Tag: software

Software and Customer Service

June 3, 2016 Customer Service Today - a phantomMy colleague Matt, a sales director here at Dovetail, recently wrote about customer service on our HR blog - this is something I find myself more and more concerned with as we continue to move from a manual society to all-things automated or computer-related. As a customer, are your needs truly met - do you feel like you are listened to? Do you want more? Have you come to expect less?Expecting LessI think this is where we are today. We have come a place where poor customer service is the norm. Where the client is only listened to when they threaten public shaming or when they actually go to a public forum like Twitter or Yelp to describe their poor experience. How sad that it has come to this. How sad that the days of…

Customer Service and Enterprise Software

September 11, 2015 Customer Service in Your Selection of Software VendorsI was reading Naomi Bloom’s blog post, “In Enterprise Software and Luxury Accommodations, Details Matter and No Disappointment Accepted” and it got me thinking. While Naomi is referencing HR software, her points apply to all Enterprise Software and she makes a really good comparison, yet I will add another element, Customer Service. Things will happen, whether at the luxury accommodations or with your Enterprise Software. The key question becomes what does the establishment/vendor do when there is a problem? That will probably be what you remember more than the actual problem.Addressing Enterprise SoftwareIt is inevitable that there will be problems during implementation. Any software vendor who tells you they never have problems is lying to you. Expectation differences, communication gaps, the customer environment is slightly (or vastly) different than the vendor was told/expected…

Clarify Toolbox

May 17, 2010 Check it out: http://www.clarifytoolbox.com/ Clarify Toolbox is a repository of apps, code snippets, add-ons, and APIs for the Clarify environment. Have some code to share that might be useful to others in the Clarify community? Post it to ClarifyToolbox. Interested in code snippets, APIs, or free products for your Clarify implementation? Download it from ClarifyToolbox. Have a suggestion? Email the site administrator: admin@clarifytoolbox.com

Customizing Dovetail Carrier

December 7, 2009 Kevin has started his first in a series of posts around customizing Dovetail Carrier. Good stuff! I’m looking forward to the rest of his series.

Software is not made of bricks

August 29, 2007 This is why Reg is one of my new favorite bloggers: bricks software is more complicated than bricks Indeed!

Get out of my way and let me do my work!

August 1, 2007 While working last night, I needed to view a video demo, and I was presented with this message from Windows Media Player: I hadn't done any updates, or installs, so I have no idea why Media Player decided that I needed to log off and back on. Notice that it's not saying I have to reboot - just log off and back on. All I know is that it completely interrupted my flow. I feel the same way when clicking on a link on a web page and all of a sudden a PDF file starts loading. PDF? WTF? What's wrong with HTML? I'm on a web page! Again, it completely interrupts my flow. As builders of software, we need to be cognizant of this. Are we enabling? Or are we throwing up roadblocks that impede the user's workflow?…

Four Letter Words in Software Development

May 31, 2007 37signals warns about four letter words. We've run into this here in our development in the past. "We can just do ..." This tends to result in redesign later on down the road. I'm guilty of it myself at times. Once you acknowledge it, recognizing when it happens becomes easier.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier

May 25, 2007 The New Yorker has a good article on feature creep vs. simplicity. "And marketing and sales departments see each additional feature as a new selling point, and a new way to lure customers. Often, the result is a product like Microsoft Word 2003, which has thirty-one toolbars and more than fifteen hundred commands."

A free wiki has become another tool in my consulting toolbox

May 24, 2007 I've been working on a web services project for a customer over the last few months. I'm in Austin, the customer is in Atlanta, and the developer on the project is also in Austin (but not in the same physical office as myself). I needed a way to work with the developer and the customer on defining the web services, the interfaces, and the logic within. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was drowning in the customer's waterfall documentation. I needed a better communication vehicle than emailing Word documents back and forth. I created a free wiki at pbwiki, which was super easy to do. Then, I started writing. From the office. From home. It was great. I created just a couple of pages at first. Defined the work to do for the first iteration. Marked it as…

Elevating consulting-ware

May 23, 2007 Back when I was working at Clarify, a good chunk of my time was spent doing custom development work, i.e. consulting-ware. We developed the code, and handed it off to the customer. We (the consultants) did some testing, but the customer was responsible for the bulk of the testing. There seems to be some sort of difference in mindset when developing a product versus developing consulting-ware. I'm not sure why. I've been working with one of our developers on a customer engagement for the last few months, working on some custom web services, amongst other things. For this project, we've incorporated some of our standard development practices into the consulting project. Unit Tests and Integration Tests The biggest practice we've pushed into custom development work is tests. We're delivering to the customer a set of Unit Tests, and a set of Integration…