E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Excellent Customer Support Summarised in a Single Word: ScreenFlow

A few days back you would remember how, in a recent blog post, I stated that nowadays it seems it is becoming more and more difficult, and rare!, to find excellent customer service, as I was trying to share further insights on the recent fiasco I have gone through with both movistar & Apple with the 3GS iPhone. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist altogether, right? Well, today I thought I would share a story with you folks. A story that features yours truly, once again, but this time around on what excellent customer support is all about. But one step at a time…

It all starts with an email sent to my personal account by the Telestream folks, announcing that the super fine ScreenFlow 2.0 is now available for download and upgrade. Now, I probably haven’t mentioned this here before, but ScreenFlow is actually one of my favorite screencasting tools for the Mac, if not my all time favorite (Yes, I know, Camtasia for the Mac comes pretty close, too!). The thing is that ScreenFlow has been there for a while now, while Camtasia is just getting started, so over time I have gotten used to the excellent features, and capabilities, the former has got to offer.

So after checking out what ScreenFlow 2.0 has in store, including some of the features I have been looking forward to for a little while now, I decided to go ahead and upgrade to it. I was advised to check the upgrade link to see how it would work, so I did that. And that’s when the problems started. Apparently, I was not the only one who didn’t go through a successful upgrade to the latest version (A whole bunch of us seemed to have problems with it, too!).

From there onwards, I decided to check what people were saying in Twitter, and when I realized I was not the only one having such problems I tweeted it to a couple of people I follow indicating it was not an isolated problem. By then, I had already sent out a note to customer support asking for further advice on how to fix it. Usually, that have been rather responsive as well, which is always a good sign. So I decided to wait…

In the meantime, I carried on with my daily work and, all of a sudden, I get this tweet from @screenflow where they are kindly offering to help out right there. Yes, almost an immediate response to my tweets. Whoahhhh! Truly amazing! I know that if you have been out there in the Web 2.0 world for a while, as a customer or a vendor, this is pretty much common thing, but yet one has got to experience it in first person to realise the kind of impact it has got! What followed afterwards was a bunch of tweets that helped me sort out my problem and helped me go through the upgrade successfully in a matter of minutes. Goodness! And that thanks to a couple of tweets!

So what originally started it as potential problems and issues to finish off a successful upgrade of my license for version 2.0 of ScreenFlow, it turned out to be an amazing experience with regards to customer support, having helped me solve it within the same day, in fact, shortly after! I am not sure what you would think about this story folks but the people over at Telestream have managed to do something, with a couple of proactive interactions, that movistar hasn’t managed to do in over nearly a year that I have been with them: gain and retain my loyalty, as a customer.

Like I said, I wanted to share this story to also show the other side of the coin. To prove the point that there is excellent customer service out there; that there are some vendors out there that get it, that understand how things have progressed and improved over time in managing customer relationships through engaging actively in the social media space; that there is an opportunity to have an open dialogue between customers and vendors and engage in solving customer problems in the shortest time possible, because, after all, that’s what exceedingly good customer support is all about: gaining the loyalty of those customers that you would want to keep for a long while!

And that is just what Telestream (And ScreenFlow) have managed to do for me. I am a rather happy customer now, who knows he can always count on wonderful customer support from those vendors that care about what matters: their customers. I wish both movistar and Apple would understand that once and for all. Forget about your exclusive rights of distribution and the hype; get down to work, do your business properly and show you care, because right now you aren’t.

Tags: Telestream, ScreenFlow, ScreenFlow 2.0, Camtasia, Mac, MacBook Pro, Screencasting, Screencasts, Customer Loyalty, Loyalty, Customer Support, Customer Service, Customer Service Center, VRM, Vendor Relationship Management, Twitter, Microblogging, Microsharing, Relationships, Connections, Dialogue, Apple, iPhone, 3G, 3GS, Excellence, Customer Stories, Stories, Customer Experiences, Vendors, Movistar, Telefonica, Brands, Branding, Corporate Brand, Lack of Customer Service, Constructive Feedback, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Innovation, Communication

A World Without Email – Year 2, Week 37 (Oh, the Irony of Things)

Oh, the irony of things… That is just probably a good title for the blog post I am just about to put together. I know, and I realise, this entry may sound a bit too strange, but as you may be able to see later on, it’s probably the best way to describe what happened last week. Yes, indeed, here I am again, putting together this article with some further insights on last week’s progress report on living "A World Without Email". Quite surprising, I tell you!

