Category Archives: what I do

More Tips on Getting Better Customer Service

December 17, 2005 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that customer service is one of my pet peeves – and praises, when somebody actually gets it right.

For my upcoming US trip, I need a cellphone. Actually, three, for the three of us going to Las Vegas for CES, so we can keep track of each other during the show. Though we all have tri-band phones that will work in the US, roaming charges from Italy are ridiculous.

I was astonished to find that there seems to be no way to simply buy a SIM card for whatever service and pop it into the phone I already have, as I did in India. Every US carrier wants me to buy an entirely new phone. This is annoying, since I am used to my own phone and have all my numbers on it. But there appears to be no way around it. US consumers sure put up with a lot of rubbish from their cellphone providers.

I consulted with my group of online experts, who concurred in recommending TracFone, and one even sent me a special free minutes offer. So I went straight to the TracFone site and ordered three cheap cellphones. Or tried to.

As I had been expecting – because it happens so often on US sites – it wouldn’t take my foreign-billed credit card. I could buy the phones from Amazon with any credit card, but that would cost a bit more, as would buying them in a shop.

Stubborn creature that I am, I decided to write to TracFone’s customer service about this. What do I have to lose?

But I knew pretty much what to expect from a low-level customer service rep. So I used an old trick (previously mentioned on my site – see below – and sometimes used onÂ me in my Adaptec/Roxio days). I did a search for “Tracfone CEO” and found out his name. (I also saw, from the press releases mentioning him, that TracFone does a lot of socially-conscious stuff. That made a good impression.)

Now I had to figure out his email address. The address I had, customerservice@tracfone-ild.com, did not look like a corporate HQ adress – some sort of service center. CEO not likely to have email there. I sniffed around some more, found a press release with the email address of a company spokeswoman. Her address was formatted first initial-middle initial-lastname@tracfone.com From that, I could guess the format of the CEO’s email. So I copied my email to customer service to a couple of likely addresses for him. I was polite, and pointed out that they were missing potential business from travellers like myself, coming to the US with a need for a phone.

That was about 11:30 yesterday morning. At 1:20, I received an email from the CEO to someone named Steve, cc’d to me, instructing him to assist me in my purchase. I immediately thanked the CEO and said I was sure I would enjoy doing business with his company.

At 4:30 the same afternoon, I received the expected reply from customer service: “It was managements decision to only accept US based Credit Cards for security and business reasons.”

I’ll give them credit for swiftness of response, though a zero on punctuation (and, of course, helpfulness).

I’m now waiting to see whether Steve manages to pull this off for me. Even if he doesn’t, at least the attitude at the top is the correct one. Who knows, maybe they’ll change their credit card policy and find themselves with a whole new income stream.

later – Steve couldn’t come up with a payment method fast enough to solve the problem, so I’ll just have to buy from a store. He did tell me which were likely to have the largest selection of phones, and that the refill cards I want are also available there. That’s enough of a good-faith effort for TracFone to get my business.

what I do

beginningwithi.com: Why the Name?

October 15, 2005 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

My dad once said that, if he ever gets around to writing an autobiography (and I wish he would), he would use rivers as a theme, because many important parts of his life have been spent near major rivers (from the Mississippi to the Mekong).

I thought about this, and decided that my own autobiography should be titled: “Countries Beginning with I.” Italy and India, obviously, are a large part of my life, while Iran, Iraq, and Israel have all had major impact on the world during my lifetime (and will likely continue to do so). I have also lived (briefly) in Indonesia, so we can check that off the list. Which leaves Iceland and Ireland – hugely influential neither in the world nor in my personal life, but I hear they’re nice places to visit…

I have also spent a great deal of my life in another country beginning with I, the Internet: as of early 2007, I have been online for 25 years.

