Category: annoyances

Categories
annoyances outsourcing

Thank you, Joel!

Thank you! Thank you, Joel! I am much younger then you, I am much less experienced in ways of business, but finally I’ve found another business owner saying same thing I was saying since same 2001…

If you’ve ever had to outsource a critical business function, you realize that outsourcing is hell. Without direct control over customer service, you’re going to get nightmarishly bad customer service — the kind people write about in their weblogs when they tried to get someone, anyone, from some phone company to do even the most basic thing. If you outsource fulfillment, and your fulfillment partner has a different idea about what constitutes prompt delivery, your customers are not going to be happy, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because it took 3 months to find a fulfillment partner in the first place, and in fact, you won’t even know that your customers are unhappy, because they can’t talk to you, because you’ve set up an outsourced customer service center with the explicit aim of not listening to your own customers.

That’s why both the 866 number and main company phone number are tied to my line. If there’s a problem – I must know about it first. Hopefully we’ll never be big enough to loose customers, especially – due to bad customer service.

Categories
annoyances business clients design zealus.com

Radio Ga-Ga

One of the problems while dealing with clients – is the problem with clients that don’t know what they want.
A client I work with on initial drafts (in fact it’s a group of 6 people, most of them – women of various ages) has rejected six initial drafts – more or less original from my personal point of view. We have discussed the situation and decided to give a client an opportunity to express themselves in how they see their web site. In a less then a week (given we spent almost 3 weeks on all the drafts so far), in fact – over the weekend, they provided us with a black and white drawing with desired elements and layout. Obviously no one expected the work of art, that is understandable. But this…
Most of the pieces were pulled together from other web sites, no originality of any kind is present. Generally it looks like that Checkhov story, when a young girl, contemplating marriage, wanted to take nose from one man, add it to the face of second, add mustache of third, ears from fourth and so on.
Very strong resemblance, actually…

Categories
annoyances business clients spam

Spam… a LOT!

One of my current clients – russian-speaking radio station GenerationNX.com are preparing to move to a newer, faster server. One of the problems they are facing is e-mail migration.

For certain obvious reasons I want them to have a copy of all archived e-mails that they have stored on the server. They’re using plain old POP3 mail boxes with web mail access. As it turned out today – most of the mail was NOT deleted (and is not being deleted, for all I know) and kept in inbox. We’re talking about 18,000 e-mail messages, 99% of which is spam. Why? I wish I knew.

So now, second hour in the row together with client we’re cleaning their mailboxes from spam.
Because, you know, there might be a diamond in the rough…