I bombed two weeks of computer classes in high school. Ok, it was really a math class, but the teacher took liberties and immersed us in command line for two weeks (TRS-80s). I wallowed. Could not figure it out, and HATED it. Swore at that point that I’d never touch another computer as long as I lived. I had no use for them AT ALL.

About 1994 my father-in-law gifted us a Mac Classic. Kevin was a teacher at the time, and he took right to it. To my utter shock, I did too. I began writing poetry and short stories. I sought out freeware and shareware games for my kids – educational stuff. After about six months, I reformatted the hard drive just to see if I could. I was hired as a computer aide at a local school, and within a few years, was buying, refurbishing, and reselling Macs (desktops and laptops). I could quote you the specs of any Mac model off the top of my head.

There was something about the Mac. I could actually USE it. And using a Mac early on in my computer business career taught me some valuable lessons, which have been part of shaping our business into something both original and successful.

1. Don’t make it harder than it has to be. Keep things simple on the surface, and leave the layers of complication for later.

2. Make it fun. The Mac was a lot of fun. There were hidden messages and games in many of the programs (nicknamed Easter Eggs). The computer greeted you with a smile. Mac instructions were written with a sense of humor (David Pogue’s were some of the best, in Macs for Dummies). You could change the desktop patterns and even make your own (remember, all of this was brand new concepts at the time, Bill Gates was still trying to mimic it).

3. Think Different. More than different – think about needs, and meet them, instead of being trapped by rigid standards arbitrated by those who really don’t get what the needs actually are.

4. Don’t be afraid to use what works, regardless of what everyone else is doing. I defended my position to use a Mac over and over, and it taught me to do what worked for MY business, and not be made to feel inadequate because I wasn’t doing it the way someone else thought I should.

5. Meet higher standards. The Mac had higher customer satisfaction standards than PCs had. They also had higher compatibility and performance standards. They met them too.

6. When you make changes to keep up with technology or growth, don’t lose what makes it work. The Mac fell apart when they made some decisions that lost many of the things users loved about it. It lost some of the humor, much of the reliability, and much of what made it unique. The end came for us when they released an operating system that was incompatible with the firmware (part of the built-in hardware coding) on our Mac, combined with a decrease in available software for our industry. We moved to the PC because the Mac no longer had what we needed – It did not matter that the iMac was cute and colored, the hard drive crashed repeatedly and had to be reformatted due to the incompatibility. It was unsustainable.

7. Just because you screw up once, or twice, or even a dozen times, doesn’t mean you can’t make a comeback. While we haven’t gone back to the Mac (it would be prohibitively expensive for us to do so now), an increasing number of our clients and students have done so.

The Mac was responsible for a huge learning process for me. It took all of my half-talents, and combined them together into a combination of skills which had value. And Mac instructions were so much clearer than PC instructions (which always seemed to assume you already KNEW what you were doing and only needed a reminder of a single concept). In fact, I learned more from Macs for Dummies, More Macs for Dummies, and Mac Secrets, about how to operate and diagnose a PC than I did from a huge combination of PC books. Because I learned more foundational computer concepts, and I learned more practical applied troubleshooting concepts, which I could then adapt to the PC.

I function using a PC. But it isn’t fun, and I miss my Mac. I don’t know if it will ever be feasible to go back. But I appreciate the lessons I learned from it. The whole philosophy of the Mac had a huge impact on how I thought about business, and has helped to take me someplace extraordinary.

This is the average process I go through lately to edit a page for a client.

1. Type in the URL.
2. Wait for 30 to 45 seconds for the page to load on average. Often this may take as long as 2 full minutes.
3. About 3 out of 5 times, the page will fail to load completely. About half of the page load failures are incomplete loads, and about half are “Failure to Connect” notices.
4. Make changes when the page finally loads, click Save. Go through the frustrating page load process again, hoping the changes are not lost.

This is a daily aggravation. We have two satellite dishes on the site of our house. One from Wild Blue that costs us $69 per month. One from HughesNet that costs us $79 per month. Each is so unreliable that we have to have a backup – that is more than $150 per month for internet once taxes are figured in.

WildBlue was adequate when we first got it – but we outgrew it fairly rapidly. And they have no options for growth beyond a certain point. When you hit the ceiling, they simply shut you down until your usage comes back in range – and that can take 3 weeks or more.

We got HughesNet in an emergency, and it was good at first. Their limits work differently than WB, so we’re never shut down for long if we exceed bandwidth. But lately, we’re having to be really careful what we do, because we’ve outgrown them too. We can get faster speeds, but we cannot get more bandwidth. When we first signed up with them, they had a higher bandwidth option. But they’ve since decreased the available options, and we have no place left to grow.

And the worst is that both companies have degraded seriously in performance. WildBlue is now behaving like they’ve throttled us, when we have NOT exceeded bandwidth. The performance is hideous – pages don’t load at all, and email takes forever to download. It is completely unacceptable, we are not getting anywhere near what we pay for, we aren’t even getting USABLE internet most of the time now.