I don’t know when I’ll ever get around to writing my autobiography, but my website is that, among other things. So I have set up a new domain, beginningwithi.com. I figure that’ll be easier for people to spell than Straughan (as long as you remember that there are two Ns in the middle of beginning).

portfolio, what I do

Creative Energies: Doing User Interaction Design

July 5, 2005 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

As you will have noticed, my newsletters are getting fewer and further between. Nowadays, most of my creative energies go into my work for TVBLOB. “What work is that?” you may ask. Good question. As in many startups, roles aren’t well-defined, but, basically, everything that touches our future end-user customers will somehow, someday, be my responsibility.

For the moment, my main job is designing software features, behaviors, and interfaces. This would be relatively straightforward if we were making software for the familiar Windows environment – I’ve been closely involved in the development and support of some very popular Windows software packages, and I have very clear ideas on what works and what doesn’t.

But TVBLOB’s software and services will be displayed on a television set, with a far smaller viewing area (in terms of pixels) than any modern computer monitor. Try setting your computer display to its smallest possible resolution and you’ll get the idea – except that, at least on my current computer, the smallest possible setting is 800×600 pixels, while a standard PAL (European) television set can display roughly 700×550.

Limited screen real estate is not the only design problem I’m up against. The hardware I’m designing for is not a computer with a keyboard; we expect that people will mostly use a TV-style remote control to interact with our software. And I don’t mean a huge, clunky remote with 300 buttons that are so tiny you can’t press them, let alone remember what they’re all for. Our remote will have only a few more buttons than you’d find on your average DVD player controller. So I have to use them wisely.

Not that I’m complaining. It’s a fascinating set of design challenges, and I’m having lots of fun. But the work does tend to wring all the creative juices right out of me…

what I do

Making Money from a Content-Rich Personal Site

April 15, 2005 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Millions of people have put up websites: many in hopes of making money one way or another; many, like myself, because we have something to share with the world, and don’t care whether it makes any money or not. On the other hand, making money wouldn’t hurt…

As I have mentioned, and you have no doubt noticed, I’m using Google’s AdSense service to place ads on my site, for which I get paid when visitors click on any of the ad links. I started this mostly to see how it works (my professional field – well, one of them – is online marketing), and it’s even earning a bit of money. Not nearly enough to pay for all the time I spend doing the site, but more than enough to cover my hosting costs. It’s interesting to see which pages generate the most revenue. I can try to guess from that which links are paying the most and why, and which are most likely to be clicked on (the living in Italy section is the most lucrative, though it’s also one of the larger sections, so there are more links to be clicked).

My site now gets over 500 visitors a day (NB: as of Dec, 2006, the number of visitors has doubled), a fact which has been noticed by companies who sell link exchange services to help boost traffic to their clients’ websites and improve their search engine rankings (that is, show up higher in the list of results when you search on a certain term in Google, Yahoo, etc.). Their pitch usually begins: ” am contacting you about cross linking. I am interested in your site because it looks like it’s relevant to a site for which I am seeking links.– This is most often followed by mention of a site which has no conceivable relevance to mine, such as one –about specialized business products including caution tape and barricade tape.– I ignore these offers.

I have exchanged links with a few sites which truly are relevant, and happily link to some friends’ sites which may be of interest to my readers. But I’m becoming reticent about linking to just any old site about, e.g., tourism in Italy. Due to the amount of –qualified– traffic that comes to my site every day, a link from me is now actually worth something: it helps new sites get noticed faster by Google, and directs desirable (and not just random) visitors to relevant sites.

I’m not really set up to monetize and manage the value of such links, though, so I’ll just have to evaluate whether the requesting linkee can provide equal value in return. So far the track record isn’t good. I was recently asked to allow some of my articles to be used on a new site for expatriates in Italy – –We’ll put in your name and a link– was the offer. I have given away a few articles in the past, in exchange for links, in order to build traffic from sites which I knew had a lot more visitors than I did. But it makes no sense for me to give away content to a brand new site – I have far more traffic than they do at the moment. (I explained all this to the guy behind the new site, and he agreed that they might consider paying me.)

