Jeffrey McManus

The New Thing

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Entries Tagged as 'School of Customer Service'

The Apple Store is Genius

January 27th, 2005 · 2 Comments · Apple, School of Customer Service, Web/Tech

Excellent New York Times article about the "Genius Bar" at the Apple Store, where you can get help with your Apple products from people who actually know what they’re talking about and who can replace your product on the spot if it’s busted.
I hadn’t been in a shopping mall in a couple of years, I [...]

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How Not to Provide Premium Developer Support

December 28th, 2003 · No Comments · School of Customer Service, Web/Tech

When it came time to upgrade my beloved Macromedia Web development tools to the new “MX 2004″ version, I took the plunge and paid $599 to get all of my upgrades along with a Macromedia DevNet subscription. My reasoning was, it wasn’t that much more expensive than the upgrade to the Studio suite (which includes [...]

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How Not to Support Your Software Product

December 23rd, 2003 · 1 Comment · School of Customer Service, Web/Tech

I bought a really outrageously expensive flat-panel LCD monitor about a month ago, the Samsung 213T. I’m totally overjoyed with it. The software they bundled with it that lets you view the display at various angles is junk, though. Let me explain.
First, the software embeds it’s own menu cruft in the right-click context menu whenever [...]

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Twelve Hours of Nonstop Help

December 22nd, 2003 · No Comments · School of Customer Service, TV, Web/Tech

TechTV is having a twelve-hour Call-for-Help-a-thon starting Friday morning. The New York Times has a great article on it today.
This was brought to my attention by my wife Carole, who works as a Web producer at TechTV and runs their online community. She and I share an appreciation of the process of celebrities unraveling. We [...]

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Excellent Automated Customer Service

November 17th, 2003 · No Comments · School of Customer Service

There are about a half-dozen things that a good online business must do. One is providing good customer service in a way that doesn’t force you to hire a giant building full of people. This seems easy but is done well fairly rarely. One online merchant that does it well is CDBaby. Here’s the email [...]

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Government Weblogs: rssgov.com

November 17th, 2003 · 2 Comments · School of Customer Service, Web/Tech

Here’s an excellent site on the use of weblogs in government. A quote:
If you as a government information provider think that visitors will continue flocking to your sites through traditional surfing, following links, or saving bookmarks…. think again.
One-to-many information management is a big problem in a world in which email utterly wrests control from the [...]

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Google demonstrates uber developer relations savvy

October 15th, 2003 · No Comments · School of Customer Service, Web/Tech

Hoo boy. Interesting post by a developer who attempted to get a non-canned response from our friends over at Google.

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