Category Archives: Business/Economy

Writings on business and the economy.

Tech Support: Key Indicator of Company Success

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I hate lousy tech support. At Infinity Softworks, we work really hard to provide fast, prompt responses that solve the customer’s problem. So when I experience bad tech support somewhere else, it is really glaring.

I have been using Yahoo! Mail for years for my personal email. Lately, a bunch of my regular emails have been redirected to the Spam folder. Mind you, it is all kinds of mail, stuff like personal emails from friends as well as newsletters from companies that used to go to my inbox and now to my spam folder. On top of that, Yahoo’s spam filtering software ignores me. When I say a message isn’t spam, it always throws the next message from the same person and email address back in the spam folder. Annoying!

So I finally emailed Yahoo! to tell them that this is going on and see if they had any suggestions. This is the response I got less than 24 hours later:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care. We like to provide you with fast, efficient support. And the best way to get straight to your issue (and to get it resolved!) is to start from a topic in Yahoo! Mail Help that’s similar to the problem you’re experiencing.

So, please take a moment to browse Yahoo! Mail Help for a question like yours:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/

If the answer doesn’t clear up the issue, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Contact Us” to open a form where you can write to us about what’s going on. Please be detailed and give us as much information as you can about your issue.

Thanks! With your help, we can get Yahoo! Mail working for you as quickly as possible.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Mail.

Regards,

(name removed to protect the guilty)
Yahoo! Customer Care

Now, I’m a smart guy and know how to use the web. If I had found an answer on their site, I probably would have tried it first and told them I tried it. And it’s not like they knew there was a solution to the problem otherwise they would have directed me right to it.

This gives me a key piece of insight into Yahoo’s struggles. I find companies that give good technical support do well and those that don’t are either on the rocks or about to be. Yahoo used to give good support. Dell, too, used to be one of those companies with great support until about four years ago, right before the company started struggling. A trend? I think so.

So here’s my hint for understanding whether a company is worth buying from or not. Next time you want to know whether a product or service is worth it, send support an email message. Not sales, who are programmed to give you answers so they can get your money, but support, the folks who you will interact with once the company has less motivation to help you. Do you get a response in a reasonable amount of time? Do you get an answer to your question? Is the response kind and courteous? If it is all of these things, no matter what the question, then that company is worth working with.

If they can’t do this bare minimum in two tries or less, move on.

[Note: I sent a response back to Yahoo! asking them to try again. The second time I got an answer back on the issue, one that would solve the problem. As I mentioned above, I usually give a company a mulligan on the first one. After all, everyone has a bad day every once in a while.]

Fear and the US Economy

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I have been thinking a lot lately about the next twelve months, as most of us are prone to do each December. During this time, I have been thinking a lot about the big picture. What will make or break my business and, due to my heavy reliance on a paycheck, my personal life? The answer, I believe, is the abundance or lack of fear.

See, I believe more than any other factor that the US Economy is driven by fear. For instance, let’s look at the years surrounding 2000, when the stock market crashed and the “irrational exuberance” era ended. From 1993 to 2000 we had one of the largest and longest economic expansions in US history. It was built of a strong dollar and an expanding knowledge base of educated employees. From 2000 until 2007, we have had a vacillating economy. The good times were driven by a housing boom in most of the country.

But that picture is incomplete. What else happened from 1993 to 2000? Nothing. And nothing is a good thing for the US economy. There were no wars, no dire predictions of impending doom, no terrorist attacks, no perceived risk of biological or nuclear attack. Couple this with the rise of China and India, the solidification of EU, and the country’s pre-occupation with our president’s sex life, and there was very little to distract us from building businesses and making money.

From 2000 to 2007, the opposite has been true. First, irrational exuberance finally hit its peak and sent the markets down. Then, 9/11 happened and ever since we have been met with endless predictions of biological, nuclear and terrorist attacks. Every time we start to get comfortable in our skin, there’s Osama bin Laden on the screen again or dead people in Iraq and Afghanistan or a led-filled Thomas the Tank in my two year old’s mouth.

So how will 2008 turn out? That depends. Will the fear of not being able to flip our houses and pay for our collective credit card bills overwhelm us? Or will some blissful peace overcome us, leading to another year of economic expansion and happy bank accounts?

I know which one I prefer. I also know which one I fear.

An Industry In Transition

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I get the feeling that, technologically, we are approaching a huge inflection point. Look at cars, for instance. In the next few years we will see a massive transition in engine technologies that make them more efficient both in a gasoline and emissions kind of way.

I believe the same is true for cell phone industry.

In the last few weeks, huge announcements regarding openness and competition have taken place. Here are the ones I think are critical:

– T-Mobile and Sprint announce wi-fi support. Couple this with iPhone having built-in wi-fi that works off AT&T’s network and suddenly connectivity is changing. Have a wi-fi connection near-by? No problem. Don’t? No problem.

– AT&T pre-announcing for Apple that rev 2 of the iPhone will be 3G enabled. What’s 3G? Think internet access on your cell phone as fast as cable or DSL at home. No bandwidth lag on the phone means a whole new world for application development and device access. Devices with mediocre browsers will be in trouble as more and more content is delivered wirelessly to you anywhere you are. (As an aside, I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Steve Jobs heard AT&T announce this for him.)

