Customer service horror stories

We all know how ‘customer service’ is high on the management’s priority list. But how is it handled in practice? Please reply with some of the horror stories on customer service you know of.

Crazy interview stories

 

To assemble some background material for people visiting our website, we’re assembling a list of crazy interview stories. Rather than copying them from the forums of our users, we wanted to get some publicly available stories. Please reply to this post to tell your ‘crazy interview story’.

So, why are we doing this? I am a firm believer that everything a company does or says, the way it handles its customers, the products it makes, the services it sells, the way it advertises is all very much influenced by what the company is, how the company culture is defined. Look back to your past interviews.

So, think, think, think,… what were you asked, and with hindsight, how representative was that for the company?

Thanks for sharing your story!
Reddy

Be afraid of Facebook, be very afraid…

There is some considerable buzz on the blogosphere about Facebook opening its members’ profile data to search engines. This means you really have no way to hide.

Privacy seems such a natural thing for us at RadioCorridor, we even forget to talk about it. But now, we want to make it absolutely clear for our members: whatever you enter on the site (profile data, messages, comments,.. ) remains restricted to the members of your organization. We do not and never will make that information available for search engines, third parties, and so on. Although we are not part of your company or organization, we consider your data as ‘Company Confidential’.

Of course the pressures will be there to open up the site. The network effects coming from connecting the company networks together is tremendous. But we should not fall into the same trap as Facebook. A lot of its members felt betrayed when they did no longer restrict themselves to the campus networks, just to get the subscriber numbers up.

We have some exciting plans for inter-company communication. However, those sections will be clearly marked and it does not mean we can just throw our entire user’s ‘Company Confidential’ and personal data in the open.

Read more on our privacy section on the site. Send us a comment if you like to add something.

Which website? This website!

We’re happy to see that we get reviewed by a number of sites. I was contact by the friendly people from the UK’s website http://www.whichwebsite.com.

You can view our review here.

Check them out; they have daily updates on what’s new on the web.

Are we a killer startup?

No, it is not us asking that question. We just got reviewed on KillerStartups.com. We don’t know what to expect from it so if you know this company, or have been reviewed by them, please send us your experience. You can read the review on http://www.killerstartups.com/Social-Networking/radiocorridor–Safely-Discuss-the-Job/

How to blog safely about work?

One way would be to use our site http://www.radiocorridor.com, because that is exactly what it is made for. I guess you are not surprised by this.

While researching how to promote our site, I came across this interesting blog. This guy has assembled a true goldmine of material all about this very topic. Check it out on http://workblogging.blogspot.com/2005/06/how-to-blog-safely-about-work-and.html

Regards, Reddy.

Our competition

Over the past few months, we have come across several sites that do more or less what we do. Also, people want to compare you with sites they know. We had some surprising comparisons like Basecamp and LinkedIn.

Let me list some of the sites we feel are close to what we do.

• Wurkpal
  It’s a forum site that is designed specifically for people to gossip/complain/etc. about their work environment anonymously. The site takes a guess as to where you are logging in from based on a reverse hostname lookup and tries to direct you to the correct company forum.
• BossBitching
  A simple but cool site where users can post anonymous comments about their bosses and other users can comment and rate the stories with a slick ajax interface.
• Overhear.us
  A company grapevine. It lets information spread instantly between coworkers.
• JobVent.
  Aimed at job seekers and current employees who either want to research a company or leave anonymous feedback about their experiences working at a company.
• TheFunded
  For entrepreneurs who want to rip into venture capitalists that have turned them down

Although these sites have some similarities to ours, we focus a different audience. We are not into anonymous boss bitching, nor do we want to make internal information visible to the outside world. We do offer people the possibility to post messages anonymously, however this is just a feature. We believe there is much more value in setting up restricted forums within the company walls. In this way, communication is not anonymous, but it is strictly private: private in the company, and private within the forum invitees (if any).

People often want to improve their companies, they like to indicate what is wrong and want to communicate their ideas on how to improve. If there is demand for it, we’ll add specific features for that purpose

Let us know what you think.

Reddy.

5 item purple cow checklist

A recent entry on netbusiness blog, reviewed the famous book of Seth Godin, “Purple Cow”. More precisely it applies rules learned from the book on the online world of business blogging.

Below are the five points.

1. What content are you producing that your competitors are not producing?
2. What makes your site different from other sites in your niche?
3. What unique value does your site bring to the internet community?
4. How will you promote your site in a unique way?
5. How will your site stand out from other sites in your industry?

We like to add following points:

1. Can you do more with less?
   Most sites overload you. Too much noise, too little insight. We kept removing words from the site. Like one of the titles in the ‘Don’t make me think‘ book “Omit unnecessary words”

   Now, we may have ended up with something too simple, too little content, not enough depth. Future will tell…

2. Can your readers feel a sincerity that similar sites seem to lack?
   We’re sure Facebook frustrated a lot of people when they opened up their network to everyone. The early adopters thought they were part of a private club. But the Facebook owners put the ’subscription numbers’ as their top priority.

