinterpretation of his words and extreme actions? Would he have pulled the post?

Of course not, he would have reveled in it. Like Scrooge McDuck in his swimming pool of money.

There was no misinterpretation, and this isn't an apology. He doesn't think he did anything wrong, so is just trying to appease the people he offended with some crocodile tears.

If you want to apologize Paul, try admitting you were wrong to call people greedy and say they made you sick because they don't do things you aren't prepared to do yourself - i.e. work for free.

It doesn't work when you say sorry for offending people while simultaneously insulting them again with your mob mentality etc. comments, and expect them to believe it. :crazy:

Just bite the bitter pill, swallow that pride and say a real apology if you want it to be taken seriously.

Daniel

Open Source developers are human too!

Link: http://www.pseudorant.com/joomla-money-opensource

I recently read an article by Paul at Pseudorant expressing their disappointment at how Joomla Open Source Developers (OSDs)charge for their work, questioning their Open Source-ness (is that a word?), and calling them greedy because they wanted to receive a fair compensation for their work.

It was, sadly, filled with the sort of hypocritical entitlement syndrome thinking that permeates the Open Source consumer environment. Most OSDs themselves don't feel this way, it is typically only consumers who do so, though many of them are fellow developers themselves.

Now this isn't entirely the author's fault, as thousands, if not millions, of others feel the same way. But I personally feel that Open Source will never come into it's own and truly flourish unless this thinking is changed.

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