How to Write Out Your Domain Name
It seems like such a simple and trivial thing that it’s not even worth writing about. But the truth is that how your write out your domain is very important. It can have a very large impact on the traffic your business or website gets as we’ll soon see. And the worse part is that it’s so easy to do. So many people do it wrongly that it’s amazing, or maybe it’s a good thing for you if your competitors are still doing it the old (wrong) way.
What am I talking about? It’s how you write out your domain. Back in the old day, which in internet time is less than a decade ago, everyone wrote out their domain names in all lowercase. At first this wasn’t a big issue because almost all the domains were one word domains, with the few odd domain names having two words.
Today a lot of domains are multi-word domains. Look at this domain, it’s two words “Follow” and “Steph” (FollowSteph.com). My company, two words again “Landlord” and “Max” (LandlordMax.com). It’s now pretty common to see two word domains. Many domains today even have more than two words. Look at my latest project “Find” “Your” “Wedding” “Dress” dot com (FindYourWeddingDress.com). This is a four word domain. And this is where the issues come in.
Which is easier to read?
or
Even knowing ahead of time what the domain name is it still takes you more time to read the lowercase one than the uppercase one. What about these less obvious and made up domain names?
whatarethewordsinthisdomain.com
versus
HowMuchEasierIsThisDomainToRead.com
I bet it took you a few glances to figure the first domain. You had to pay attention. Your probably read it more than once. Now when the first letter of each word in the domain is uppercased like the second domain, I bet you didn’t have to think about it. You just read it as fast as you can read a normal sentence. You didn’t have to re-read any part of it. That makes it easier to recognize, easier to remember. Overall it makes it that much easier to brand the domain!
Pushing this further, what about if you have ethnic terms in your domain. For example in the city where I’m located one car dealership is always playing their ads on the radio. They’re very big and everyone in the city has at least heard their name once. Probably much more than that because they have a jingle that stays in your head. Whether or not you like it, it creates very good brand name recognition. However, because it’s an ethnical name it’s a little harder to spell out for anyone that’s not of that ethnicity. Not a major issue but as far as marketing goes you should try to minimize any possible confusion to maximize your ROI.
Where am I going with this? The other day I saw one of their courtesy vans driving their customers around which had their domains written on the back it. Even having heard the name of their company many many times it still took me several attempts to correctly decipher what the domain was on the back of their van. How easy is it for you:
What if it was re-written as:
How much easier is that? I personally kept reading the “rich” in the middle of the text as a separate word when in fact the “ri” was part of the first word and the “ch” the beginning of the second word. By just uppercasing the first letter of each word in the domain it quickly removes any and all confusion. The domain is clear. I’ll remember it. Had I not been stopped and little bit bored at a red light I would never have taken the time to decipher the domain. If I had been driving behind the van, I for sure would’ve never known it was from DilawriChrysler.com. Even now when I just copy and pasted the domain I still again caught myself reading the word “rich” in the middle of the domain.
It’s only a matter of time before uppercasing each word in a domain becomes the standard way of writing out domains. It only makes sense. Right now we’re still stuck in the “old” way, but this will change. Mark my word, it’s only a matter of time before you see everyone write out their domain names this way.
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Almost Another Record Sales Month…
About two weeks ago in my article Why I love Being an Entrepreneur I predicted we’d have another record month of sales here at LandlordMax. Unfortunately I was wrong. Not by much though. We missed breaking our record sales for one month by 3.8%!!! A very close race!
Hopefully this month it won’t be nearly as close and we’ll break our sales record by a large margin.
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What am I up to?
The short answer? A LOT! Seriously, I’m overloaded with things to do. There’s a lot going on here alone at LandlordMax. Lots of things going on behind the scenes, lots that’s already been publicized here through this blog, and a lot extra curricular items as well. Today I’m going to make a list of it all. Mostly the reason I’m writing it here is because I’m asked so frequently that it gets too long to say it all. “Lots” just doesn’t work anymore as an answer. So here goes:
LandlordMax – Version 3.11d
We’re planning to release an updated version of LandlordMax (version 3.11d) later this week. This is an updated version of the main 3.11 version and includes a few bug fixes.
The first and largest is a fix for Windows Vista and user access control (UAC). UAC is a new feature introduced by Microsoft for Windows Vista that is causing a lot of people grief with a lot of software, including LandlordMax. This update is going to specifically address this issue. It’s not a complete solution, we’re working with Microsoft to “properly” code where the database of LandlordMax should be stored on your computer. but for now this will correctly deal with this issue.
As well, this release also fixes a few other minor issues. For example one is a small error in the vacancy report when you have an evicted tenant assigned to a unit at the same time as a “current” tenant (the unit appears as vacant when it has a actually has a “current” tenant).
This update is already finished, we’re just in the final testing phase. I suspect it will be available within the next few days.