HughesNet is also apalling lately. If you call them, they will run you through diagnostics, tell you you have to be reporting the wrong numbers (which are so slow their own techs cannot even believe they are real), and then wander off – they do follow up a few days later in hopes that the problem has miraculously solved itself. It never does. Our friends who also use HN have called about the slow speeds, and have been told they exceeded their bandwidth, when they have not even USED the internet in the last 48 hours! (HN has a 24 hour revolving limit.)

I ran some diagnosics recently, and they returned latency speeds that were 5 times longer than dialup speeds. This isn’t the speed of the upload or download data, rather this is the delay between the request from my computer, and the response from the other end. Often there simply is no response at all, so the browser returns a failure to connect error.

It is clear that both have vastly overloaded their satellites, and no longer care about usability for their clients. We are losing money on both – if we had an alternative, we’d be gone in a shot. I believe they make their money from people who accept it because they have no choice. The dumb thing is, many people would pay more for decent service – we would if we had the option, because our business is entirely dependent on good internet access. It is very frustrating to have no choices at all. It hurts our business, and there is nothing we can do about it.

It looks like an alternative is coming. We have two companies which will be bringing in high speed internet options soon. We’ll test them, and assuming performance is even a little better, HN and WB will be dropped. Sadly, a year ago, we’d have known we’d drop WB first, and keep HN as a backup. At this point, there is nothing to choose between the two, they are both so bad that neither is even good enough for a backup!

I don’t expect this post to change anything. The net is littered with negative comments on both of these companies. They do not listen when you contact customer support, so I doubt they are concerned with a negative reputation online either. They should be – internet options are growing for small towns across the US, and if they do not get their act together, they will simply fade out of existence.

Circumstances in my business have given me a lot of reason to think about customer service, satisfaction policies, and refund policies. Having always felt that a business owner gives MORE, not LESS, and having been raised on the philosophy that you just accept hardship and cope with it, it has taken a great deal of thought, and reasoning to create some new policies which set a limit on how far certain types of clients can push me.

We charge flat rates, so we often have to set limits on what can and cannot be done within a contract. With the average client, a polite, “I’m sorry, but the technical difficulty of that feature is beyond what your contract covers” is enough to let them know where that limit is. And typically, we don’t have to issue refunds, because when problems are encountered, we can address them and help the client move past them.

Two situations recently made me start really thinking about when the customer ISN’T right, and when a refund should NOT be issued. Those are hard things for me to define, and I dislike it intensely when someone is displeased with the outcome. But when the problem is not one that I caused, but which the client brought on themselves, I am not responsible for making it right.

In one situation, the demands of the client became such that it was interferring with my ability to keep up with work for all of my clients. I eventually said NO, because it was unfair to the rest of my clients for one client to demand so much time and work that it was impossible to keep up with the reasonable requests of the others. I had one dissatisfied client. But to satisfy that one, I’d have had a dozen dissatisfied clients. And it needs to be stated, that this involved a fairly low priced contract, for which I had already delivered about 5-7 times the amount of work agreed on. This client would make requests that wasted time, and think nothing of it. “Just make two copies of that graphic so I can compare them and decide which one I like.” or “I don’t have the right text or image yet, just make one up so I can see what it might look like.” Those things waste time, and cost extra work that is not reasonable when time is not charged hourly.

In the other situation, the client asked and was informed about the amount of work their part of the contract would entail. They assured with enthusiasm that they were up to it, and were ready to get it done quickly. This was a half-priced contract where we were responsible only for install, design, payment processor setup, and support – we would do personal training on request at no extra charge. The client began the work, then lost interest, and changed their mind. We offered a training session – which they scheduled, then canceled. They then accused us of not informing them of the amount of work needed (which we had done both in person and in writing), and demanded a full refund of all money paid. Since we did not have a refund policy for this specific service, we looked at our general policies (which they had agreed to during the payment process), and offered a refund based on those terms. This meant half of the setup fee was refundable. The client said that was not acceptable, that they had never agreed to any such thing, and that we needed to refund the whole thing or they’d file a complaint with the payment company. We promptly refunded the amount of half of the setup fee, as we had stated we would, and informed them that they HAD in fact agreed, showed them the document, and informed them that since the services agreed on HAD been completed and delivered, and that there was no issue of either non-delivery, or misrepresentation of services, they had no justifiable reason to file a complaint.

In both instances, there were strong reasons for setting a limit with the client, in spite of having strong customer service ethics. It came down to sustainability and what is reasonable and fair. To satisfy ONE client in this instance, would have done long term harm to our business.

In the first instance, keeping this client and answering all his demands would have undermined our entire business. We over delivered, and he got far more than his money’s worth. He was angry that I refused to do more without additional pay. But this, again, was not something we caused, and was beyond reason to expect on his part. It was better to have one dissatisfied client than to allow one client to destroy our business.

