CRM Software for customer service professionals: Really effective, if you have it. Sprint apparently doesn't.
So, I've now been trying to port my number from Helio to Sprint since last Wednesday.
First, I tried this Wednesday, and they told me I was all set.
Then, when it didn't happen, I called again Saturday.
Of course, every time I call, I go through my little dog and pony show to tell them what my problem is and of course they need to transfer me to some other department.
But what absolutely kills me is that no one that I get transferred to seems to have any of my information. You have no idea how many times I've given my name and address to verify the account.
My favorite is when they ask for my password.
Do you know how many different types of passwords I keep for all my different service providers?
What do you want? Pick a password.... I've got first pet's names, 4 digit codes, last 4 digits of my social. Mom's maiden name?
And of course, not every representative has the ability to login to the integrated "Sprint together with Nextel" billing system, so I always get transfered at least one extra time.
Now, I'm at the point where we need to call Earthlink while I'm on the phone to get the transfer approved.
So, let me get this straight... Earthlink (Helio) can say "no"? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they can't, so what's the point of this?
And, as if this wasn't irritating enough, now all the representatives are trained to come back from putting me on hold every 2 minutes to tell me what they're doing. Don't stop! Keep doing whatever you need to do until you actually help me!! I actually told a rep that yesterday. I was like, "Take as long as you need. I'm trained to hold for ludicris amounts of time and frankly, I liked that better than this annoying touchy feely, "Is it ok if I place you on hold again... thank you so much for your patience."
I couldn't believe it, but I was actually pleading with the customer service person not to be polite to me, because all these thank yous were wasting some serious time on the clock.
And, of course, I'm doing the whole thing on Skype, because you never call the wireless carrier using the wireless phone itself, just in case they need to do anything on it.
So, at the moment, my number porting has been "elevated" to the technical department to do this manually and will be worked on "as soon as possible" and they'll call me back "from time to time" to check on this.
I don't have from "time to time"! This needs to be done TODAY, because my new month at Helio starts tomorrow and I don't want to have to pay another month over there.
Perhaps it's the fact that they know I have this cheap SERO account and so they're getting me back for screwing them over by finding the super secret special cheap plan.
Knowing when to throw the right pitch: Marketing Your Startup
Alex and I have been doing a lot of meetings for Path 101 and one of the most difficult things has been adjusting the flow and content of the meeting for the audience.
So, for example, we took a meeting with a VC that we knew well and whose demeanor is usually pretty fun and casual (not Fred, just fyi). So, we decided not to run through our slide deck and instead stayed at a high level, conceptual, throw some ideas about the space around, kind of thing... conversation was kind of all over the place, admittedly, and today we got the "sorry, not for us" e-mail. I'm not sure I would have invested in us either, because we probably seemed a lot more all over the place on product than we really are at this point. It's unfortunate, b/c we really didn't feel like we put our best foot forward.... basically got fooled on a pitch and looked bad for it.
Conversely, we tried to walk through the slide deck with another VC and it was 45 minutes before we got past slide two and that conversation was excellent... and it was our attempts at herding the cats back into the slide deck that actually made the conversation less interesting.
Predicting what someone needs to see is incredibly difficult. If you've ever pitched at USV, you know that you should just walk in and show them the product, throw some ideas around, etc... It will become more like a hack-a-thon than a pitch meeting... and you need to be able to roll with that flow... b/c that's how they like to get to know businesses. They want to poke and be imaginative about what you could become, who you run into... what is the scope of possibilities for this business and how flexible are you and your model. Not all VCs are like this...and if you bet wrong, you might not get another meeting. I like to think that we never held slide deck dependency against any entrepreneurs at USV, but it sure does make it difficult to get in an engaging conversation with someone.
What we've found incredibly useful has been meetings with other entrepreneurs... not for funding or biz dev, but just to see what others think, and also learn a lot about how partnerships and teams function. We met with Paul and Rony from Indeed the other day. They have an incredibly focused strategy and clear vision on what they want to be. We're quite a bit wider and perhaps a little amorphous at this point and so it was an incredibly valuable conversation to have... not just to help us think about focus, but to help marketing our focus. We know we'll be building something comprehensive, but we don't need to overwhelm the audience with the comprehensive vision before establishing the viability of the first thing we want to build.
