June 28th, 2009 | by matt | in the news
Jun
28
The big boss and I were watching VH1′s Top 20 Countdown this morning and noticed something rather interesting. 5 of the 20 videos were by American Idol Alumni. Whether you are a fan of Idol or not, you have to admit it has been a rather impressive phenomenon.
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June 23rd, 2009 | by matt | in the news, rants
Jun
23
I recently ordered tickets online for a Broadway show that’s coming into town this fall. I was expecting the price to be fairly pricey seeing as this is a pretty hot show and its the first time that it is coming to our town.
There are some fees that I don’t really care about. Restoration Fees to keep the facility looking nice and operating well is fine by me. However, $4.75 for the convenience of ordering via the internet?!?! PER TICKET!!!! Are you freaking kidding me! If anything, it should be EASIER for me to order via online. Sure I get that there are costs for hosting, bandwidth and software. But c’mon, that has to be cheaper than additional phone lines, personnel, benefits, overtime, etc.
Behold the convenience of the internet. If it was going to somewhere other than the Civic Center which I know can always use the cash to bring in great shows (and Wicked is GREAT from what I hear!!!), I might be a little more upset. But seeing as this is supporting the performing arts at its highest caliber, I’ll let it slide this time. But good grief!
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June 19th, 2009 | by matt | cool videos
Jun
19
Wicked!
This perspective window by Adelbert Ames upsets size-shape scaling to produce remarkable effects.
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June 16th, 2009 | by matt | dumb people, rants
Jun
16
Recently, our CR-V has developed what can best be describe as a cigarette smell to it after it has been sitting closed up for several hours. The thing is, we don’t smoke. We don’t think that we part near a smoking area so it is rather odd that this smell has started to develop. In an effort to fight this phenomena, I found the location of the cabin air filters, vacuumed them off and attempted to vacuum the chamber that they sit in as best I could. I think it has gotten better, but still not 100%. While I had the filters out, I noticed that they were in desperate need of replacement, so I did what everyone would do, fire up google and look for replacements.
It didn’t take long and I found a site that looked like they had a good deal on the filters. Though from pictures on other sites, I wasn’t sure how many filters were in each package. Their picture showed two, but others I had seen showed one so I needed a bit of help. So I emailed their customer support. Here was my message:
From: matt@xxxx.com
Received: 6/9/09 9:06:15 PM PDT
To: sales@car-stuff.com
Subject: I’ve got a quesFrom: Matt Patterson
Phone No.: 515-###-####
Message: I’ve got a question about Item #H420101. How
many physical filters come in a package. There are two
filter carriages that I need to replace and I’m wondering
if this part will have the necessary filters to replace
everything, or do I need to order 2.Thanks,Matt Patterson
Simple, straight forward, I thought anyone would be able to answer it in a matter of seconds.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a response until today, a full week later. And the response was less than impressive. Here it is:
On Jun 16, 2009, at 12:39 AM, Raymond wrote:
Greetings!
This is to acknowledge that we are in receipt of your
email sent days ago. We regret for not being able to
respond to your message via email. You may contact us at
1-800-262-0795 for us to be able to further assist you
about your concern.
Please accept our apology for this inconvenience.
Thank you for your business.
sales@car-stuff.com
www.car-stuff.com
“Your Discount Auto Parts Source”
Wow, you acknowledge that you received my message and have done NOTHING with it for 7 days. Thank you very freaking much! And, I can call you to get my question answered because clearly, you could give a rats freaking ass about responding to email let alone pick up the damn phone to call me.
I’m pretty sure that this company has faced some economic down turn and they may not have the staff to take and fill all their orders anymore. You know, the good problem to have. But an auto-attendant message 7 days later, insulting as it is, basically telling me that you could give a crap about my business is NOT going to help you out.
So, I thought I could give them the decency of a call and go off on some lowly schmuck that answered. Or I could blast them in an email. But I thought, let’s fire back at them with basically the same email with a bit of a twist. Mature? Probably not. Did I feel better and make a point without lacing my email with a slew of profanities that would make a sailor blush, yes! Here’s my response.
Raymond,
This is to acknowledge that I am in receipt of your email sent several hours ago. I regret to inform you that I am unable to do business with your organization due to your lack of customer service. A simple response to my email in a timely fashion, much like this email, or a call to the number provided in my original inquiry would have easily won the business. So while my order was going to be relatively small, it has unfortunately been placed with one of your online competitors.