LandlordMax – Website Re-Design
We’re working very hard on redesigning the LandlordMax website to make it friendlier as well as better selling. I’ve been reading (and re-reading) a lot about web usability and sales & marketing. and there are many improvements we can make. For example we’re going to move away from using so many colors on the main page to instead using whitespace more effectively.
As well we’re hoping to address many of the same pre-sales questions we continually get. One of our most common question is how to implement re-curring accounting entries (rents, mortgages, etc.). Although the software does a great job of it, it’s not always obvious to everyone (especially if you come from another software and expect us to behave in exactly the same way). We currently have an animated tutorial that walks you through the process but it’s only available in the View new features in version 3.11c. With the re-design all such pre-sales animated tutorials will be available on the home page. Basically we’re doing a lot of cleanup to try to answer as many of our pre-sales questions on the home page as possible (without cluttering up the page). All at the same time trying to make everything easier to do.
We’re also hoping to add a lot more screenshots on the main page. Or at least what we call “shorts”. These are cut-outs of screenshots which showcase something. At the very least, if we can’t put a screenshot, we’ll put a link to one or an animated tutorial, whenever we state something. So for example if we say “Easily show a list of tenant’s that are late paying rent” we’ll either link it to a “How-to” or an animated tutorial.
The re-design is going to happen in three phases. The first is going to be a large revamping of the website, especially the home page. In phase one, we’re not going to really change our shopping cart, that going to be pushed to phase two. I’d rather release phase one sooner than wait for phase two to be done. Why wait? So phase one is all about the home page and the new look and feel.
Phase two will be all about the shopping cart. We’re hoping to drastically reduce the number of choices, go from six choices to one with a few “options” (for example shipping). We’re also hoping to refactor the shopping cart for some future additions and options.
Phase three will be the completion, cleaning up the rest. This includes updating the user manual the FAQ, and so on. Adding a lot of animated tutorials. Basically enhancing the content.
LandlordMax – Version 4.xx
We’re also working on the next major release of LandlordMax! We’re hoping it will be available before the end of the year, at least that’s the plan.
The list of new major features for this version has changed quite substantially since we initially started working on it. For example, we anticipated offering QuickBooks support but that’s been postponed to another future version. The costs to benefit just doesn’t align right now. Integrating with QuickBooks is just too expensive and time consuming as compared to the number of requests. We even looked at purchasing third party components to alleviate this but we’ve only had limited success. We’ve already spent a significant amount of time and money on this feature and its unfortunate to have to postpone it again. I’m just glad we’re able to avoid the “sunk cost effect“.
One feature though that’s looking like it will make it into the next major version is check printing. Although its not official yet, and nor will it be until it’s completed (remember our QuickBooks experience), we’re making some good progress here. Another major feature that we’re pushing for is integration with Outlook. Being able to pull out your contacts, put in new ones from LandlordMax, send emails, etc. There’s obviously more, but for now that should give you an idea.
We also have quite a large list of smaller changes we’re planning to implement. Simple things such as having the lease automatically fill in the tenant’s building for you rather than having to re-input it when possible. In other words many many UI improvements. My feeling is that this version will have fewer new major features and instead it will overwhelm you with sheer number of significant UI improvements. Things that will make your life simpler all around.
LandlordMax – Mac version
This version has currently been postponed. We use to get a lot of Mac requests but recently they seem to have fallen (not sure why). We did have a large push for a Mac version, we bought all the necessary Mac hardware to go forward, and so on. We got quite a ways forward but then we hit a few roadblocks (code and image conversion costs). Nothing insurmountable, but enough that I’ve decided to postpone this effort because of the cost to benefit ratio. I really do like the Mac, I’m actually working on a Mac right now that was purchased specifically for the Mac version. Unfortunately Mac support has been postponed. We just have too many other higher priority items. I don’t have the time to manage an outsourced resource to solve our remaining issues. So for now this is on hold.
LandlordMax – Real Estate Analyzer
On the LandlordMax website we currently offer a free real estate analyzer as a traffic generating tool. When we launched it I mentioned on this blog that I’d like to expand it, possibly offering a more advance paid option (maybe even integrating it with LandlordMax). We’re looking into this.
LandlordMax – Browser Based Version
Probably the biggest item here today! We’ve been really really wanting to do this for over a year now, almost two really! We actually almost started the whole thing as a web application. Anyways, our interest in offering LandlordMax as a web application or online service has been increasing with time as more and more people keep asking us about it; they love the software but need a networked multi-user version.
So far we’ve done a lot of research and prototypes to see which path we want to take. My personal training and experience is with J2EE, so I’m a little biased this way. Before I start a holy programming language war, I’d just like to say that J2EE done right can perform very fast and not hog all your resources. The problem is many people don’t do it right, they often try to over engineer everything which is bad.
In any case, just because I’m J2EE biased it doesn’t mean it’s the right solution for us as a produce or company. The reality is that we’re probably going to build it as a PHP based web application. This decision wasn’t easy, it took a lot of time and effort.
