Category: Business Philosophy

By Daniel
Nov 27, 2009
Posted in
Nekkid Ranting, Business Philosophy

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.

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?

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.

Ninja Extension Central Now Official Online

Dear NinjaForge Members and those who want to become Ninjas.

Many of our members surely know the problems they had, directly after signing up to NinjaForge. The first shock: Can't download :'(

This horrible situation began after an upgrade of our account managing software AEC, that suddenly did no more group assignment to the download manager Remository on an automatic PayPal subscription. So we had to assign every single user to the appropriate Remository groups by hand.

We had a lot of feedback at our forums on this issue and we really tried to be very fast in fixing accounts. But sometimes it's not possible, because humans needs to sleep, rest or to do sports for balance. One cannot work nonstop all the time.

We worked very hard on our new extension manager Ninja Extension Central and finally switched it official online today, after an extensive beta testing and tuning phase. We hope that those download issues now are things of the past.

The new download manager has a technically mature and powerful search function. Finding the needed extension is now pretty easy and time saving.

Have A Lot Of Fun.

Best Regards
Uwe Walter

Anti-spam on Ninja Hosting

A little while ago I posted about I blogged about the anti-spam system that was being installed on Ninjahosting HQ. An eagle-eyed visitor spotted that it was Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP)server project.

Since that time ASSP has been installed and the server has been running effectively with a dozen or so live accounts.

Time for a quote:

Nekkid Ninjas