Regretfully,
Matt Patterson
Customer service matters people. A simple response to my message, a quick phone call would have won my $30 order. Don’t insult me by asking a week later to give you a call because you can’t figure out how to service your customers, current or future. In the economic down turn that just about everyone is feeling, especially the auto industry, its going to be the companies that can figure out how to stay lean while providing top notch customer care that will rise to the top.
FYI…my order was placed this morning, a confirmation email has been sent and an order tracking email has been shipped from the competitor. Its simple and straight forward. That’s why the other company has my business and Car Stuff does not.
Customer Service Matters!
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June 14th, 2009 | by matt | in the news, micro$oft
Jun
14
I’m not sure how many people have picked up on an announcement that Google made last week, but it definitely caught the attention of my dev team. (For those that may be new to this blog, I work for a company that offers Hosted Exchange and Hosted OCS services.)
Here’s the announcement.
Google has developed a way to help companies move onto Google Apps–and away from Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail software–without forcing a migration to the Gmail user interface.
Microsoft’s Outlook has been the dominant e-mail client within the business world for years, and Google’s new Apps Sync for Outlook plug-in acknowledges that some business workers just aren’t ready to give up that familiar interface, even if their CIOs are anxious to get everybody onto Google’s version of the cloud. Businesses who have already signed up for Google Apps Premier Edition–as well as Education Edition customers–will be able to roll out this plug-in across their networks and allow Outlook messages, contacts, and calendar appointments to sync with Google Apps.
Google is trying to expand its presence inside the world’s corporate IT departments with products like Google Apps, which the company says offers a cheaper and more reliable alternative to traditional IT software companies. Quoting data from Forrester, Google’s David Girouard, president of Enterprise products, said companies who chose to use Google’s hosted Gmail service save about $17 per user per month as compared to companies that build and host their own e-mail servers.
Demo:
Now, I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there thinking that we’re screwed. And I’m not sure that is completely true yet.
First off, we’re the first hosting provider to tie in hosted OCS with Broadsoft. Not something that everyone has done. But what does that have to do with Exchange? Everything. Its about presence. The killer application for exchange is NOT email, its calendering. OCS + Broadsoft is an extension of that. Having your IM status update because you are on a call is pretty cool and not something that a hosted service can typically offer.
Second, is Google ready for the Enterprise? Is the Enterprise ready for Google? There is still the perception that Google is beta (more below). Exchange can safely say that they are a carrier grade solution. They have done some heavy lifting for enterprises for many years and enterprises are well entrenched in their Exchange systems. Having an outlook plug-in may break that for some of the smaller guys. But I highly doubt that they will be converting the big boys with the 20,000-30,000 users.
Now, how well does this play in the SMB space? These would be the 5-50 email account systems. Well, I think it will play fairly well for those that want to shell out the cash for the premier version which will be required for the outlook plug-in. But for most, even when the costs are cheaper, there is still a group of admins out there that will not outsource their email to Google. Here’s an example:
Recently, one of my former co-workers a few jobs back was talking about putting up a new email system. They were working away from having it dog food off their hosted service. This way in case there was a catastrophic issue with the system, they could still get support email. The system has been around for many many years and new development isn’t part of the daily routine anymore so moving it out makes logical sense.
Now, he mentioned how he was putting together this box that would allow IMAP, POP, incoming and outgoing mail and webmail access. I had to ask him why? Why not just setup Google apps for domains? You could be up and running with all those services in under an hour and with the number of employees there, it would cost him nothing which was an important selling point. Because believe me, I’d love to sell him my service but the budget just isn’t there. His response to me was two fold. First, he doesn’t want to use a beta product. I don’t think that the email is beta anymore but even if it is, I’ve never had an issue. Second, he doesn’t trust Google. Now that one I’m not sure any convincing on my part would be able to overcome. But this isn’t the first time that I have heard it. There are some people that are drinking the Kool-Aid and think that Google can do no wrong. There are others that sense something is not right under the hood there. I personally don’t have major issues with them. I think that they collect a lot of data which makes them a bit dangerous, but so far, they haven’t done anything to jeopardize my trust with them.
So where does that leave us? I’m not 100% sure. I’m not sure having the plug-in will suddenly make people look around and go, “Holy crap, I could move all my email to Google and still use outlook, freaking awesome! ” The area that I think it will play pretty well is the smaller customers that really need the calendaring and are big time outlook users. They might start struggling for a bit of money and maybe they decide to take the leap to Google away from their hosted Exchange service to save a few bucks. But I’m pretty sure that this won’t suddenly convert a huge group of the IMAP / POP crowd as they have always had the calendaring issues and use an array of clients. So they’re not 100% sold on the outlook side of things.
Time will tell I guess.
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