I know by now you may be wondering what exactly happened. Intriguing, eh? I know. Not to worry. Done on purpose, although I can imagine how, probably, the embedded weekly progress report screen shot I will be sharing shortly may be able to clarify some of the stuff that took place and which took me by surprise a little bit as well! So I guess I better share that particular snapshot, so you get to see what I mean:

Whoahhh! My goodness! How did that happen? I mean, how can it be that for the last few weeks I’ve had a steady count of incoming emails to say between 18 to 25 and, just last week, that all went away and jumped, sky high, into the total number of 35 emails in a single week! Ouch!! That hurts!

Now, I do realise that most of you folks would probably think that 35 emails a week is not too bad; and I would probably agree with you on that about 21 months ago. However, today I don’t think it is that good. That’s right. After nearly 2 year’s having giving up on corporate email at work, it is interesting to see how sometimes that number of the emails received during the week comes pretty close to the number of emails I used to get right at the beginning on a daily basis. Plenty of progress, you would probably be saying, but for someone like myself who wants to receive less and less emails by the month that sounds like trouble ahead.

And, believe it or not, I am the one who is creating that trouble. And that’s what I mean with… the irony of things. The reason why last week I got those 35 emails was no other than myself falling back into the trap of engaging back with fellow colleagues using … email! Yikes! How could I have I done that? I mean, I should know this. I have lived through this for a good number of years. I know exactly what the reaction is going to be, and how to avoid it, yet I didn’t. The golden rule of email struck again in full force: the more email you reply to, the more email you will get back!

That’s just exactly what happened last week! Those two days you can see on the snapshot where I got 10 emails a day were actually due to three different email exchanges, where, instead of me using social software tools to engage, I gave in, oh my goodness!!, and replied back through … email. Geez!

I don’t think I have learned the lesson, have I? After 21 months, the temptation is just so… tempting, that I can’t help myself. And what happens next? People don’t leave their comfort zone, because that’s where they live in, so they bring me back into *their* own comfort zone and I am back to square one.

Oh the irony all things… it seems that if I don’t keep actively fighting my way through reducing my incoming count off emails, no-one will; with the ultimate result that if I don’t continue to put a stop to that I know I will go back to what I was over 21 months ago. And there’s no way I will be doing that. Like I have said a few times already, I have already seen the light, I have seen (And experienced!) what it is like being back in control of your own productivity (While still helping others), and, like I said, there’s no way I’m going back.

So, I guess folks should have enjoyed that moment of weakness, because it is now over. Today I got things back on track and things are looking good again. You see? It is not the first time, nor the second one (If I recall correctly) and perhaps not the last one either. But there is one thing for sure. These moments of weakness help me understand how, if I don’t get actively involved, it is going to be very hard to make it happen. Thus, here I am again putting up some fight and ensure that I can keep consistently reducing that number of incoming emails over the course of the next few months. And that way I can keep demonstrating to people how there better ways of sharing your knowledge and collaborating with your peers than good old email.

For this week I think that would be it. For now though I would just want to conclude this blog post with another thought that has been in my mind for a little while now, and which fits in quite nicely with that "Oh… the irony of things…". After thinking about it quite a bit, this is going to be my last *weekly* progress report over here in this blog. I know these entries don’t seem to be very popular in here, which, I think, is understandable. So, instead of boring you folks with these weekly reports, what I am going to do is to eventually move them out of this blog and onto a new social software tool that is making the rounds nowadays and that, funny enough, uses email as one of its main user interfaces.

Yes, I’m talking about Posterous, where, as you well know, I have got an account there that is screaming out loud to get things going and add some content to it. Well, this may well be it. One other chance to share with people how that progress is going, without clogging my main blog, and at the same time I will be making use of that account to share some further insights on the increasing number of articles that keep flourishing out there proving poor email as a knowledge sharing and collaborative tool. And as you well may have guessed already, I have caught a good number are draft entries that I will be putting together in the next few weeks and, from there onwards, we will see where things will take us.

Then every so often I still plan to come over here and post sharing overall general impressions of what it is like living in "A World Without Email". So, that way that conversation won’t disappear entirely from this blog. For now, I am almost ready to start posting into my Posterous account. If you want to subscribe to it, you can do so by going into this link, but … do it at your own peril hehe

Thus let’s continue with that meme of "Oh … the irony of things" then … Are you ready?

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, Moments of Weakness, Weakness, Giving up Email, Posterous