The quick of it was that J2EE let us share the current code base (huge factor). It gives us an amazing path to AJAX support (IceFaces – if you’ve worked with it you know what I mean by how impressive their AJAX support truly is). And I know J2EE very well.
The downside is that if we offer it as a web application rather than just as a service, hosting will be an issue for many people (few hosting providers offer J2EE hosting). We looked at Ruby on Rails and decided against it for this very same reason. PHP removes this very large hurdle (don’t try to downplay it, hosting options are a very important factor). PHP is pretty much available everywhere. We can re-use a decent percentage of our code base (at least the SQL queries which are often times pretty complex to figure out). But what really got me excited about PHP is CodeIgniter and their framework. I’m very impressed by it!
Of course just looking at a framework is not the same as really using it. So we’ve since built 3 small trial web applications. This is where WhichJar.com came in for example.
In any case, offering LandlordMax as a web application is not a small effort. It’s going to take some time. We’re working on it simultaneously with the other items listed here today. It’s going to take some time, no doubt about it. With limited resources choices have to be made. It will be available, and right now my suspicion is closer to 2008 than 2007. But we’ll see…
WhichJar.com
As I’ve already mentioned, we’re expanding our reach beyond just property management software. I truly believe a business should focus on it’s core competency, no doubt about it. I’m a strong proponent that businesses should spend a certain amount of their time and energy on other endeavors to expand themselves. For us, that’s about 10% (1 day every other week) on side projects. This is where WhichJar.com came from.
Right now WhichJar.com is stable in terms of code base. What we’re trying to do is grow its database by adding more Jars. For this I’m looking to outsource the database population. The only issue is that I don’t have the time to manage it as I initially anticipated. So right now it’s moving pretty slow. Hopefully this will accelerate sooner than later.
FindYourWeddingDress.com
Another project that’s about to go live soon because of our policy to spend 10% of our time on side projects. This is a simple site that lets you search for and look at wedding dresses. It’s a large database where you can filter out the information (or browse through it all). The site will not sell anything (other than put ads on it when I get a chance) so it’s really about getting pictures and information of wedding dresses to upcoming brides.
Right now this site is somewhat live online (very small database but that’s changing). It hasn’t been marketed at all because we’re in the process of filling it with real data to showcase to perspective companies/designers. That is to say, we’re seeding it with real wedding dresses so that we can show how it works when we contact companies/designers for permission to display their dresses (and get updated information on their wedding dresses). I believe that if they can see it live they will be interested, otherwise it’s a hard sell.
So right now we’re at the stage of getting someone to populate the database with real data. As it’s still in the “side project phase”, this is moving along slower than any of our LandlordMax efforts. However I’m hoping that by sometime next month we’ll have enough data to start contacting designers.
So please feel free to go and check it out. Let me know what you think.
Online Sales and Marketing Book
And you thought that was it! I really am a busy entrepreneur. On top of all this I’m working on a book for smaller online businesses to help them better market and sell themselves. I’ve started writing it, I’m almost done the second chapter now. I was hoping to allocated more time but the Windows Vista UAC bug I just mentioned has really been taking up a lot of my time. This and some other personal things I’ve had to take care of.
FollowSteph.com
As well as the usual article writing like today, I’ve been looking at ways to enhance this blog. One item I’ve really been considering for some time is podcast interviews. I’ve already lined up one person who’s willing to do a podcast interview with me about his online company (it’s a company that offers a different type of service, so it’s interesting). All that remains is making this a reality (figuring out the details). So hopefully you’ll see that sooner than later.
That’s All Folks
I have no doubt I’m leaving something out, maybe even a few items, but at least this gives you an idea of what I’m up to. Yes, I’m definitely keeping busy and I’ll continue to be busy for some time. But as you can see from the list, there’s quite a lot of diversity in everything I’m doing. And that’s why I love being an entrepreneur!
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Telus Customer Service
A little over a month ago I wrote an article entitled “An Example of Horrible Customer Service by Telus” describing my recent experiences with Telus and my cell phone. Today I’m writing the follow-up of what actually ended up happening.
Many of you may not know this but a long time ago there was a small company called Clearnet that had excellent customer service and I was proud to be one of their customers. I referred a lot of people to them. It didn’t take long for them to grow and get acquired by Telus, another up and coming company at the time. They too had great customer service back then. However today things have changed a lot. Telus has grown into another large telecommunication company and changed its ways. It’s now acting more or less like all the other large major telecommunications company which is unfortunate. I’m only mentionning this because I want you to know that I didn’t always think this way about Telus.
Getting back to my adventure, and without re-iterating it (you can find it here), I phoned them again to get another reimbursement on my second data payment which was coming due. I initially thought it was suppose to be around $300 but it ended up being $430. The good news is that Telus did reimburse that amount because of the precedence from my previous reimbursement and the fact that I completely turned off my internet (data) access. That’s the good news.
