Great Customer Service (Timbuk2 Style).

A small company's CEO adds a comment to a blogpost about the excellent customer service that the blogger had received in response to a complaint. You can and should read the full story here.

Real people treating customers as they would like to be treated and reaping a whole mess of word of mouth in the process. Give your staff the confidence to act like this and your customers will do your marketing for you. Break the rules that should be broken.


Addendum: In light of some linkage problems here is the complaint


and Timbuk2's response.




(Via Adriana's del.ici.ous)

Focussed Attention Is The Goal.

Having been underwhelmed by the in-store experience I described the other day, I actually had my attention grabbed by the window in which there was no "free live music".

It's equally dislocating to see a washing machine in a shoe-store window as it is to see a live musician, but it doesn't distract from what you want the customers to think about.

Freespire Yang Menawan

Beberapa waktu yang lalu, saya mendapat beberapa order untuk menginstal Linux di notebook dan PC milik rekan-rekan kuliah saya.
Pertanyaan pertama adalah distro apa yang cocok? Ada beberapa pilihan : Mandriva, Ubuntu, SuSe atau (mungkin) Fedora. Ubuntu, walau sudah cukup masyhur, namun karena menggunakan Gnome, yang msaih cukup asing bagi rekan-rekan kuliah saya yang terbiasa pakai windows, saya urungkan. Begitupun dengan SuSe, walau datang dengan KDE, namun susunan menu-nya cukup membingungkan untuk pengguna awal yang belum pernah kenal Linux. Akhirnya pilihan terbaik adalah Mandriva 2008. Datang dengan KDE yang sangat indah, dan sangat hardware-friendly.
Nah, setelah beberapa kali berkutat dengan Mandriva, saya ingat sebuah distro keluran perusahaan Linux komersial Linspire, yaitu Freespire 2.0. Freespire versi 2.0, ternyata diturunkan dari ubuntu 7.04, dengan ditambahai berbagai macam pustaka, codec multimedia, dan plugin, serta beberapa aplikasi buatan Linspire.
Untuk pengguna pemula yang terbiasa pakai windows, saya yakin, Freespire dengan KDE-nya yang menawan, akan sangat friendly dan mudah dipahami, serta enak dipandang mata.
Lalu, apa keunggulan lain dari Freespire? Pertama, kita tidak perlu repot-repot mencari dan menginstal codec apapun untuk memutar file multimedia non-free seperti mp3. Baiklah, akan saya tunjukan beberapa aplikasi menarik yang ada di Freespire :
1. LSongs
Adalah aplikasi pemutar musik buatan Linspire, yang tampilannya sangat mirip sekali dengan pemutar musik Amarok. Walau tidak mirip dengan Winamp, susunan dan desain aplikasi ini pasti tidaklah sulit untuk dipahami oleh pengguna Linux awal. Tampilannya juga eyecandy, dan seperti yang saya sebut diatas, kita tidak perlu repot-repot, LSongs sudah datang dengan codec mp3, dan dengan lancar memutar koleksi mp3 kita.
2. Kplayer
Adalah pemutar multimedia yang juga telah dilengkapi dengan codec yang sangat lengkap, sehingga (bahkan) mampu memutar sile .flv khas Youtube dengan sangat lancar. Tampilan Kplayer juga sederhana namun tetap eyecandy, dan sangat mudah dipahami oleh pengguna awam Linux.
3. LPhoto
Adalah aplikasi manajemen foto buatan Linspire. Tampilannya sangat menarik, dengan efek yang menarik juga. Sangat berguna bagi kita yang memiliki koleksi foto cukup banyak. Efek menariknya adalah ada preview saat kita mengarahkan pointer ke salah satu foto. Selain itu, ada fasilitas burn-to-CD koleksi foto kita, sehingga kita dapat membuat album foto di CD dengan mudah.
4. CNR ( Click N` Run )
Aplikasi manajemen software buatan Linspire yang sangat terkenal. Bagi kita yang memiliki koneksi internet, CNR adalah sebuah keajaiban. Seperti namanya, Click N` Run. Kita tinggal mencari paket yang diinginkan, lalu tunggu dan CNR akan menginstalkan aplikasi yang kita butuhkan ke system, dan siap dijalankan. Sangat-sangat berguna bagi pengguna awam Linux.
Selain itu, Freespire juga datang dengan NVU, aplikasi web-creator yang sangat handal dan user-friendly. Kapabilitasnya tidak jauh beda dengan Dreamweaver. Sangat berguna bagi kita yang sering berhubungan dengan pembuatan dan desain web. Aplikasi lain adalah standar Linux KDE, seperti K3B CD & DVD burner, OpenOfficeOrg, dan juga datang dengan paket games yang sangat menarik.
Nilai lebih lain dari Freespire adalah, fasilitas instalasinya yang sangat mudah dan sederhana. Dengan basis GUI yang menawan, kita tinggal membuat sebuah partisi, lalu gunakan untuk Freespire, dan jadilah Freespire terinstal di system.
Secara keseleruhan, Freespire 2.0 sangat memuaskan bagi saya. Indah, namun mudah digunakan dan tidak repot. Selain itu, kita juga dapat dengan mudah menambah aplikasi, bisa dengan CNR, bisa dengan download manual di repository ubuntu (packages.ubuntu.com). Selamat mencoaba!

