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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
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
Coupon Code Strategy Ramblings
We run a ton of sales. Just check the Detailed Image home page at any given time you’ll always find a daily special, weekly free item if you spend $x, and products on sale for monthly special. There’s also a good chance we’re running a big site-wide promo, such as free or flat-rate shipping, a brand or category of products on sale, a percentage off of everything on the site, buy product x get product y for free, or some combination of those things. At any given time we’re also running countless promos behind the scenes for various segments of … Continue reading
This Just Made My Day
It’s weird, my email volume doesn’t necessarily correspond to our sales volume at all. In seemingly totally random fashion, I’ll go weeks without having to spend more than 30 minutes a day on email…and then there are days like yesterday where from 7 AM to 8 PM I was answering email (I did take a break for a few hours to go on a hike, so instead of being 13 hours it was probably closer to 9). Seemingly every question was the type of thing that involved a ton of work to resolve. Anyway, a DI customer had a technical … Continue reading
When the Waitress Forgets About You
Picture this. You walk in to a restaurant. The hostess seats you. You look at your menu, decide what you want, and then realize that no one has come over yet to take your drinks. You wait some more. At this point, you further realize that you have been forgotten about. There was some mix up between the hostess and the waitress (or, host and waiter, so as to not gender-discriminate). Hungry, angry, and a little embarrassed, you have to flag someone down and find a polite way to say “what the hell, you forgot about us, way to start … Continue reading
How to Figure Out What to Automate
I think everyone who owns a web business wants to do as little work as possible to make as much money as possible. That’s pretty obvious right. Given that we’ve built our cart from scratch, we have the ability to automate just about anything that can be automated. So why don’t we? I get that question from time to time, particularly from people who have just caught the internet business bug and think that they can just automate everything, do nothing, and sit back while the money rolls in. The answer is pretty simple: because in many instances there are … Continue reading