Sadly the story doesn’t quite end there. They did admit that they can’t cancel my data plan (even at a penalty) because I bought the phone at a discount (with the data plan). Ok, I can understand this but I wouldn’t have bought this phone or the data plan had I known ahead about the issues I would have faced. So I really lose out here to the tune of about $250 because I can’t cancel a plan I can’t use!
The worse part is that Telus customer service couldn’t help me terminate the data plan no matter what. The problem is that every time I shut off the phone and restart it, the data plan re-activates itself automatically and the phone tries to reconnect! So if I don’t pay attention just one time, I’ll get hit with all kinds of bandwidth charges (approx $12-25/day based on the previous charges). Telus customer service said they couldn’t prevent this, I just have to be vigilant with my phone. What!?! You will continue to charge me for a plan I can’t use and on top of that you can’t disable it from my phone so that it doesn’t accidentally come back on and charge me. I’m not impressed!
This is nowhere near a win-win situation. This is a clear lose-lose. Sure Telus might make some money now ($250 for the data plan over a year). But once my plan is over I will never use their service again. Not only that but I will never refer them. This article and my prior one have already reached a large number of people who will never use them either because of this situation. On top of that as my company LandlordMax grows and the need to purchase more cell phones increases do you think I will use Telus? Not likely. Yes they made $250 today but they lost a lot of money over the total lifetime of their customer (me). Had they correctly resolved this issue they could have made a lot more money. Not only that but imagine the value of my publishing a very positive experience with them on this blog…
Let me push it one notch further and give you an example of the value of customer service. Recently we had a customer that purchased LandlordMax but didn’t receive their license information by email. What happened is that it was sent to a Hotmail email address and was probably incorrectly sent to the junk folder where it was easily missed. On top of that this customer thought they purchased the shipped version rather than the download only so they were getting annoyed when nothing was coming in the mail. Three weeks after their initial purchase they contacted us asking what’s happening as they’ve never heard anything from us. We immediately replied explaining the situation. Our reply doesn’t make it through, same issue.
We do post the following warning on our support page (as illustrated below):
“Important Notice: Some email providers may wrongly filter emails from LandlordMax as spam/junk email and automatically move them to your spam/junk/bulk folder. If you do not receive a response within 1-2 business days, please look into these folders as this is probably what happened. This is currently especially true for email accounts with Comcast, Yahoo, GMail, and Hotmail.”
But not everyone pays attention to this (I can’t blame anyone I don’t always either). So who’s at fault here? The customer, Hotmail, us? Who really knows, it’s not important, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the customer didn’t get their response from us. PERIOD! So two days later we get an irate email (very understandably). It now appears that we’re ignoring their support emails as well. We reply again. Same issue.
At this point I also personally contact him from another domain, from FollowSteph.com rather than just LandlordMax.com. The email finally makes it through to them. We’ve now established communication. I personally explained what happened send them bookmarks to our prior responses so that they can themself see that we did respond and how.
Through our further communications I also find out that they meant to select the shipped CD rather than just the downloadable version. At this point I could have simply instructed them to send us the regular $15 shipping and manufacturing charge so that we could ship them the CD. I decided otherwise, instead I told them because of all the difficulties we’ve had communicating the least we could do is send them the CD free of charge (whether or not it’s our fault). A simple gesture of positive goodwill but it’s very positively received:
“Thanks so much. I’ll definitely utilize it and refer you business.”
This is how you turn a customer who has had a negative experience into one that really appreciates your company and the effort you go through to help them. Understand your customer and think past today, think about how valuable they are for the total life of your business and beyond.
Telus customer service missed this simple step with me. They instead decided to get the most they could from me today and forget about my value to them tomorrow. This is the not the company I used to know from before. And unfortunately I believe this type of behavior will eventually catch up with them.
And that’s the end of my story. I eventually got reimbursed for all the data payments I didn’t use. I cannot cancel the data plan on my cell phone, even at a penalty (I asked). I also cannot turn off the data plan so that it doesn’t accidentally turns itself back on. I might no longer be extremely upset, but I’m not happy either. I doubt I’ll ever get a cell phone from Telus again, nor will I refer anyone. But at least it’s over.
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Windows Vista Read-Only
Since we released LandlordMax with full Windows Vista support, we started to notice a certain level of error reports coming with messages stating that the software couldn’t write data to database because the database folder was read-only. Obviously, if the database folder is set to read-only, it can’t write, but the big question is why are any database folders being set to read only? Was it specific to Vista?
At first it was only a few read-only errors so it was harder to nail down. But it didn’t take us long to isolate it to Windows Vista. Although we support Windows Vista, only a small percentage of our customers use it. I believe the current market share is somewhere in the the single digits percentage wise. But as time passes and we add more and more Vista customers, not to mention Vista growing their market share. It’s a growing issue for us and all other software vendors as you’ll soon see if you aren’t already experiencing this issue.