Yesterday, we met with Pete and Josh from Reprise Media (and got to meet the infamous Kate from Searchviews). As we did with Paul and Rony, we tried to gain a little insight into their working style, which would be hard to match since they were childhood friends. Still, hearing about the process of hiring, collaborating, product management from people who've done it successfully is invaluable. Josh finished up our long diatribe on what we were doing with, "You need an elevator pitch", and Pete responded, "So do we." That's our next step, in addition to all the product strategy work/research we're doing now... culling the message down to its basic points and tailoring that to investors, schools, the public, etc.
Alex and I were talking about opening this whole company creation process up... like doing some kind of a regular open meeting where people can just show up and essentially give feedback and here about our progress so far. I don't know what the right venue for that would be... we'd certainly like to make it as casual as possible, but also somewhat functional. Perhaps once we wrap up this funding, we can do it in our own tiny little cramped office. In addition, we'll be adding a wiki to our site and a blog of course to further expose ourselves in public. :)
Techcrunch and My Mom
What do they have to do with each other?
Well, today, GotVoice introduced some new features to its platform, including avatars that read your voicemail.
Evite's most annoying feature... did you and your friends take photos of the event yesterday? Post them here.
Do you know anyone that keeps their photos on Evite? Seriously, anyone?
It would be so much easier if they just integrated with all the existing photo platforms and allowed anyone, no matter what platform they keep photos on, to show photos to the group. They should be the photo aggregator for events... because, believe it or not, not everyone uses Flickr or has friends on Facebook.
This is one of the many things Evite strikes out with, but this particular one just really gnaws away at me.
Six years ago today
What to say, except that I'm pretty sure this is the first year that we didn't get that same perfectly blue sky we had that day. It's raining here. Seriously, if there's anything that stood out to me about September 11th, it was how amazingly blue and clear the sky in NYC was.
And let's see... we're mired in a war we can't seem to get out of, Ground Zero is still a whole in the ground, 9/11 workers are sick, Bin Laden looks better than he did a few years ago and our immigration policy now seems to keep the people we actually want to come here out, and we still have no idea who's even here.
I dunno, but I hope that by the time the 10th anniversary comes around, we have a little more to show for what happened...
Calling all Boston-area college career counselors
Alex and I are heading up to Boston on Friday to meet up with some angel/VC types and want to spend the morning meeting with some college career planning offices. If anyone has good contacts, particularly with schools like Boston College and Boston University, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could drop me a line--especially if you know them well because you've worked directly with them, spoke at one of their events, etc.
links for 2007-09-10
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“It’s actually served us pretty well,” says Haro. “If you think about 3D games from seven years ago they look pretty terrible. And the kids who play this game don’t even know what the word ‘retro’ means. It’s just another look to them.”
My Helio Ocean breaks and I just ordered a Sprint Mogul... thus endeth the Helio experiment
Recently, I've been pretty frustrated because the Helio Ocean Exchange wouldn't sync my calendar and that the contacts wouldn't actually sync the phone's firmware contacts. Therefore, I could look you up in my Exchange contact list, click to call you, but then if you call back, the phone would have no idea who you are. The calendar issue was a bug on their part that caused the phone to just completely crash when I tried to sync my calendar. The guess from Helio was that it was due to old calendar entries... seems like that's a hell of a bug just to be caused my some old entries.
Well, today, we had a new bug:
Did you spot it? Look closely. Yeah, um, the magic triangle spring is supposed to prevent the keyboard and the numeric keypad from opening at the same time. I opened the keyboard today and something went ping on the inside. The top slider came loose and not only was I able to open both sides of it, but this is as closed as I can get it now. So, I basically have an open Swiss Army Knife for a phone.
I went over to the Helio store expecting to get a replacement, because I'm paying the insurance. Nope. First, the guy tells me that he doesn't know if this is a warranty item or a claim because, he'd "never seen that happen on any of the phones before", implying that I broke it. I told him I didn't much care if he had seen this before or not... fact of the matter is that it broke and I was insured. All he could do was to direct me to a phone and gave me the customer service number. They implied it was a claim (not a defect) and so they gave me the insurance company's number. They were going to take 24 hours to process the claim and then get me a phone in 3 business says standard shipping... i.e. 4 days without a useable phone (It doesn't dial out anymore and the menu buttons are all screwed up b/c it doesn't know which way it's oriented). Of course, I could pay another $15 in addition to my $50 deductible to get it next day. Knowing that there was a good chance I was bailing on Helio anyway because of the Exchange issues, I passed on the $65.