I’m also not equipped to require a subscription to my newsletter – even if I wanted to, which I don’t. But, in case anyone’s inclined to contribute something, I’ve added an Amazon Wish List link.

This is partly a sociological experiment. Some people are reportedly making enough money to live on from purely voluntary donations: Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, for example. Jason Kottke, a popular blogger, recently announced that he hoped to do the same. Kottke evidently has a large and enthusiastic following, to even undertake such an experiment. Cohen has created something truly useful (not just to pirates) and deserves to be paid for it (I really must get around to that one of these days…).

I doubt that my material would engender or even deserves such monetary affection, but what the heck – the worst that can happen is I get pleasantly surprised someday by a contribution! I have seen a couple of examples of people offering their readers the chance to express appreciation via an Amazon wish list, so I’ve added links to mine. And I suppose my wish lists offer more insight (as if any was needed!) into my personality.

The Amazon experiment continues: whenever I happen to mention a book or movie that I like, I put a sponsored link on my site so that, if you click through from my site and actually buy something, I get a small commission. It appears that if you follow a link from my site to Amazon and then click around and buy something else, I still get money, even if it’s an item not mentioned on my site. Someone recently bought a very expensive set of headphones after arriving at Amazon from my site, so by the end of the month I’ll receive a gift certificate from Amazon (which I will immediately spend on books). Millions of people have put up websites: many in hopes of making money one way or another; many, like myself, because we have something to share with the world, and don’t care whether it makes any money or not. On the other hand, making money wouldn’t hurt–¦

what I do

Representing a Company in Public Internet Forums

March 4, 2005 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Being an official company representative on the Usenet (or any other online forum) is hard, especially when the company you represent is the 800-pound gorilla in its particular niche. The attitude out there is often “large automatically means evil” – kinda like the public attitude towards Microsoft.

So I came in for a lot of flak during my years representing Adaptec/Roxio online, and some of it got personal. I mostly let it roll off my back (though I spent hours composing witty, sarcastic replies, which I rarely sent – sarcasm and irony do not come across as intended in email). The allegations which bothered me most were those that I lied on behalf of the company – I was always scrupulously honest. During my last months of representing Roxio on the Usenet, someone called me (repeatedly) “a lying bitch.” That thread went on for days, becoming a flame war between my detractors and my supporters. I finally weighed in myself:

Subject: The Bitch Bites Back
Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2001 10:57:42 +0200
From: Deirdre’ Straughan
Newsgroups: alt.comp.periphs.cdr

All right, folks, it’s time for the subject of all this to put in her own piece. I begin by quoting Elizabeth Hilts, author of Getting in Touch With Your Inner Bitch:

“There is a powerful and integral part of each of us that has until now gone unrecognized, its energy largely untapped… It is the Inner Bitch… The Inner Bitch is not that part of ourselves that is sometimes stupid, or mean, or humorless. She neither indulges in self-defeating behavior, nor does She abuse herself or others. The Inner Bitch does not engage in petty arguments, even for sport. Why bother? The Inner Bitch never enters into a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.”

I recommend this book to anyone who’s ever called a woman a bitch and thought it was an insult.

My “real” title in the realm of CD-R used to be well known out here, but I haven’t publicized it recently because my sense of humor was misunderstood by some colleagues. [That unofficial title, bestowed on me – lovingly! – by friends, was “the Bitch Goddess of CD-R”.]

“Lying”. That is slander, because it’s not true. If anyone has any proof that I have ever intentionally lied to any customer, here on the Usenet or anywhere else, I invite them to step forward with it.

As for the rest, my other guru, Miss Manners, would likely advise that the best response to coarse insults is a dignified, ladylike silence. And if you think a bitch can’t also be a lady, you have a lot to learn.

Naturally, this didn’t convince the troll of anything: years later, he is still slandering me out on the Usenet.

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Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia