Today, a very cold and icy day, I met my friend Loredana Pascal at a down town cafe I usually like a lot. Mostly because of the menu, not their service. I was so happy to finally see her as work, life and other minor details meddled in our plans and it had been a while. I got there first and as I was pretty much frozen, so my first thought way hot chocolate!

Hot chocolate, the right choice! Only I love white hot chocolate and not all cafes or coffee shops have it. The cafe in question has it most of the times, one of the reasons for me choosing them So I ordered it! By the time Loredana arrived, a couple of minutes later, I had drunk half of it. She wanted the same thing and ordered it. The waitress told her, not before giving me a look that said “You’re a total freak for drinking that!”, how the traditional hot chocolate is much better!  Loredana still went for the white one… Continue reading

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When answering a customer support enquiry, when replying a reporter’s email or a fan’s request, when simply sending out a sales offer, anticipating the next move you need to make to help the customer is the secret to your impressive success.  You need to be able to predict what their next question will be and reply to it before they actually ask it.

Let’s consider a few examples to better support my statement: anticipating questions is a PR superpower and by extension a business superpower. Continue reading

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I have a confession to make… I am extremely harsh when it comes to customer support. I’ve spent quite a while being a tech support engineer, I know how much it matters in building a great relationship with customers. So when I make my decisions about certain products or services, the quality of tech support backing them up is extremely important.  Why? It is simple. Anything can crash. No one should look for guarantees they will have no problems, they should make sure they will have help solving them when they appear. And based on my fare share of customer support talks, chats, email exchanges, I thought I’d make a top of the best ways to drive customers away.

1. Don’t pick up when they call

Definitely, this is the fastest and never dethroned method to make sure your customers will switch you for any of your competitors quicker then lightning. Continue reading

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In most cases, before buying something, we stop and evaluate our existing offer. From a cart of milk to a computer, car or hosting service, we need to know we’ve made the right choice, that we’ve invested wisely, especially in a time where the economy is forcing us to act smarter. It sometimes happens that a certain buyers is extremely loyal to a brand, but that doesn’t mean he or she has never compared it against its competition. It only means they chose the brand they most like and trust every time they wanted to buy that same item.

When trying to decide what to choose, a potential customer might request offers from several companies. They might also tell you who you are up against and they might even ask for your opinion. And here’s where the tricky part begins! Continue reading

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If there is something everyone loves about Open Source software (FLOSS) is that every issue ever discovered with it is known, there are no surprises. All incompatibilities, if discovered, are out there and anyone trying out the software knows what to expect before they begin. The main benefit of such transparency is that customers are never outraged by bugs. And let’s face it, there is no bug-free software, especially if you try to make it work on Windows

When it comes to closed source software, I’ve been in the industry enough to know the rule of “hush-hush” is the preferred business model. Known issues, bugs, incompatibilities? Keep them buried and hope no one finds out. The perfect plan to have everything blow in your face.

I thought a series debating all the aspects of this “hide it all under the carpet” strategy would help software vendors understand that transparency can actually be a great selling point. No customer likes to be bullshitted and asked to remove programs without any real explanation. That is why I’ve come up with a series focusing on how important respect and telling the truth are in this competitive industry and what the lack of these values can lead to. Up to now, I’ve thought of 4 parts, but things might get more complex around the way:

1. How Much Do Sales People Know and How Much of that Do They Hide?
2. Should the Marketers and Communicators Care about What’s Wrong With the Product?
3. When Everything Goes Wrong, Do Support Engineers Eventually Come Clean?
4. Software Utopia: Transparency All the Way! Any Benefits?

This is indeed a large and complicated topic, so while posting each entry of debating the subject of transparency in the software industry, I’d love to hear your thoughts, your pleasant encounters and horror stories involving tech support, sales people and marketer in the software industry.

So stay tuned, and let’s start debating!

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