LandlordMax Mac Version Update
A while back I talked about possibly offering a Mac version of LandlordMax. We bought all the necessary hardware, started work on it, we were very excited. If you follow this blog you’ll already know that after some time we ran into a few roadblocks. Nothing that insurmountable, we just got to a point where the cost to benefit ratio (the development costs versus the potential revenue) didn’t work anymore. It wasn’t that we were converting the system, it’s that there were certain UI (user interface) issues we didn’t know how to program on the Mac. Our knowledge is mainly Windows UI programming.
Therefore we ended up having to postpone the Mac version so nothing was moving. Then suddenly out of the blue Werner Randelshofer from the Quaqua Look and Feel posted a comment on my article LandlordMax Mac Version. I quickly replied and asked if he would be interested in helping us. This eventually led to an off-line discussion by email.
Before I go on, let me tell you how much of a stand-up person Werner is. We basically asked what it would take to have him help us, possibly even offering a small contract (you can even see this in comments for the article). For someone with his know-how of the Java Swing language on the Mac, this would have been easy for him to make a quick buck. It reminds me of the story I recently read on Friday Reflections, which to quickly paraphrase (and I’m doing the story proper justice here), it’s not the actual work effort that’s valuable it’s knowing where and what to do. Anyways, Werner instead suggested that he would be happy if “it contributes to the final solution for LandlordMax“. And that just an Amazon gift certificate or a bottle wine would be great. Thank you Werner, I really value you’re beneficence, it’s very appreciated. A lot of salespeople might groan at his beneficence, but you know what, it’s because of it that I’m sitting here today in front of my computer writing so positively about him and Quaqua.
Although I’m sure he never thought about it when he decided to help us (I have no doubt he was acting altruistically), he’ll probably get more benefit from his beneficence than had he charged us a very high quick one time bill. Firstly, we might not have taken him up on his offer (we already turned down one person who tried this tactic). And secondly as you can already see he’s getting his name out. He never asked to be written about, in fact he never even mentioned it. This is coming directly from me to show my appreciation. It’s my personal recommendation. And not only am I recommending him as a professional Mac Java Swing developer but I’m also recommending his product Quaqua. By the way Quaqua is free so there’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t look at using it if you’re writing a Java Swing program for the Mac. On top of recommending him publicly, if we ever need more help with the future Mac version of LandlordMax I won’t hesitate to contact him. Who knows what this might lead to…
Therefore because of Werner’s contribution, we’re re-allocating back some of our efforts to working on the Mac version of LandlordMax. We definitely won’t be releasing a version 3.11 for the Mac, but hopefully the next major release of LandlordMax will be fully Mac supported. So let’s see where this journey leads us…
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LandlordMax Discussion Forums are Open
After a long hiatus, we’ve just re-opened the discussion forum at LandlordMax today. It’s very exciting in that our customers will now not only be able to communicate directly with us, but with each other as well. Fellow LandlordMax’ers will be able to talk to each other, to share ideas, to basically also be able to help each. It’s very exciting!
So please don’t hesitate to take a look and write a message yourself. Maybe even be one of the first to start a new topic. Before long it will be filled with a lots of discussions and many different topics.
And thank you Ian for the great Forum software that’s part of HelpSpot. I don’t know what we’d do without it here. It’s a great product which I recommend to anyone looking for an online help desk support system.
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Ya Gotta Love Innovative Advertising
Last week when I had a few moments to waste I went to the local Timmies and picked up one of those free local real estate magazines, the ones showing all the latest listings (in this particular case it was Homes & Land). Anyways, as I was perusing through the magazine, one page in particular caught my attention. Actually not a page, but an ad. I looked at it two to three times before I realized what was happening, which is very amazing. I thought I had circled it myself, but in reality it was part of the ad.
Click here to see the full page ad
Now some of you might think this is misdirection, in-proper, just not right. Possibly. I won’t argue here whether or not it’s right, but what I will say is that it really got my attention. It made me think I had circled that particular listing, so I paid a lot more attention to it. I looked at it a few times trying to see why I would’ve circled it. And remember at the time I didn’t have a pen in hand, I had just gotten the magazine. And I also wasn’t looking for any real estate properties. That’s effective advertising!