After a lot of investigation we discovered that the “read-only Vista issue” is very prevalent. It’s frustrating a lot of users! To give you an example of just how big an issue this is with Vista, I just did a Google Search and found these threads here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here within seconds. A lot of people are complaining, it’s affecting a lot of software. But worse, it’s not just affecting the software applications but also the users data folders. For example a lot of people are also complaining that they can’t even edit their pictures.
Delving further into the issue, what’s happening is that Microsoft is trying to add extra security to prevent “Malware” from getting onto your computer. Whether or not this is the right approach is an entirely different discussion, but the downside is that it’s definitely causing a lot of frustration to their users! As I’ve already said a lot of people are complaining. Software vendors are getting hit with a lot of extra “support” costs to deal with this issue. After all, if the software doesn’t work, it’s probably the software vendor. Not in this case, but you can’t blame the customer. I initially had the exact same reaction. Windows Vista is still too new that most people haven’t yet figured out this is a Windows Vista issue.
On top of this, something we’re just starting to experience, sometimes if you change the file properties from read-only to read/write (ie uncheck the read-only file attribute), it comes back as read-only!!! What? I uncheck the checkbox, close the folder properties dialog window, and re-open it only to find the read-only checkbox selected. And yes I’m in Admistrator mode. I myself am confused and I’m nowhere near a novice user. I can only imagine the storm that’s going on as most people would have no idea what to do.
Up until recently all our customers could resolve this issue by just changing the folder permissions (at least as far as I know). Now this doesn’t always work. There’s no indication of what to do anywhere within Windows Vista. It changes your settings without you wanting to. I’m personally at a loss and will be contacting Microsoft on Monday to see what’s going on.
I have no doubt that they will have to revisit their decision on this aspect as they gain market share and it becomes more obvious what’s happening within the community at large. I can only imagine the scale of the storm that’s already brewing…
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Why I Love Being an Entrepreneur
Because everyday is different! It’s as simple as that. You never really know what to expect tomorrow. For example, a couple of days ago I wrote an article about how the downward trend of the USD dollar versus the CDN dollar has affected our revenue. Then today I found out we’re on pace for another record month for revenue! We’ve already beaten last month’s total revenues (although May is not a good benchmark because it’s never been a good month for us). At our current pace it looks very good that we’ll beat April’s sales record.
For a lot of people this would be nerve racking, especially the ups and downs in revenues. For me I really enjoy this. You always have to be prepared for the unexpected. The more challenges you face, the easier it seems to get. And this is why I love being an entrepreneur.
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The Effects Of Currency on Pricing
You would think that a smaller company like LandlordMax would be immune to international currency issues, but quite the opposite is true. You see LandlordMax is a Canadian company where the majority of our customers come from the US. And because of this, the currency values between the two countries, that is the difference between the Canadian dollar (CDN) and the US dollar (USD) has affected our bottom line.
Over the four years since we’ve been in business, the USD has steadily declined in comparison to the CDN. In the past we used this difference as a competitive advantage over our competitors where for example if the USD was 20% more valuable than the CDN dollar, we could then sell the software for about 20% less to make the same profit (assuming the same costs). Although this isn’t entirely accurate, it’s a good enough example for today’s discussion (in reality most of our expenses are also in USD).
Up until today, we use to charge $147 USD and $170 CDN for LandlordMax. Initially the difference between the two currencies was higher, but over time as the USD has dropped in value this difference has gotten closer and closer. Today, we’ve adjusted it to $147 USD and $155 CDN. Almost no difference at all. At this point the CDN and US dollars are almost equal.
What does this mean for our pricing strategy? Quite a lot actually. We no longer have the luxury of using the currency in our pricing model. Actually if we look at just the trend over the last five years in the graph above, we really have to consider the probability that the USD will continue to decline below the CDN. Therefore there are really good chances that our USD price will have to increase. We won’t do it today, but with the next release I highly suspect that we will somwhat increase our prices to cover the currency difference (especially if the CDN overtakes the USD).
The good news is that although our income has decreased because of the currencies, so have many of our expenses. Most of our advertising, server, etc. costs are USD. So although our profit margins have decreased along with the currency, they don’t match up exactly (it’s a much much slower downtrend on a per unit basis). However our margins have decreased enough that I believe it’s time we increase our price to compensate when we release the next major version of LandlordMax Property Management Software. I don’t know by how much just yet, but you should expect to see the price of LandlordMax go up to at least match the currency changes over the next little while.
