randulo’s unblog

I wrote someone to meet about a future project for a customer. The
dollar value of a project we are looking at would be around $140K.
The email I got back wasn't very enticing. It had a heavy PDF attached
with nothing I didn't already know about the company. What's important
is what comes next:
 
I wrote asking to meet, as we're in the same city. No answer. My
partner met this person subsequently and the guy confirmed getting my
message.
 
Zoom forward several weeks. Today, I received a mass mailing to my
address with news from this company. I replied asking him remove my
address from the mailing list and that subsequent mailings would be
reported as spam. Here's what he answered:
 
"I was thinking you would be interested by this newsletter. If you
don't wish to receive this newsletter anymore, you can unsubscribe
directly."
 
Bzzzzzzz BAD answer. I replied that one doesn't opt out of UBE which
is Unsolicited Bulk Email (aka spam) and when I ask to be removed, you
don't make me jump through hoops to be removed from a list I never
asked to be put on.
 
He then answered beginning with "I am the General Director of Vin......a"
 
I do not wish further discourse with this person, but here's what my thought is:
 
As General Director of a company, you just pissed on being a part of a
$140,000 deal with name more prestigious than any in your PDF.
 
One: Admit you're wrong, it doesn't cost you anything. Almost any
error is savable (except if it involves atomic energy)
 
Two: Don't bandy about your title to people, it means nothing to me.
You probably made it up anyway.
 
Three: What part of UNSOLICITED do you not get? Bad enough to send
this crap out, but never ask me to opt out of something I did not opt
into.
 
I feel like we're back in 1998.

We take a hiatus from ribald tales and stories of music, celebrity and controlled substances to focus on a serious issue. The bane of our times, SERVICE.
 
In our core business, since the financial crisis we have been given an ultimatum by two customers to cut our rates by half. We can't do this for several reasons, the most important of which is that the work we do for them is not inspiring or even interesting. I do have some information for companies like these who want to reduce the rates they pay for ongoing contracts. Be careful what you wish for. I can see the DNS still isn't properly configured for the customer who left for a cheaper solution. It still points to the old server!
 
Service doesn't scale well
 
I can have terrific Internet connectivity in France for under $50, so why do we pay double that in two locations? Because the day I need to contact my ISP, I call a normal phone number and I immediately speak to a human being who evaluates my problem and either connects me with someone who can act or is able to launch the service process. If I am connected, I can email them and get a valid response within an hour. On the other hand, Orange offers very cheap and usually decent connectivity (it's the same DSLAM and physical lines, after all) but Orange wasted several weeks of my time and never got our second line connected.
 
Hosting is dirt cheap. Years ago we paid $25 per month to rent web space that was a few megabytes and would serve a single customer. Now we can host gigabytes on Amazon S3 or CloudFront servers for a few dollars a month. It isn't the hosting our customers pay for, we offer that free of charge to them. In other words, it matters little how many email addresses they need or how much web space, these costs are trivial and we don't even consider them in billing anymore.
 
What the world needs now (besides "Love, sweet love") is service, good service
 
I bought some software the other day. Although he was on vacation, the creator exchanged a few emails with me to make sure the purchase went well. This is service. When we are on vacation, we can always be reached by email and usually by phone. I know how much our customers appreciate our reachability and none of them have ever abused this service.
 
As a consumer, I recently closed an account with a computer supplies company from whom we'd been ordering for several years. They are not the cheapest, but I wasn't looking for cheap, I was an am looking for service. This company made it so hard to apply a refund that I left them with the $80 to avoid further waste of my time. The company lost my business forever over an issue they could have easily resolved.
 
I pity service providers whose clients don't get how hard they work but thankfully, our own customer base cleanses itself.

I keep thinking about this. Millions of Skype users, a lot of
businesses and other endeavors using Asterisk. The day the
Asterisk-Skype bridge (chan_skype in beta) actually goes out into the
wild, it suddenly becomes easy to reach that huge Skype audience.
 
I know a lot of business travelers who use Skype to talk to their
family. They could just as easily Skype to their office pbx as well.
Cell roaming? Sure if you don't care at all about the ridiculously
high cost AND poor quality.
 
I don't care about business as much as I do about geekdom. The bridge
would allow people to call Talkshoe (or anyother SIP system) with
Skype. They can call our conferences but also they could call me
directly to my phone. Yes they may love Skype, but I rarely have it
on. My SIP phones are on 24/7.
 
I hope to get a report on how the Skype/Asterisk beta is advancing
this Friday at 12 Noon EST on the Voip Users Conference
http://VoipUsersConference.org