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 [...]
Archive for the ‘Customer Service’ Category
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 [...]
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 [...]
Making Shipping Estimates a Little More Obvious
Back in September when we did our exhaustive shipping project on Detailed Image, one of the more interesting features was a system we developed to estimate the ship date and arrival date of the package based upon the delivery location, time of day (before or after our last shipment time), day of the week, upcoming [...]
Phone Support and Great Customer Service
About two years ago I wrote a post about how we essentially stopped taking customer service phone calls on Detailed Image and still increased revenue that month. Fast forward to 2010. We have a “real” phone system with multiple lines at our warehouse now, but we still don’t answer the phone. Greg checks the messages [...]
Customer Service Quote of the Year
From Small by Choice, Whether Clients Like It or Not, a New York Times article about a successful small Chicago pizza shop that only opens 4 days a week, doesn’t do deliveries, has an owner that makes every pizza by hand, and refuses to allow customers to customize their own pie (emphasis is mine): Q. [...]
This is Why I’ll Probably Never Pursue VC Funding
From Rand Fishkin’s post about his long, expensive, and ultimately unsuccessful journey trying to raise VC money for his company SEOmoz (emphasis is mine): I tell this story about our VC experience to a lot of people – it seems to be a subject that attracts great curiosity and I, of course, love to share. [...]
How I Handle Customer Service on a New Feature
Graceful error handling is something that all good web developers pay attention to. There are too many weird scenarios out there for everything to work perfectly. Too many browsers, too many flavors of operating systems, and too many people that will do things that you never could have dreamed of. When we were developing the [...]
Customers Never Cease to Amaze Me
This weekend we’re running a 20% off coupon code on Detailed Image. Coupled with our free shipping on orders over $150 for the rest of the year, it’s a pretty enticing pre-holiday sale. Apparently it’s not quite good enough for one customer. Said customer decided that he was going to outsmart our system by buying [...]
Understanding Your Target Market…In War
I saw a fantastic piece about General Stanley McChrystal on 60 Minutes this past weekend. McChrystal is the new commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan. He’s absolutely brilliant. He is completely changing the approach to winning the war. He understands that the goal isn’t to beat the Taliban, it’s to free the Afghani people. Understanding [...]
