What? you're just some sloppy application.
June 2006 Archives
When buying something from the internet I appreciate being informed of things during the process. When ordering something that requires the dispatching of a physical item, then you need to ensure that the customer can safely determine what the state of their order is at any point.
There are two normal mechanisms to support this. The first is an order status page. This page contains information about the state of the order. For example, when a company accepts the order it is flagged as 'Accepted'. Once someone is taking the item and putting it into a box it should be placed in the 'Processing' state. When it has been given to the delivery company a state of 'In transit' would be appropriate. When the delivery reaches the destination and has been signed for, then a state of 'delivered' would be appropriate. This covers the company, who can be happy that the order has been satisfied, and the customer who can see what state their order is in.
Some companies would combine the Processing and Dispatch state, some companies don't have confirmed delivery. These things need to be factored into the equation.
For companies that don't maintain separate account pages, you have the status email. This is sent out once the item has been dispatched from the company. This allows the customer to feel some connection to the order that they have made without needing to confirm the location of their item with a customer service representative.
A few simple steps and you can help your customers feel happier with your service, and as a result more confident in their feeling that you are not some fly-by-night operation.
As the tag says, communication is the key to a successful relationship, be it business or personal.
There are two normal mechanisms to support this. The first is an order status page. This page contains information about the state of the order. For example, when a company accepts the order it is flagged as 'Accepted'. Once someone is taking the item and putting it into a box it should be placed in the 'Processing' state. When it has been given to the delivery company a state of 'In transit' would be appropriate. When the delivery reaches the destination and has been signed for, then a state of 'delivered' would be appropriate. This covers the company, who can be happy that the order has been satisfied, and the customer who can see what state their order is in.
Some companies would combine the Processing and Dispatch state, some companies don't have confirmed delivery. These things need to be factored into the equation.
For companies that don't maintain separate account pages, you have the status email. This is sent out once the item has been dispatched from the company. This allows the customer to feel some connection to the order that they have made without needing to confirm the location of their item with a customer service representative.
A few simple steps and you can help your customers feel happier with your service, and as a result more confident in their feeling that you are not some fly-by-night operation.
As the tag says, communication is the key to a successful relationship, be it business or personal.
When I sign up to commercial services I create a specific account for receiving email for that account. When email arrives for that address from a third party I know that the account has been compromised in some way. Today's offender is audible. I'm not linking them as they don't deserve it.
For some reason the ^G character is not performing a 'default system sound' when it happens. No idea why, probably a misconfiguration on my behalf. It makes using a console very annoying - for example every exception on vmware produces an annoying beep when anything wrong happens.
The solution is in, of all places, the MSDN reference for Beep(), which states in small print to type: net stop beep followed by sc config beep start= disabled
Reenabling it involves typing: sc config beep start= system followed by net start beep
I hope you found this as useful as I did.
The solution is in, of all places, the MSDN reference for Beep(), which states in small print to type: net stop beep followed by sc config beep start= disabled
Reenabling it involves typing: sc config beep start= system followed by net start beep
I hope you found this as useful as I did.
While the rest of the planet goes crazy I'm painting :)
I was at Shannon Airport to collect the sister this morning. Sign up says 'free internet access'. You just need to register. Two problems with this - registration was be email and I could not connect to my mail server securely until I had registered. Secure web browsing seemed to be unusable - possibly because I was using self-signed certs from my home server (at $200 p/a for a cert when it's just for me is plain silly).
The other complaint was of course the everyone must use web 2.0. I cough politely, and remind people that not everyone has broadband access from everywhere. Considering that I use the laptop for most of my work, when I need to connect it's over GPRS, and that's just expensive from the get-go. You may complain about a 10cent text message (plus VAT) for 160 usable characters (which works out at 0.0625cent a byte), but the phone companies are charging 2cent for 1k of data. Not that I could ever get this working correctly. All those round-robin trips to the server could end up costing a fortune to the on-the-go user.
Well, rant, rant. It's such a lovely day I think I'll be outside.
The other complaint was of course the everyone must use web 2.0. I cough politely, and remind people that not everyone has broadband access from everywhere. Considering that I use the laptop for most of my work, when I need to connect it's over GPRS, and that's just expensive from the get-go. You may complain about a 10cent text message (plus VAT) for 160 usable characters (which works out at 0.0625cent a byte), but the phone companies are charging 2cent for 1k of data. Not that I could ever get this working correctly. All those round-robin trips to the server could end up costing a fortune to the on-the-go user.
Well, rant, rant. It's such a lovely day I think I'll be outside.