Spot the 5 differences

Recently we received much feedback from many helpful people around the internet. They all try to make sense of what we are doing. Typically you are compared to something people already know. We were very surprised on what people tell us:

• How do you differentiate from LinkedIn

  LinkedIn typically links people across companies, we intend to do just the opposite: create a network within the company. In this way people can talk more freely without the risk of exposing too much of the internals to the outside world.

  In the long run, we’re thinking of offering a forum for the employees to give feedback and input on the company strategy, how the company is dealing with hiring, customers, internal promotion and so on. So the ‘company internal content’ will be much more important than what is possible on LinkedIn.

• Sort of a more social version of BaseCamp.

  This is a comment we got from one of the people evaluating our design. We were rather honored by that comparison. I mean, being compared to the current gods of the internet! You could do worse. We initially ignored it but it kept coming back in our meetings and reviews. And the end, we promoted it as our internal mantra, much in line with what Guy Kawasaki talks about in his book. It captures much of the essence of what we do. 1/ social è seems clear 2/ basecamp è getting people on a easy to use web application.

• The interface should look like the iPhone.

  We have declared the company as an ‘iPhone free zone’. We belong to the sort of people that went asleep a few weeks before the launch. The longer this craze goes on, the less we understand. But, if you mean the GUI should be simple, pleasing, easy to understand: of course we couldn’t agree more. We’ll even build a version that if your laptop is turned upside down, the page will do so too…

  

We love to hear more of these comparisons! Drop us an email if have one.

And now, a real game of ‘Spot the differences’. Find all 10!

You can find the answer and other games on the Reid Puzzles.com.

The 6 deadly traps of freelance outsourcing networks

We did several jobs through outsourcing using the well known outsourcing networks. These jobs included logo design, development and technical support. In this post we share what we learned.

1. Do your homework.
   Take your time to browse over the various networks. Each of them has their specific niche and geographical target area. A good overview article is listed below.Take 1 or 2 full days of surfing to look for stories, reviews and articles.
2. Decide if you want to go ‘fixed price’ or ‘time and material’.
   Each network is specialized in one of the two. The fixed price ones let you post jobs and wait for offers. You basically shop around to see which offer and which seller you like most. On the typical freelance sites, people offer their services at an hourly rate.We suggest you start with ‘fixed price’.
3. Select your jobs carefully.
   Not all jobs are possible to outsource. Evaluate each job on following criteria:
   • Can I clearly define what I want?
   • Can I clearly define the starting conditions?
   • Can I clearly define how I will evaluate and accept the result?
   • Ideally, can I have the project delivered in steps?
   • Is your Intellectual Property protected?

   If you can’t say yes to all of the above, forget outsourcing.

4. Review the ratings, carefully, very carefully.
   All sites offer some kind of rating system. For both sides. Don’t be impressed with a score of 8/10. On some of the networks, you can get 10 to 20 qualified people with ratings of 9.6 or 9.7. Also be careful on first time bidders. A score of 10/10 is easy if you only did 1 or 2 jobs of a week. There is much more value in a score of 9.6 of somebody who did 30 projects that took on average 1 month.
   
   Selecting a freelancer with a better rating on more jobs saves money in the long run.
5. Don’t forget the stereotypes.
   This is probably the most controversial statement. But I don’t mean it in a negative way. People doing a lot of international business will tell you the same thing.
   1. Being on time means a different thing to an average Eastern European and somebody from the former Soviet Union than to an American.
   2. A yes does not necessarily mean yes in China or India.

   [Fill in your own stereotype here]

6. Beware of the bid spammers.
   Some of the companies post on any job they can. Only when they get granted a job, they read all the details. If you are lucky, the pull out of the job early (most networks offer this option to their coders). You lose a few days but at least you don’t end up with somebody who doesn’t know what he/she is talking about. If you are not lucky, they grab anything they can get. This is one trick we apply:Ask for a very specific but easy question to be answered in the bid.
   If it is not answered in the initial offer, remove the bidder from your list.

    

List of common sites

www.Elance.com	FP	Established site, but sold its software division. Now a more creative-based service.
Guru.com	Both	Software consulting sector, public relations, advertising, and market research
RentACoder.com	FP	Mostly coding jobs but also web design.
Bid-Job.com	FP	Less known site.
GetAFreelancer.com	T&M	Mostly European focused
www.odesk.com	T&M	Freelancer site with clear rates, exam qualifications and ratings.

• FP: A Fixed Price offer for a job.
• T&M: Time and Material, meaning an hourly rate.

Resources

• http://www.smallbizresource.com/document.asp?doc_id=114975&page_number=1