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LandlordMax Sales Revenues
It’s been an interesting ride getting LandlordMax to where it is today. We’ve had many bumps and twists along the way, and we’re still in the thick of things. The good news is that we’re definitely showing revenue growth, even amongst the real estate market downturn in the US (the majority of our customers are from the US). I won’t get into it here, but I think this is good business wise for LandlordMax. Its unfortunate for the people who will lose their investments but I believe it will strengthen the astute real estate investor. In my personal opinion the real estate market downturn will reduce the number of “hobby investors” and lead larger real estate portfolios by professional investors. Whether this is good or bad overall is another question, but I do suspect this will lead to more sales of LandlordMax (our average customer has anywhere between 5-1000 units). In any case, this ia a discussion for another day.
Getting back to LandlordMax, I decided to quickly create a graph of our sales revenues (not profits, just revenues) over the last few years which you can find below. I didn’t have the data for version 1.00 easily accessible and hence it wasn’t included (it was only two months before we released 1.02 anyways). As well, these numbers are approximations. In any case the graph below gives you a ballpark idea of where we stand in terms of revenues.
As you can see we’re definitely growing! Our best revenue for a month in 2004-2005 is now pretty much our worse revenue for a month in most of 2006 (excluding the first two months) and all of 2007.
I also included the major released of LandlordMax along the way, to see what impact they had. Version 1.00 to version 1.02 did have an impact, but again unfortunately I didn’t have easy access to those numbers to display in the graph. Actually if you look at the graph, all new major versions seem to have positively affected our sales revenue except for version 1.08, which didn’t seem to do much either way.
This is an interesting anomaly because if you look at the release notes, we definitely added a lot to the software with version 1.08. My guess is that we didn’t as many new “major” features as we thought, they were probably considered more as enhancements and niceties by our customers: more reports, a Late Fees button, accounting filters, due dates, partial payments, etc. With all the other versions we added at least one major component. For example in version 1.02 we added the concept of landlords, in version 2.12 we added pictures, table sorting, etc. For version 3.11 we added huge performance enhancements, receipts, preferences, etc. For the upcoming version we anticipate (this is not an official list of features, this is what we’re currently working on and hope to have available for the next release if all goes well) adding Quickbooks support, charts for the reports, etc.
All around it’s very exciting to see the sales revenue climb over the years. As you can clearly see from the graph, we’re about to beat our best fiscal year (our fiscal year ends in the fall). To be honest, we’ve already beaten it by 10% as of last month and we still have some months to go! Very exciting times!
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Can a User Review Be Considered a Testimonial?
As part of releasing an updated version of LandlordMax Property Management Software we contact all the shareware sites to let them know about it. In the past we used a service by Rudenko with great success. This time however we decided to try their software RoboSoft and do it ourselves. It’s been a very positive experience and we’ll be purchasing it shortly. In any case, as part of testing out RoboSoft I was randomly looking at some of the sites it submitted LandlordMax to verify it actually worked as expected. At about the third or fourth site I saw the following “User Review“:
“Does not limit you to how many properties that can be entered.
Keeps track of everything even tentants their roommates as well as being able to list every appliance for each property (fridge, oven, dishwasher, water heater, furnace etc.) This is the most comprehensive program that I have been able to find to date! For the price it is a bargain. Most other programs that I have looked at have been less appealing and didnt offer as many features/reports (this one generates hundreds of reports including cash flow for each property!!!) The main advantage that I liked is that the number of properties that can be entered is limitless (as many as you want this program will handle the work load!)”
This is a great user review! To me it’s also a great customer testimonial. Is it really though? Should we use it on our Success Stories and Testimonials webpage? This is my dilemna. What do you think?
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An Example of Horrible Customer Service by Telus
I really don’t like to talk negatively about any company or person but today I’m making an exception about Telus (I don’t think I’ve actually ever really done this before). I just finished a good 1-2 hour call with their customer service department about my last bill and I was very angry and frustrated. I know I should wait a day or two to publish this but I’m going to break my self imposed rule because of the insanity of it all.
It started about 3-4 months ago when I bought myself a new Palm Treo 700wx from Telus (one of the bigger telco’s in Canada). It’s a great looking phone that was going to serve all my needs (top of the line). What I need from my cell phone is the ability to talk on it and read my emails (very simple). I still enjoy getting email messages sent to my phone about my daily sales, etc. Nothing too crazy, no more than a few messages a day (summaries, etc.). That being said, this phone was going to be perfect. I got the data connection for 4mb/month for $20-25/month (I can’t remember the exact price). There’s no way checking my emails every 60 minutes would use up 4mb of bandwidth a day, assuming most of the time there’s no new emails and those that do come in are summaries of at most 10-100 characters.
As part of the package I got they also gave a discount of $400 on the PDA bringing it down to $200 (with a three year contract). As well they gave me free unlimited bandwidth for the first three months so I could test out the internet. I was excited to get my new phone.
Within a week or so later I noticed that about a third of the time the person on the other of the line couldn’t hear me when we initially connected. This is annoying to say the least!!! So I went back to the store and they were more than happy to exchange my phone with a new one. Great. The downside was that it was going to take at least a week since they had to order in a new one because they couldn’t just exchange it for what was on the shelve. I don’t understand but fine, I can go along with that since I get to keep the current one in the interim, with calls with no voice and all.
