Greyheart’s `Angelsight`

Don’t know how things work in other parts of the world, but my dear Romanian friends are bugging me 24/7 with stupid Mass Messages over Yahoo! Messenger. It can be so annoying to see a window pop up from nowhere with a stupid message in it. I have a popup blocker for Firefox. Someone should invent one for Yahoo! Messenger too.

The messages I lately get can be categorized like this:

1. Advertising own blog! This one gets on my mind. Especially if the person advertises a blog at least 5-10 times a day using Mass Messaging, but the blog was not updated in days. At first I open the page on every ad. After doing this a few times and seeing no new content, I ignore the ad. Than, getting bored of the ad messages I instantly close the window and maybe even set the user to IGNORED!
2. Advertising an online radio! I have 2-3 contacts on my contact list that have an online radio and keep advertising it. One of the ads are a simple “playing now on my radio station URL” and the other one is “if you don’t listen to this station I’m gonna delete you from my contact list”. The first one is acceptable, but annoying. If you want to advertise you radio and show everyone that you play very cool tracks, just get yourself an application that changes your Yahoo! Messenger status to the track you play and set an URL that gets you to the radio station’s page. The second type is really stupid for a type of advertising. Especially that it comes from a girl that I think most of the people keeps in their contact list as a sexual fantasy resource while mast*** and if that is the kind of people that are listening to the radio station I’d better go watch CNN on TV.
3. Messages trying to promote humanitarian sites! “Go to this site and sign a petition for this and that”! Everything is ok with this accept the site is full of ads. I would say that is ok too as long as they are covering, let’s say domain name and hosting expenses. But when the site is hosted on a free host with a free subdomain provided by the hoster, I can’t see other reason for those ads than making money out of a good cause!
4. Yahoo! is closing down! Oh, this is my favorite! I’ve got at least 1000 messages like this in which more than 100 presidents of the Yahoo! company say that they will delete all unused accounts and the only way to keep your account alive is to send the message to all your contacts. I wonder if these people are really believing what they forward, or just do it for bugging others.
5. You will die! Now these are very interesting. There are hundreds of stories, hundreds of outcomes for you but in the end it always gets you dead or having at least 7 years without any luck if you don`t send the message to at least 10 if not all your contacts. Never have sent one and am still alive.
6. You are a coward! This one I hate the most! “To prove you are not a coward, forward this message to all your friends adding your ID at the end of the message!” At least it is a good way to see which IDs you need to set as IGNORED to shorten the list of stupid messages.

I guess that’s about all. Looking forward to hear your messages!

with all the respect, Greyheart

I am really angry these days thinking about the stuff I’ve been through the last few weeks. As I mentioned in my first post, I am an area sales manager and I am working at least 9 hours a day communicating with the companies costumers, with people. I am not even close to be perfect, but it really bugs me when idiots hired for support or just for forwarding mail to the right person don’t do their job or are incompetent to do it. You don’t wanna do it, go away, let someone else do it. You can’t do it, find something you can.

There are a few basic rules to start and maintain a good relation with your customer. First, if he contacts you for anything, even if he wants to ask you when is your grandma’s birthday, you have to answer him. If your customer does not get an answer for his question you will probably lose that customer. Second, if your customer asks for any information you don’t treat him like the most dumb person in the world. Third, don’t waste your time on details. Tell your customers exactly what he wants to know and let him know he can contact you for further details. He might just need some basic information about your product, the rest being obvious. If you start telling him all the details he might get confused, lost and forget the thing he was actually supposed to remember. Forth, and last for today, be sure you give your costumer the right information. Customers are usually really unhappy to get as a reply information that they did not need without any relevance to their request.

I wrote these few lines because I can’t really understand how companies like Kodak can afford to ruin their image by paying idiots to answers peoples support requests. I, for example, asked a simple question about the Orientation Sensor option, which my Kodak camera has, but uses it wrong and the one answering my mail start explaining how it works, how can I turn it on and off. OK, so he called me a lamer and flooded me with information I already know, leaving me with the problem unsolved. Oh, he also mentioned that my camera works correctly. I really don’t wanna mention the outcome of my reply.

Stories about customer relations departments are still many to be told, but maybe another time!

Sweet dreams, Greyheart