In the second instance, we were dealing with a situation that we did not cause – in fact, we try very hard to ensure that clients purchasing that type of product KNOW that it will take work. She changed her mind. That wasn’t something we caused. This is a service for a direct sales company. Had we just given the refund to make her go away without being upset, then she would tell her downline to go ahead and order a site from us, that if they changed their mind, we would refund. That would do a lot of harm long term. We were fair and honest with her, and the problems were not things we caused, and we offered several options to try to help her overcome the problems, but she did not want to even try.

I really struggled with figuring out the appropriate thing to do in both of these situations. In normal circumstances, I am more than willing to go out of my way for a client, and to do more than they paid for. We typically include a certain amount of wiggle room in our flat rate quotes, and I expect to have to work hard for what I earn. I generally LIKE my clients and want to give a lot for them. But there also has to be a limit. Otherwise a business is not sustainable.

Because of these two clients, I now have a new refund policy for the one particular service, and I have a new guideline for myself, to know when it is better to “fire the client” than it is to continue working with them. Neither of those things are handled lightly – I never want a dissatisfied client if I can avoid it. But I also recognize that some clients never WILL be satisfied, and that beyond a certain point, it is THEIR choice, not mine. When I have done all I should have done, and more, then it is ok to let them be unhappy, and to walk away. It still isn’t a nice thing to have to deal with, and I don’t think I will ever be able to do that without a lot of thought and analysis of the situation, to make sure that I was in the right in doing what I did.

I don’t know if I have a point in all of this, except to share the experience and maybe the bit that I did get out of it. If I have a point, it is maybe that when you ARE doing it right, this kind of decision generally WON’T be easy. It wll always cause thought and discomfort. But that lines must be drawn for problem clients, to keep the business sustainable for the GOOD clients.

When you did not cause it, and when you did more than was reasonable to try to make it work, it is ok to let the client choose to be dissatisfied.

I asked my friend and associate, Kerry Crawford, of WhoMadeYourSite.com run a test on the student interface in eFront. This is her commentary:

Here is me trying to get to a lesson in a course.

1) Took a minute to work out how to register. The button says “I don’t have an account” rather than something like “No account yet? Register here for site access.”  A small thing but may confuse some people.
2. Once I was in, I got a green checkmark with “You have registered successfully”. Should also say something about now that you’re registered, please choose your course from the list below and add it to your cart.
3. I really like that you can hover over a course name and get a brief syllabus.
4. if you click on the course title you get an add button with a price. This is good – assuming there is an instruction added to choose your courses and add them. Do not like the course topics are listed here because when you click on one you get an add to cart button that makes it appear as though this is something in ADDITION to the main course rather than PART of the course. Also when you click on a course topic and get the add to cart button you also get a list of lesson content items that don’t do anything when you click them. Would like to see topics and lesson content items hidden so all you see it the course title withsyllabus on hover and the ability to add it to cart when you click it.

Moving Along…

So I add the free expert certification course to my cart (cart is not obvious- would like to see a cart image or a big YOUR CART or someting) and then I click Continue. I get taken to a page that says Please Log In To Complete Registration (which is a bit confusing considering the green congratulations message I got earlier). Nonetheless, I log in.

I get a blue bar that lists the course I chose and shows a blue Free Registration button. I think I have already registered but okay – I’ll click it. Now I see 2 courses – the first is Marketing Plan – which if  I click it I see I can register for for $25. The second is my course and all of the 9 topics are listed. Would like to see my course at top and Other Courses You Can Take underneath or to the side

I click on the first topic in my course – Protecting your domain name. I get a screen that lists sub-topics for that lesson – which it turns out cannot be clicked – and a message saying that I already have the course Website Ownership. Huh.

After some thinking I click on My Lessons on the left – there is no reason to click that because no lessons are listed. But I click it and lo and behold a list of the 9 lessons comes up. I click on the first lesson and the sub-topics come up. I click on the first sub-topic and it opens.

SO if you are very persistent you can get there. But it is illogical to say the least. I like Moodle about a zillion times more than this system. If you don’t like Moodle there has GOT to be something more intuitive than this out there. Yikes!

I am going to try to address these concerns, and hope that I can do so. The other things have not been complete show stoppers. This could be.

I was able to set up the Groups with an access key, and that seemed to work on my test runs, and it was easy to spot – though the name doesn’t really tell someone what it IS. This feature is a big thing for me, because this is the one major thing that eFront offers that none of the other LMS packages even hint at.

So far I’ve not seen much in the way of organizational or layout flexibility, though I’ll dig and see. The lack of helpful documentation for things that people actually DO is getting in the way of knowing what the system IS fully capable of. This is common with Open Source, and we expect it to a certain degree, though a more functional forum search would solve much of that (and not just for eFront).