A week goes by and I get my new phone. At first everything seemed to work well but within a month again the same problem. Many times the other person can’t hear me. So I started to surf the net about this problem and it appears to be very common with this phone. No one is doing anything about it, no firmware/software upgrades, nothing. And you can’t really change phones without paying the full price of the PDA (ie. the $400 difference). Not only that but the phone crashes at least once every other day forcing a hard reboot. This is not uncommon. So in the meantime I’ve decided to wait a bit for a firmware update. Still nothing as of today (I just checked).
Now you’d think the story ends here, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, the really interesting part is just about to begin! My three months of unlimited bandwidth have ended and now I’m on the 4mb/month data plan. I haven’t really been monitoring my traffic because its not accurate. I did try to surf on the net when the bandwidth was free to see how it all worked, which was interersting, but because of this I knew that my current bandwidth usage wasn’t indicative of my email usage. So I didn’t even bother to check the numbers. Either way, once the unlimited bandwidth was over I only checked my email every 60 minutes for 1-5 messages a day with 10-100 words of content. Nothing that’s bandwidth intensive. Nothing that should use many megabytes of data month. So you think…
Last week I received a bill for a whopping $406.71!!! How come? Because I used 86Mb of bandwidth to check my 50-100 email messages a month. Yes, that’s right, its not a mistake. I immediately called Telus which led to the conversation I just finished with their customer service representative a few minutes ago. The first thing I questionned was the accuracy of this bandwidth usage. It made no sense at all, 86mb a month to check and read 50-100 emails… He confirmed it, I was using about 4mb of bandwidth a day to check my emails. I told him that was impossible, that it didn’t make any sense at all. At this point I was put on hold for about 10 minutes as he confirmed something with the technicians. When he returned he told me that each email check would cost me about 100kb of bandwidth, regardless if there’s any email or not. This is completely laughable. At those numbers, checking your email and finding there’s none is transffering more data than a complete 100 page MS Word document. How much data does it take to say you have no new emails. Not 100kb.
Not only that, but if that’s true, doing some quick math, it would cost me 50-100mb of bandwidth a month just check my emails once an hour! If you do the numbers, where we know people check about 5-10 minutes in a corporation, that would be about 500mb a month per user (not counting the email content). The math makes no sense, the bandwidth costs would bankrupt everyone. Later in our phone conversation after a few more technical support discussions, he did admit that these numbers made no sense and that 4mb per month should be ample for my usage. But it didn’t really help to solve the issue and took a lot of pushing for him to even admit that.
In any case, after I explained to him several times that this wasn’t possible, he said that the bandwidth was coming from my cell phone. They had the serial number of the cell phone registered. I told him specifically that I didn’t use the net to surf but only for those emails. After about 10-20 iterations of exactly this (how many times can you tell someone you’re not surfing the internet)I finally convinced him to call the technicians to see what kind of bandwidth was being used. He came back and told me that at least half of my bandwidth was directly from surfing the net on Internet Explorer on the cell phone. He called out several dates, including yesterday, the day before, etc. Basically he said every day I surfed for at least 2-3mb on my phone. I told thim this isn’t possible. He then insisted it happened or that someone else was using my phone to do this. The phone is attached to my hip. It’s not possible.
So what’s going on? What’s causing this? I’d like to know to. The technician just kept insisting I was using my phone to surf everyday. So right there on the phone, I removed the check every 60 minutes to see what would happen (and killed all running applications). Now before I proceed, please note that when you connect to check emails, the phone doesn’t disconnect right away, it sometimes stays connected. That’s ok as no data is being transmitted, hence no bandwidth costs. Going back, I just confirmed with him that I had nothing connecting to the internet. Within a minute the phone connects back to the internet. I check with him on the phone the list of active applications. Nothing is open. I manually disconnect. Within another minute or two it connects again. We both have no idea why. I repeat this several times and I can see he’s wondering why but won’t admit it for obvious reasons. I ask him if he can check with his technician if there’s any activity going on right now with the phone to which he strongly insists he can’t. So here we have a connection that’s being monitored, that I can’t close, and he can’t tell me if there’s any data moving back and forth. Great…
At this point I ask him if there’s a way I can force it not to automatically connect, or at least something to monitor what the phone is doing (some kind of utility that will give me something). He says no. The only thing I can do is to either delete the connection completely (and hence continue paying for a service I can’t use) or to turn off the whole phone which is even worse as I get nothing. I simply cannot set the phone to only manually connect, it’s all or nothing.