In a magazine that has many listings, this one particular really caught my attention. Enough that I looked at the property in detail. If my guess is right, the property that was circle was intentionally selected for some reason or other by the real estate agent. This was her main property to move for this issue of the magazine. And I’m sure it worked. I’ll even try to contact her (Shirley Charbonneau) as soon as I’m done writing this article to follow-up and see just how effective this advertising tactic really is. Personally I’m sure it very effective.
Which leads me to the moral of today’s story. Even in a sea of ads if you’re smart you can quickly draw attention to your ad. It doesn’t always need to be splashy, in your face, the largest, the most expensive, or what have you. You just have to be smart about it, creative. You have to come up with an innovative way of doing something a little differently that will draw people’s attention to you. Congratulations to you Shirley on doing just this!
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LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
As many of you know, several months ago we released a free online Real Estate Analyzer as a promotion tool to generate traffic to LandlordMax. It’s been a great success and we’ve received many positive emails about it. This week, we received one in particular that I just had to share:
I am a property owner as well as a Investment RE agent, I am looking to purchase your product as a management tool but your analyzer “I must admit” Rocks the pants off anything I can currently give my clients as a pro-forma. My question is does the actual program have this analyzer built in? And if it does can I input the Info on a property we are looking at print it out and give it to my client, with my Information and maybe Logo/picture on It?
Al Romero
Property Owner and RE Agent
YorkHomeGuide.com
What a great comment!
For those of you who are curious about the answer, the current version of LandlordMax doesn’t have this built into it however we’ve been planning on adding this in a future version. Although I can’t guarantee if it will make it into the next major version, it will definitely be in a future release.
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Book Recommendation: On Writing Well
Since I started FollowSteph.com about two years I’ve been reading a lot on how to improve the quality of my writing. So far the best resource I’ve ever come across is the book On Writing Well – The Classic Guide to Writing Non-Fiction by William Zinsser. If you haven’t already read a copy, you absolutely should! This book is amazing and filled with great advice that will improve your writing skills.
I’ve only read it a month ago and already I’ve applied many of the suggestions he offers. This is not saying that I’m a great writer, only that I can always improve myself and this book has clearly shown me some great ways to achieve this. Sometimes his advice is subtle and other times it can be so obvious that you can’t understand why you never saw it.
On my last blog entry How to Write Out Your Domain Name, I made several edits directly attributable to this book. For example the beginning of the last paragraph of the blog entry starts with: “It’s only a matter of time before uppercasing each word in a domain becomes the standard…”. In my first draft I had started it with “I’m willing to bet that it’s only a matter…”. I changed it because in On Writing Well the author suggests:
“Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be confused. Be tired. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident”.
I couldn’t agree more. If you look at the last draft it’s much more powerful without the “I’m willing to bet that” beginning. It’s obvious when you read it, but I doubt I would have noticed it if it wasn’t for the book. After all, we all do it, it’s just that the book brings it to your attention. It’s part of evolving your writing and making it better. Learning something each day.
As another example, in the second paragraph I state “Back in the old day, which in internet time is less than a decade ago, everyone wrote out their domain names in all lowercase.” Before having read the book On Writing Well I would have finished this sentence with an exclamation mark, mostly to get across the light humor I embedded in the sentence. However after reading this suggestion from William I decided not to:
“Also resist using an exclamation point to notify the reader that you are making a joke or being ironic. … Readers are annoyed by your reminder that this was a comical moment. They are also robbed of the pleasure of finding it funny on their own. Humor is best achieved by understatement, and there’s nothing subtle about an exclamation point.”
Although not everything he says should be taken as a rule, which even William himself states, I really respect his advice. He offers examples for each of his suggestions to show the difference. More importantly though, is that when I now read other authors I really enjoy, I notice some of these suggestions in their writing. A great example of how to properly embed humor in your content is just about anything written by Joel Spolsky from Joel On Software. He does exactly what William suggests, he doesn’t force out the comedy, it lets the reader pick it up on their own.
These aren’t the only tips the book offers, it’s loaded with great advice on how to improve your writing skills, be it for blogging, business, etc. What I’ve described above is just two small examples of many that I learned from reading On Writing Well. If you haven’t already read it, I strongly suggest you do.
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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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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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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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Marketing And Sales For Small Online Businesses
For some time now I’ve been considering writing a book about marketing and sales for small online businesses. Not just software businesses, but all small online businesses. During the summer I was even a spearker at such a seminar with Glenn Scott where I personally presented “Website Promotion and Traffic Generation” which got some really great reviews. As one attendee put it, “if the average course is like drinking from a cup [content], then this course is like drinking water from a fire hydrant“. Btw, congratulations Justin on starting CitySales.ca.