– Android from Google is announced. Now this is a platform and isn’t massively changing the market in and of itself. But if Google is successful with their approach, we will have more interesting devices that work across networks and offer more choices for developers and customers alike.

– Open platforms have become the norm. Verizon joins T-Mobile and Sprint in the open platform approach advocated by Google. This could have a huge impact on how we buy cell phones and open up the market for alternative devices. Like to carry a wireless tablet? Today, the cost to partner with the big boys is too expensive for anyone other than Microsoft, Google and Apple. That might not be the case tomorrow.

– There is new bandwidth coming up for auction and anyone can bid on it. While I am no expert on the ins and outs of cellular bandwidth, I do know it is big deal when companies like Apple and Google bid on it. See, whomever controls the bandwidth has the right to set the licensing terms to others as to how it will be used. Computer companies like Apple and Google will see how to use that bandwidth a lot differently than Verizon and AT&T.

The bottom line is more openness, more choices, and higher bandwidth. As you can see by the names in bold, all the big boys here in the States are playing.

To this point in time, major carriers such as AT&T and Verizon have dominated the cellular game, lording it over hardware manufacturers, software developers and customers alike. This model may be turned on its head, with hardware and software companies gaining at least equal footing and consumers getting much better options.

Economy In Flux: Creativity as the Third Wave

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I have suddenly seen a number of articles written about how our economy is fundamentally changing. Starting in the early 1900s, the U.S. led the industrial revolution, the making of things. For about 80 years, the industrial revolution was at the center of our economy.

In the 1980s, the advent of computers and the Internet, the rise of cheap labor overseas, and the ease of which it became possible to move goods all over the world changed this dynamic. The U.S. economy was no longer built on the backs of people who create goods, but instead on the idea that knowledge is power and he who controls the knowledge centers becomes economic powerhouses.

Now, we are in another transitional stage. The rise of social networking, the rise of web-based communication, the rise of user-defined content (wikis) and the use of the web as a shared platform to distribute information is changing the nature once again. The next phase, believed by many (see Business Week and October 15 article in Fortune for examples), is the rise of the Creativity Economy.

The idea is that he who controls the creative centers, she who invents and comes up with the concepts that companies are built upon, will be the world’s economic powerhouses. If this is true, it indicates that the U.S. can continue to be an economic powerhouse. We have continued to lead the world in innovation, even if we make it somewhere else.

I’m not certain that this is really new but instead can be seen as a refinement of economists’ beliefs. After all, the industrial companies (examples: GE, 3M and GM once upon a time) were built on ideas and so were the knowledge powerhouses (examples: Microsoft, Verizon, Comcast, Bank of America).

But it does highlight why, given all the measurements we use for successful economic activity, the U.S. can still be at the forefront. To me, it is a refinement of the definition of what makes the U.S. economy so powerful. It also, in my mind, re-emphasizes the role that education plays in our country and how, in this day and age, it is even more important that we figure out how to educate our children effectively.

What does this mean for you and me? It means, to me, that those of us who control information and make our living dispensing that knowledge are in serious trouble. Much if not all of those business models will be swallowed whole by web-based resources, assessable from your desk or laptop or cell phone anywhere in the world.

It means to me that we have to get busy creating and innovating, finding new avenues to create value for our customers. At the end of the day, those of us successful at doing this will be the economic powerhouses of our time.

The Efficiency Advantage

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My first exposure to mobile computing was through my father. In the mid-1990s, my dad started to use an Apple Newton along with a Macintosh calendaring program called NOW Up-To-Date to keep track of appointments, customer contact information and the like.

There weren’t a lot of people carrying these devices around, but my dad saw the utility. He carried laptops early, he used the original Macintosh, he carried handhelds before others. I even remember him carrying a cell phone before most others. What does he do? He’s a piano technician.

Piano technician? You mean the guy that comes to my house and tunes my piano and fixes it when it’s broken? Yes, that’s the guy. You wouldn’t think of it as being a technologically-oriented profession, but he saw the potential early. He saw how technology products could make him more efficient, get him out of the living rooms of his customers and on the road riding his bicycle.

I tell you this because we had an interesting conversation last night about this woman he hired to make phone calls for him, set up appointments, and follow up with customers who haven’t called in a while.

How does he use mobile computing? He carries a cell phone and a handheld. He used to carry a laptop but now the handheld does what he needs. He calls customers on the cell phone and uses it for GPS capabilities to find his next appointment. He uses the handheld not just to see his schedule and contacts, but also to tune pianos with a cool little piece of software that assists his own ear in the tuning process.

But it’s the woman handling scheduling in his office that brought it all together. See, she answers the phone and she calls customers back promptly. The other day my dad got a call from an old friend that used to work with a different tuner. He has resisted working for this woman because, well, no one wants to step on each others toes. But she said she keeps having to wait, sometimes as long as two weeks, to get a return call and schedule an appointment. She likes how she can call and get an appointment with my dad today.

To our customers, that’s all it takes. A little responsiveness and they are satisfied. Gonna be late? Call. Need an appointment? Pick up the phone in a reasonable amount of time. Do the job? As efficiently as possible.

And, in the end, it just leaves more time bike riding.