After a few minutes of this he then tells me he wants to check something and goes away for another 10-15 minutes. When he comes back he tells me that it shouldn’t matter anyways, that no data is going back and forth when the connection is idle. I then remind him again of the 4mb I’m suposedly using each day. He doesn’t really know how to respond, so he repeats himself again about the idle connection. Then he proceeds to suggest that I should upgrade my data plan to a higher more expensive plan to cover my usage where I’ll pay another larger amount per month each and every month. I quickly explain to him that he’s not only asking me to pay for something I’m not using each month, but to pay more for it! To pay another $60/month for something I’m not doing. Not only that it might cover my current usage, I have no guarantees that more bandwidth won’t be used since I’m not the one doing this. He confirms this and suggests an even higher plan where were getting to $100/month or more. Again I explain to him that he’s asking me to pay for something I’m not using!
He then suggests I reset my phone, to do a complete reset in case there’s a software issue (I’ve not installed any third party software). I can accept this, but what if the issue persists. I’ll be going over my plan each day. So I ask him the cost whereby he looks it up and confirms it will about $50/day extra should it persist with the same bandwidth usage. I ask him if theres something we can do so I don’t get charged $50/day should the problem persist. Remember this is my second phone because of defects and I’m experiencing problems again, my faith in a replacement phone is extremely low, especially when it’s going to be out of my pocket at $50/day. He goes back to suggesting a higher plan to cover the full bandwidth should it continue ($100-$150/month). I ask him about getting real time bandwidth usage data or a technical person to assist us. He informs me this is not possible and that the bandwidth usage information will be delayed by at least 48 hours. He guarantee by how much exactly.
At this point I’m thinking this is getting nowhere and I just want out of the whole thing. I can live without my email notifications if this is the cost so I ask him if I can just cancel the data connection ($25/month part of the plan) where he informs me that with the phone I purchased this is not possible for at least a full year. At this point, my options are extremely limited and I have no idea what to do.
My options are:
- Keep the current phone (where on a third of the calls people can’t hear me) and delete the internet connection completely. I continue to pay $25/month for 10 months ($250) for a service I can’t use because it’s broken.
- Keep the current phone (where on a third of the calls people can’t hear me) and reset it hoping it works. If all goes well no extra costs and I’m happy. If something goes wrong I pay $50/day for at least 2-3 days ($100-$150 minimum, probably more) before I can even tell if there’s a problem. And then I disconnect the internet completely and try again for another round of costs.
- Keep the current phone (where on a third of the calls people can’t hear me ) and get a much higher plan paying $100-$150 more a month to cover the additional bandwidth costs ($1500 for the remainder of this year alone) and figure out the issue. Minimum cost is $150 if I’m lucky and I can resolve it in a month.
- Return the phone and try one of the above (same prices).
- Return the phone and get a non-PDA phone where I have to pay the $400 difference and save $250 in data costs (paying $150).
In no case can I guarantee I won’t pay at least $150 more (probably more) for something I didn’t do!!! Think about that. That’s insane! No matter what I’ll be charged at least $150 to figure out what’s wrong. I explain this to him, that he’s given me no good options, only terrible ones. This is EXTREMELY poor customer service to say the least. I’m absolutely not impressed. He can’t find another solution and he’s at a lost for words. He quickly restates the options, says he put a note on my file, and quickly says a very polite goodbye (I will admit he was very polite and friendly throughout the whole discussion). And I can’t blame him for wanting to end the call quickly, I’m pretty much left with only horrible options.
I will also admit that he did go ahead and offer to credit me the $400 amount when I was listing these options. But he also let it slip that for this month I was already at about $200-$300 in additional bandwdith charges! I asked him if we could also credit this balance to which he answered no. He could not credit this additional amount. Same problem same issue but he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do it. So I’m going to be out another $200-$300 on top of my costs to figure out this issue (probably another $150-$250). They can’t help me with that. Talk about poor customer service. At the very least if you can’t credit me (knowing there is an issue) than at least help me solve it without charging me more money! Horrible horrible customer service
At this point I just don’t know what I’ll do. I’m going to sit on it for a day or so. I’ve already completely disconnected the internet so I’m now being charged for a service I can’t use.
I’m just completely amazed and apalled at the customer service of Telus. It’s beyond ridiculous. Will I ever go back to Telus once my contract is done? NO. Will I ever refer anyone? NO. But worse yet is that they got me upset enough to publish my story here because I want to help prevent others from getting caught in a similar mess. And if you look at the reach of this blog, the amount of money they were able to extract from me will cost many multiples more in negative PR than they’re getting!
*** UPDATE ***
To give you a better idea of the scale of this issue, up until I was credited the $400, this would have been a $950 issue at a minimum: $400 (current balance) + $300 (next balance) + $250 (cost to resolve the issue) minimum. It’s now a $550 issue.
*** UPDATE 2 ***
I’ve sent emails yesterday to two of Telus’ main PR contacts from their website and still haven’t received a response from either… If you have any suggestions who else I should contact please let me know.
*** FINAL UPDATE ***
You can find the conclusion of this story on my follow up article: “Telus Customer Service“
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