Marketing and sales is now a domain of business which I’m quite familiar with, one that I’ve been really striving at since I founded LandlordMax about four years ago. Since that time, LandlordMax has steadily grown in traffic and sales.
In addition to LandlordMax, I also personally started this blog (FollowSteph.com) almost two years ago now. Together, these two sites get approximately a combined total of a million unique visitors per year! It might not seem like much when compared to the major players (Google.com, Cnn.com, or even Digg.com), but the thing to remember is that both of these sites are focused to niche demographics, so these are phenomenal numbers! All in all this is a very big achievement which I’m very proud of.
Which leads me back to my initial concept of writing a book about everything I’ve learned since I initially started. It’s been quite a road, with lots of bumps and turns. And I can tell you, I’d have been a lot further ahead today (at least I’d have gotten there quicker) if there had been a book like this one explaining everything I needed to know about marketing and sales for an online business. There’s a lot of information out there, no doubt about it, but it’s all over the place. It took me a lot of time to consolidate it all into one. This doesn’t even bring forth all the trial and error experience I got along the way. I can tell you as part of this whole learning process I also purchased lots of books, lots of ebooks (ebooks are great for quickly changing information such as “Adwords Definitive Guide“), read tons of articles, read tons of blogs, and so on. All in all, it’s been a great big adventure of learning.
So now I’m considering putting it all together in nice little book that will contain lots of information, more meat than fluff. I’m personally not a big fan of fluff, I like to get a lot of information for my money, and especially time (it’s my scarcest resource bar none). My personal value of a book is if I can get at least ten times the what I paid for it (time and money), then it’s worth its price. I’m hoping this book will be worth more than that!
So without further ado, here’s the outline I’ve been looking at so far:
Introduction
- Some of my personal story, including some successes and failures.
Section 1 (General information)
- Why is marketing and sales important to you?
- How does traffic affect your revenue?
- Is all your traffic worth the same?
- Will your efforts need to change over time?
- How will people find out about you?
- What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
- What are the free types of website promotion?
- What are the paid types of website promotion?
Section 2 (SEO – Search engine Optimization)
- What exactly is SEO again?
- Why is SEO important to you?
- What can SEO do for you?
- Tips to improve your website for better search engine ranking?
- How does Google view your site overall?
- How can you improve your site’s ranking outside of your own site?
Section 3 (Free Website Promotional Campaigns – Blogging)
- What is blogging?
- Should you blog?
- How you can blog to increase awareness of your website
- How you can promote your website in your blog
- The real power of blogging
Section 4 (Free Website Promotional Campaigns – Part 2)
- How can your content help drive traffic?
- How can your content help your search ranking?
- What are loss leaders and how can they help you?
- What all this social networking about?
- Is linking still important?
- Do you really need an online presence?
- Are directories worth anything anymore?
- Are e-zines worth your time and effort?
- Potpourri of tips
Section 5 (Paid Website Promotional Campaigns – Adwords)
- How does Adwords really work?
- Is Adwords really that good for you?
- Does it really matter how much effort you put into Adwords?
- What’s CPC?
- What’s CTR?
- Why are they both so important to you?
- How you can do Multi-variate testing with Adwords
- How can you improve my Adwords Ads?
- What’s the best way to Manage your Adwords campaigns?
- Does it really matter what keywords you bid on?
- Are the other systems like Overture, FindWhat, etc. worth trying?
- Adwords Potpourri
Section 6 (Paid Website Promotional Campaigns – Part 2)
- What are presses releases and how do they work?
- Are press releases worth your time and money?
- Which services should you use for a press release?
- How do you determine what’s newsworthy?
- How do you write a press release?
Section 7 (Paid Website Promotional Campaigns – Part 3)
- What domains should you buy for your website?
- A great tip on how you can get an amazing ROI by buying domains
- How do you know which domains to buy?
Section 8 – Promotional Potpourri
- Why you should always sign your emails
- The power of giving testimonials
- Can you use RSS to your advantage?
- Misc Potpourri
Section 9 – Sales Conversion
- What is sales conversions?
- How can you increase your sales conversion?
- How can you monitor what’s going on?
- What to look for when you try to increase your sales conversion?