Here's the interesting financial outcome of this whole thing, though. Dave Evans pointed me out to the Sprint SERO plan (Google it), which was a hidden discount program for employee referrals. The problem was, I couldn't take advantage of it when my prior Sprint phone got stolen because it was only for new customers. Now, since I left, I'm a new customer again.
So, in the end, even if I eat my way out of my Helio contract, here's the final financial impact assessment:
PPC-6700 stolen... No immediate financial impact because that phone was purchased as part of USV due diligence on a mobile app company... moved back to old Palm Treo... hated it.
6/13 - Bought new Treo and accessories... ($274)
3 months of Helio service (@$85) vs. 3 months of old Sprint service (@$116) = +$93
Early termination fee.... ($175)
Cost of Sprint Mogal... ($300)
So, basically, the new phone overall cost me $656...
...BUT...
Monthly savings on Sprint SERO plan vs comparable full cost Sprint service +$40/month.
So, before the end of my 2 year contract is up, the phone will have paid for itself.
Not too shabby... Can't wait for my Mogul!
I also can't wait for Ken Berger to tell me he told me so.... however, leaving Sprint and coming back did allow me to take advantage of this lower cost plan, so, in the end, it was totally worth it.
links for 2007-09-08
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Create a public Internet identity. I strongly recommend blogging, but even a homepage will do. Have a genuine all-accessible identity online that you're cool with grandma and your boss reading. Don't make it uber drab, but do provide context for who you a
Majoring in Entrepreneurship? Can Entrepreneurship even be taught?
Fordham is starting an entrepreneurship program for its undergrad students and I'll be teaching a course entitled "Innovation and the Entrepreneurial Mindset". Yesterday, those of us who teach in the program were talking with the dean about whether or not the program should be a major or concentration, a specialization, a minor, etc.
The difference is whether or not it should be something focused on by itself or in conjunction with other majors, like finance or marketing.
I've always leaned towards identifying yourself with some fundamental business skills set, like finance, accounting, marketing, info systems, etc., and then layering on specializations, like entrepreneurship or international study. To me, international marketing, marketing in mainstream media or advertising, or marketing for a startup are three pretty different types of marketing--all of whom require the fundamental principals of marketing, but differ in their application. Now, whether those are specializations, double majors, etc. I don't think it matters.
Also, you have to think about fallback, too. What if someone does the entrepreneurship program, but can't nail that business idea or decides that getting some industry experience and connection in the area of their startup idea would be valuable--working for DKNY before you decide to start your own fashion label, perhaps. Would anyone want to hire you if you were only an entrepreneurship major and didn't at least have marketing, finance, or accounting?
There are business programs that have full majors in entrepreneurship, like Babson. In fact, I met a Babson entreprenuership major last night at the CooBric opening and he thought it was a valuable experience.
Of course, this question of where it fits in a program presupposes that you can even teach entrepreneurship in the first place... and to be honest, while I might not have thought so a few years ago, the more I get involved in this program, the more I think you can. It's not so much teaching as it is introduction. When I grew up, starting your own business was seen as kind of a flakey thing to do. My mom worked in a school and my dad was a fireman before he went into accounting (yeah, I never understood that transition either). I never knew about the startup world, and when I learned about it, I thought it was just all about having the big idea one day--like a lightning strike.
In my own experience, I think what is more likely to happen is that the big idea is slow cooked after being involved in a space or a line of thinking over time. I got the idea for Path 101 after seven years of various mentoring and intership programs. I wasn't trying to be an entrepreneur and the best ideas probably come when you're not trying to be one.
So, what am I going to teach? I'm going to teach immersion and opportunity identification. I'm going to teach these kids what it means to actually get waist deep in something like I am... that it's not just getting a job... it's about real active participation in the industry, in the community, whatever it is. And, once you're in the thick of it, learning how to identify power structures, pain points, etc.
These are lessons that are useful whether or not they'll ever become entrepreneurs, because it's not enough to just clock in and clock out anymore. There are so many more opportunities to really get active in a space and the people that take advantage of those opportunities are often the ones that wind up innovating and changing those spaces.
What do you think? What does an entrepreneurial education look like to you? How does it fit with other skills and courses? Did anyone take any entrepreneurship courses in school?