REQUEST A DEMO

Tag: Gary Sherman

FreshBooks roadtrip: a great example of getting personal with customers

April 11, 2008 Becky at the Customers Rock! blog recently detailed the FreshBooks roadtrip, which is a great example of how a company can stay connected with its customers. I love this: This was not a product roadshow.  This was a listening tour. I also really like how they're using face-to-face conversations, but also expanding their conversations using a company blog, a roadtrip blog, and Twitter. Awesome.

The world's atwitter with Twitter

March 27, 2008 I've been using Twitter a lot lately. For the un-initiated, Twitter is basically micro-blogging. Wikipedia has more details. Or check out a Newbie's guide to Twitter.You can follow me on Twitter.There's many opinions on Twitter, including:"I don't get it""This is brilliant""This seems stupid"Twitter is very new, and all of its usefulness and power is still in its infancy.For me, its super exciting to see how companies are connecting with customers via Twitter - they're Joining the Conversation.What companies? Here's just a few:JetBlueSalesForce.comSouthwestflickrThat rocks!More discussions on companies using TwitterJackie Huba (of Citizens Marketes fame, and also a recent Austin transplant) has a few example of How companies connect using Twitter.Ike Pigott, who specializes in crisis communication, discusses how the American Red Cross is using Twitter as part of their Safe and Well Program.Companies using Twitter as an always available help request…

Give, give, give

March 21, 2008 This is brilliant. Just watch: http://garyvaynerchuk.com/2008/03/20/the-8020-business-ruleheck-life/ In a similar vein, a snippet from Hugh at SXSW: We can only execute on 10 percent of our ideas. We might as well give the other 90 percent away.

A few of my common utilities

March 20, 2008 Whenever I have to do something more than a few times, I like to make a shortcut or a utility for it. I have all of these in my c:\bin directory, and I have my system path set to include c:\bin.  These utilities mean that I don't have to think about a lot of heavy syntax most of the time.   For example, to import a DAT file into my database, rather than using:   c:\bin\diet.exe -license MyDietLicenseKey -user_name sa -password sa -db_server . -db_name dovetail -import file.dat -sqllog sql.log     I just have to use:   import dovetail file.dat     Much easier to remember, and much easier and quicker to type.   Most of these are geared towards running on my development system, which is primarily SQL Server running onlocalhost with an sa password of sa.   Here's a few common…

Don't force the customer into working how we want them to work

I've run into two scenarios this week where co-workers asked me how they should handle certain requests. How these questions get answered shows how much you're in a customer-centric mindset.Customer requests a new version of a productWithin our SelfService application, we allow customers to request product upgrades. Rather than using this mechanism, a customer simply created a new support case asking to receive the latest version of one of our products that they have licensed. One of my co-workers asked me: Should we tell him to go into SelfService and request the upgrade using the mechanism we've setup?Customer requests SelfService logins for his new co-workersFrom our SelfService login page, we have a link that allows you to register for SelfService. If a customer doesn't already have a login, then can fill out the form in order to get login access.…

Having a voicemail create a case in our Dovetail/Clarify system

March 7, 2008 We recently moved into new offices here at Dovetail, and with our new offices came a new phone system.One of the features of the phone system is that we can get an email whenever we get a voicemail. The email contains a WAV file of the actual voicemail recording. This allows us to easily be notified of, and receive voicemails, even when we're out of the office.The same rule applies to voicemails left on our support mailbox. So, if one of our customers calls our support line and leaves a voicemail message, we can get an email alerting us, along with the WAV file of the message.This is all well and good.But many of us are not on email all the time, and we have other notifications setup using Rulemanager, such as notifications to our mobile devices, and notifications via…

Just stating the obvious: your test environment should match your production environment

March 5, 2008 I was working an urgent support issue with a customer today who had a problem in their production system after upgrading the database client software. He said that there were no issues when he made this change in the test environment. I was surprised that the issue hadn't occurred in his test environment. Come to find out, the test environment and production environments are not the same. The test environment is Windows 2000. The production environment is Windows 2003 Server. Hence why he saw different behavior. Your test environment should match your production environment! Otherwise, it's not really a test environment for your production system. It's just an environment.   Tags:  Best Practices. Stating the Obvious. Things we learned on our first day in IT.

Neal Ford on Car Rental Counters, Enterprise IT, and Self-inflicted Complexity

February 19, 2008 Neal Ford has a good post recounting his experience at a car rental counter - the same experience I've had many times. I too often wondered - why are they typing so much? He ties this into the decisions made everyday in IT organizations at enterprises, which often yield self-inflicted complexity. No one intends for it to happen, but then no one is standing up, challenging the decisions being made, and the work being produced. I've seen this over and over again in my years of working with large enterprise IT projects.  Neal says "Going back to first principles is hard". Yes, it is. When I was in my first consulting job, on my very first assignment, doing at project at Sprint PCS, I was complaining to my boss about the assignment, and I said "but this is hard". He…

Perspectives from a sales guy

February 14, 2008 Kent Valentine, a member of our sales team, has dunked his toe into the blogging waters.I'm looking forward to reading his tales from the field, which I'm sure will offer a different perspective than what us techies have to say.

Expanding text boxes, font-sizing, and readability within Clarify

February 11, 2008 While talking with a customer recently, they were showing off a "feature" that they had implemented. Whenever they added a note to a case, they have some ClearBasic code that automatically uppercases the entire text of the note before saving it to the database. I shuddered. They asked me if we could do this in our DovetailAgent application. I said Yes, we can, but No, I won't do it. I think he was a bit shocked.Why won't I do this? Because that's coupling your content to its presentation. There's already been much written on this topic, so I won't expand on it here.After I dug into it a bit more with the customer, it turns out that the reason they did this was because the case history is hard to read, and they felt that uppercasing all the text made…