- Some quick tips on how to increase your sales conversions
Section 10 – Resources
- Links to great blogs and articles
- Recommend books and ebooks
Section 10 (Tentative)
- Small interviews and tips from industry leaders
Well that’s the outline I have so far. It might seem like a lot, but imagine if it’s not all consolidated in one place and rather spread out across multiple books, ebooks, websites, blogs, and so on. It took me a long time to get a real grasp of all this and how it can really affect a website’s presence.
I’m also a big believer of the multiplier effect, which is the concept that your business is a multiplier of many factors. And assuming that’s a fact, multiplying any one factor will significantly increase your overall effectiveness. For example, if you score a 2 on one thing, then 4 on another, and 10 on still another (all out of a max of 10), then you’re a total of 2 * 4 * 10 = 80. However if you increase just one item, since it’s multiplied, you get 3 * 4 * 10 = 120, where you’re whole business is running 50% more effectively! By being 10% more effective in just one area (going from a 2 to a 3 out of a max of 10), you increased your overall business effectiveness by 50%!
Therefore I think there’s a lot of value in marketing and sales, and coming from a more technical background, these are some of the tools I wish I had know more about beforehand. Things I wish I didn’t have to learn at the school of hard knocks. I can tell you that I spent a lot of money learning many of these priniciples. Adwords alone cost me quite a bundle before I finally started to really “get” it. On one ad alone I increased it’s effectiveness from 0.42% to 1.62% through about a dozen small iterations in just a few weeks time. This alone increased my ROI incredibly, much much more than four times! I won’t explain here why it’s much more than four times ROI (42 * 4 is approx equal to 1.62), I’ll leave that to the book. All I’ll quickly say is CPC * CTR is the key to your success (hint: another multiplier effect is in play here).
Anyways, please let me know what you think. Would you be interested in this book? Would you buy it? Would you buy it in ebook format or just as an ordinary book (from Amazon for example). How much would you pay for this book? $29.95? $49.95? Are there other topics you’d like to see included? Any topics you’d like to have skipped? Basically any feedback you may have would be greatly appreciated. At this point this is just my outline, but I will start writing it this weekend.
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Interesting Marketing/Sales Technique
This week when I was in the Tim Hortons drive through line, a very very famous Canadian coffee/donut chain, and I noticed something very peculiar. When I got to the order kiosk in my car, a very friendly voice greeted me and talked about their latest breakfast ordering. Nothing out of the ordinary, the tone of the voice might have been a little more pleasant than usual, but nothing too unusual. Anyone whose ever worked as a cashier knows that after saying “Hi. How may I help you” many times over, that you get a little less enthusiastic with time. Anyways, like I said nothing too too special, so I went ahead and proceeded with my order. However once I had finished another voice came on to give me my total and tell me to drive forward.
That was odd. At first I thought maybe I was in the middle of an employee shift change, or that maybe I had missed something entirely. However because my car window was still opened when I drove up, I could hear the next car as they drove up to the booth and the same very friendly voice started with the exact promotional description of their new breakfast menu item. The person ordered, and again the second voice came back to give the amount and tell the person to drive forward. Then as I moved up further, although I could barely hear, I did notice the same pattern again.
What’s interesting about this is that it’s the first time I’ve personally seen a company use an automated greeting at a drive through (I’ve heard of order being taken in another country, but not an automated greeting). But what’s VERY interesting is that it seems to be very effective! Why not do this? Firstly you’re guaranteed that every single drive through customer will get a very pleasant greeting. Second, you know that whatever you’re trying to promote will be promoted. Thirdly, you will get exactly the corrent content and tone you’re looking for, it will be a professional voice. And lastly, other than a few people, no one will really notice it!
Now the question becomes just how effective is this technique? I don’t know, only Tim Hortons knows this. But from anecdotal evidence, I can say that the last time I was at Timmie’s (as it’s affectionately nicknamed in Canada), I saw many people ordering this new breakfast menu item. Possibly it’s due to TV commercials, possibly to other marketing avenues, but this definitely can’t be hurting its sales conversions.
Even if it isn’t that effective, the cost of using this technique can’t be very expensive! And as a worse case scenario, you get a consistent and standard greeting that’s guaranteed for all locations. It’s great to see companies trying and testing new marketing techniques in the wild. I suspect this one will become more and more common with time, at least until it’s overused.
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