Retail Knows When Your Time Has Passed.

Welcome To The Underwhelming Economy.

Walking past the Nokia Store, Regent Street - that inspiration for so many blogposts - I peeked in to check that I had not been unfair with my previous comments. But no, it was empty again and yet, as this picture shows, not devoid of activity.


I've no idea who the Bananarama tribute act are, but I do know that this is not what is meant by the experience economy. They danced and sang perfunctorily, the staff were as disconnected as before and customers remained a rarity. What were Nokia thinking? Who knows? But no-one seems to have remembered that for the "experience" to be worth the name, the customer must find it engaging and/or relevant.

And it's just Nokia's bad luck that they chose to do it today. I would have written the same post even if they hadn't because two hundred yards down the street, at the Timberland store, I'd already encountered this.


Now, Ashley Hicklin is a far more talented performer, but he too was being ignored (and in a shop window no less) while London's masses thronged past. As Iain Tait says of the online world, "When you’re doing distributed stuff, never forget the importance of clear signposts." It's just as true offline. Otherwise what you get is some insiders recording the event - no doubt so they can show how cool and innovative it had all been - and very little customer interest.


As I wandered around, admiring some very nice merchandising (of which more another time), someone who looked suspiciously like a marketing guy announced to me with total sincerity that "We have free live music instore today." WTF? Maybe someone had read that "free" was the new black or had signed up for Reboot? Maybe there's been some recent seminar that identified instore performance as retail's killer app? I really don't know. Can anyone explain it to me?

Welcome to the underwhelming economy.

Join Bloggerwave to Get More Revenue

Do you have a blog? you can make money with your blog by joining such as pay per post program. It's an easy methods to get dollars. By writing some reviews of products you will be paid some dollars for your effort. Recently I am trying to join Bloggerwave. I think BloggerWave is a good choice for a newbie like me. No need much time to get your blogs approved, and one thing I like is, we can register our blogs until 5 blogs, only with one account.

Should Advertising Lie?

Well, of course, there are regulations to prevent false claims, but the question came to mind when I saw an advertisement for the genealogy website genesreunited.co.uk that features film of a small group of elephants walking single-file through a dry river-bed. The voiceover informs the viewer that they are searching for the Elephants' Graveyard.

The trouble is that the Elephants' Graveyard is a mythical invention and furthermore I'm pretty sure that the footage (which frustratingly I cannot find online) has been taken from a recent documentary about desert elephants. Their hunt is not for ancestral grounds, but for new sources of water in the face of a severe drought.

Does that matter? I don't know, but in an age of ever-increasing transparency it makes much more sense to be completely sure that you're telling the truth because once you're caught in a lie (even an inadvertant one), everything else you say will be open to doubt.

The fact that genesreunited.co.uk is owned by the country's biggest commercial television network is just an added irony.