July 2006 Entries
Here are some tips if you have customers who want to cancel their account:
• If you can sign-up online, you should be able to cancel online. Period.
• Voice recognition may be cool to you, but speaking to a computer is less fun to your customers than you’d think, and repeating themselves to one is infuriating.
• A cancelling customer does not need to be cajoled into staying or find themselves speaking with somebody explaining why their reasons for cancelling are bad ones.
• A cancelling customer complaining about billing irregularities from a three-month free offer isn’t going to respond well to another three-month free offer.
• A cancelling...
I wish that I could take credit for this, but I can't. The fact of the matter is that one of my developers created this and sent it to me one day she was particularly frustrated. It isn't her fault that it's in VB, that was our environment at the time. I take it as a badge of honor that it was sent to me personally, rather than being sent to the rest of the team (don't get me wrong, the rest of the team were copied, but though I was the target, it was obvious that I was trusted to...
The following applies mainly to in-house business software development. It might or might not apply to ISV or other product development houses. I think that there's room for broad application, but you can hit my list of software blogs if you want some quality sources for more generalized ISV or product development exploration. Back when I was looking to hire developers a couple years ago, I knew some programmers that I wanted on my team. I had worked with them before and knew what they were capable of. Unfortunately, they didn't have much experience with .NET--our platform at the time. I...