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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Customer Service
The Little Things That Win Customers
Somewhat surprisingly, today we shipped out a record number of orders as a part of our Spring Sale, beating even Cyber Monday 2012. I took a shot of the package pile towards the end of the day: As our FedEx pickup arrived we were literally sprinting around the warehouse trying to pack the last few orders. The interesting thing is that we didn’t have to do that. On our busiest day ever, we had already packed up every order that came in after 12:15 PM, which is our “guaranteed” same-day shipment cutoff time. We had run our afternoon batch around … Continue reading
Thoughts on a Killer Cyber Monday Week
The Expectations A few months ago we weren’t sure where to set our expectations for this year’s holiday shopping rush, what I like to now refer to as “Cyber Monday Week” – the Tuesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. Last year was a huge success, setting the bar pretty high for this year. Then we had a surprisingly successful October of sales where we saw larger-than-expected growth in a month that’s traditionally been one of our slowest. The month ended with Mike and Greg traveling out to Las Vegas for SEMA, “the premier automotive specialty products trade event in the … Continue reading
In Support of GSupport
Google is somewhat renowned for their lack of customer support. Have a question that isn’t answered in their help section? Ask it in a product forum and cross your fingers. If it doesn’t get answered, you’re SOL.While this might be true for some of their products and services, I’ve actually found the exact opposite to be true in our experiences. [Side note: their help sections are so ridiculously thorough in comparison to most similar companies (ahem Facebook) that in most cases I never even need to contact them]. When we had that weird issue with Google Drive, I heard back … Continue reading
How Google Drive Crashed Our Verizon DSL For Almost a Month
File this one under “never in a million years” and “crazy shit like this only happens to small business owners who are already time-crunched.” On the off chance that someone else runs into the same issue, I decided to post the email exchange I had with Google Apps Enterprise Support. I/we aren’t really that mad, just happy to finally solve the issue and get back to work, while also a little perplexed that GDrive can effectively take down a business class DSL network. My email from this morning: We recently experienced a very odd issue with Google Drive. The only … Continue reading
Taking Care of Your Best Customers
When it comes to our customers, it’s easy for our attention to gravitate to the small minority who contact us repeatedly: the ones who love to chat about detailing, the ones who have crazy purchasing scenarios (you know, the guy who wants to dropship a gift to his brother-in-law, wants it delivered precisely on January 25th, wants a hand-written card included in it, and wants to pay for his order using 4x $25 VISA gift cards that he received from his step-grandmother for Hanukkah), and the ones who love to complain about anything/everything. The reality is that this small subset … Continue reading
Teamwork in Action
I’m writing this on Wednesday morning. Up to this point my work this week hasn’t really resembled what a “normal” workweek looks like for me. At all. I’ve spent the majority of my time in the warehouse helping the guys pack orders (we had a really successful early early holiday sale), answering customer service questions (which spike during big sales like this), and interacting with job candidates for our customer service position. Kind of a far cry from the usual web development and web marketing stuff. Why? Because while I was away Greg closed on a new house. Mike and … Continue reading
Creating a Better Customer Service Workflow: Part 3 – Synchronized Text Expansion with AutoHotKey & Dropbox
In part one of this series about creating a better customer service system, I wrote about the problems with our existing customer service setup, in part two I wrote about our new solution using Google Apps Gmail. In this last post of the series I’m going to cover how we use AutoHotKey and Dropbox to synchronize text expansion across our company. What is Text Expansion? Text expansion is one of those things that’s somewhat difficult to explain, but once you see it or try it you instantly realize the value of it. Lifehacker did a great feature on text expansion … Continue reading
Creating a Better Customer Service Workflow: Part 2 – Our Solution
In my previous post, Creating a Better Customer Service Workflow: Part 1 – The Problem, I gave an overview of the issues we’ve begun to face as we’ve introduced multiple people into our customer service workflow. As you can see from the graphic above, our solution was simply Gmail. Well, a pimped out version of Google Apps Gmail that takes advantages of all of the unique features that Gmail has to offer in a manner that actually turns it into a pretty awesome customer service system for a small team. This solution sort of came about by accident. Since we … Continue reading
Creating a Better Customer Service Workflow: Part 1 – The Problem
One of the ways that any small business can outdo the competition is with great customer service, something we’ve been dedicated to providing since day one. Given that we don’t provide phone support, it is even more important for us to provide the absolute best email customer service that we can. We’ve recently overhauled our customer service workflow so that it’s simpler, more scalable, and more efficient. These changes apply to all of our sites that generate a lot of customer questions – Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and SportsLizard, but primarily you can assume that I’m talking about Detailed Image throughout, … Continue reading
The Benefits of a “How Can We Get Better?” Box
When you’re starting a new site, especially something like LockerPulse that doesn’t fit into an existing category with an existing set of “rules” (like say e-commerce), you really have no idea what people are going to love about your site and what they’re going to hate, what they wish was better and what they wish was the same. Studying analytics is one part of the conversation, but equally as important, maybe even more so early on, is just talking to users. The problem becomes how to go about talking to your users in the most authentic manner. I want to … Continue reading