A few emails we received recently deserve a bit of special attention.
From an email request for a quote
“Important Factors to consider when estimating:
* Easy to please, open minded client. (me)
* Relaxed deadline. (no rush)
* Willing to pay up front. (if desired)”
From an apologetic hosting company (not like these guys )
“On behalf of everyone at Media3, please accept our apologies for the unusual network
performance experienced on 3/19/2007.
Let’s not be overly preventative… If you need to solve that problem, you’ll be making enough money you won’t mind investing in extra infrastructure. Let’s try this out. We can let a couple people on your sales staff see if it works, and if it does, -we can do it on a larger scale… It’s […]
We recently received an email from a hosting provider of ours. Not long ago they had about a half day of outage due to an unavoidable circumstance caused by outside world infrasructure. Due to the advanced notice, and the frequent updates on status, we were sympathetic. After all, they scheduled the outage early morning on a Sunday…
The problem came a week or two after the down-time, when their email newsletter came out. It contained snarky little comments like:
Recently we had an opportunity to do a bit of consulting on an ecommerce site. It’s not uncommon for us, we work on a lot of sites that require commerce. No matter how many times we do it, we’re always surprised at people’s perception of selling online.
It seems that people have a perception of ecommerce as something different than normal retail. The same person who is a savvy store owner running a successful brick-and-mortar store can be a failure at selling online. Why? Because they permit themselves to assume that the online world is different than the real world.
It’s a strange fact that success doesn’t make as big a splash as a failure. When you do something wrong, or something breaks, your clients will necessarily know about it. When you do your job well, a client forgets you exist.
Not just in our business, but in any business, you have to be a cheerleader. Most of us are humble by nature, and we don’t tend to toot our own horn… But who will do it if not us? As a service based industry, you learn to cringe when the phone rings. Clients don’t call when things work right. They call when things are broken…