JoshSweeney

Ease of WordPress, Documentation of CodeIgniter, and Support of NuSphere

Although I have yet to formally introduce WapSnap and release a Beta version, I have been thinking fairly in depth about how I would like a software company to be run if I decided to push WapSnap or any other project into the main stream. I have worked for multiple software companies and used enough products to believe that I can at a minimum spot what should and shouldn’t be done. Anything I miss will be an educational ride.

Ease of Use

When it comes to web based applications I do not know of any application that is as easy to use as WordPress. WordPress has always been well known for a straight forward installation that can get you blogging quickly. Although I cannot speak for myself, I have friends that have switched from developing websites and applications in Joomla and Drupal over to WordPress because it is said to be very logical and easy to customize. With the introduction of the one click upgrade I can see how that would be so. One of the biggest problems I have seen in using open source solutions is that the script kiddies get the security updates when you do and usually they can write an exploit script before you can upgrade and test an application along with all of it’s 3rd party components.

With this information in hand I have decided that when my application rolls out that I would like it to have the ease of use of WordPress.

Documentation

Having to work on a poorly documented project or application has to be one of the biggest time waisters. When something isn’t documented well you spend most of your time debugging and chasing down answers in a forum instead of moving forward with what needs to get completed.

This is why I want documentation like CodeIgniter. When I started searching for a PHP framework to pick up, I started by looking in the documentation section of each. First stop, the getting started guide, then to the full docs, and then to the forums to see the amount of threads that go without a response. When I got to CodeIgniter I started with the first video tutorial which actually worked and was easy to follow. Wow what a concept, I say this sarcastically because this was not the case with many other frameworks that I tried.

Another positive of the CodeIgniter documentation is that it is easy to follow. Everything is separated out and named logically, this way if you do a search you are likely to find what you are looking for. I also enjoy that it doesn’t read like a 500 page manual and it isn’t a huge PDF that has to be churned through page by page. The CodeIgniter guide makes use of simple elements like line separators, code boxing, and bolding that makes the entire guide easy to read and follow.

With this information in hand I have decided that when my application rolls out that I would like it to have the documentation of CodeIgniter.

Support

I think that anyone who has been in the IT arena for any length of time understands what I mean by poor support.

This is when every time to call with a problem you only get a message machine.

This is when your SLA’s are never met and nobody seems to care.

This is when you post to a forum and nobody answers.

These all constitute poor support.

Nusphere is one company that I have dealt with recently that has fantastic support. To start with, even before I bought PHPed I posted to the forum and quickly had a response. This has been the case for every forum post that I have added to the Nusphere site. Nobody ever asked if I was a customer,how many licenses I had, or did the tiered support two step. Another honorable mention from a recent voyage is Slicehost. Slicehost provided multiple support routes where I didn’t even need to open a ticket. I went to their chat channel and had a solution within minutes.

With this information in hand I have decided that when my application rolls out that I would like it to have support like NuSphere.

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Tags: codeigniter, documentation, ease of use, Nusphere, support, WapSnap, wordpress

SugarCRM: New User Tips

SugarCRM is, for the most part, a channel sales organization. What this means for new users is that depending on the company/channel that the SugarCRM licenses are bought through, the new customer may or may not be given “the necessities” after the purchase. “The necessities” in this case are the links to information required to answer product questions after the sale takes place. In many instances new customers are given a license key and information about professional services and consulting.

In the next few paragraphs I will point you to the additional documents that you will need to have on hand in order to answer product questions as you move forward with your new CRM.

Documentation

The first area that we will look at is the SugarCRM Documentation page. Once you browse to this page you can pick the SugarCRM Edition that you are using and then the tab with your version. Under this tab there will be two or three guides depending on your version.

The first is the User Guide which will tell you about using every area of the product except the admin section. The documentation is very well written and answers almost any question that you may have.

The second document is the Installation and Administration Guide. This document will tell you everything that you need to know about the administration of SugarCRM. The installation portion will tell you how to install SugarCRM but will not tell you how to setup the webserver which is required to run the software. This is left out mainly because there are just to many different configurations and types of webservers on the market for SugarCRM to effectively provide this data. Also, if you are not familiar with or do not have someone that knows webservers in your organization then you should purchase the SaaS service and let someone else host SugarCRM.

The last guide is the developers guide. Currently this can be found in the forum or under the SugarCRM 5.1 version tab. It provides information about how SugarCRM operates internally so that you can make upgrade safe customizations and more easily adapt SugarCRM to your organization.

SugarCRM University

SugarCRM offers a healthy amount of documentation on the product. In conjunction with the documentation they also offer training, 80% of which is free. When you browse to the SugarUniversity page you will be presented with the SugarCRM Online Library and the Learning Sessions. The library holds step by step tutorials in written format and the learning sessions are videos that tell you how to use various areas of the product. I suggest that most users head over to the learning sessions and spend some time getting to know the product before they login.

The Forum

After you have searched the documentation and watched the videos you may still have questions. If you browse over to the SugarCRM Forum you will see a very active Help section. In this section you can post any general help related questions that you may have. Another good tip is to post to the forum before you open a support ticket. Most of the time someone else will be on the forum at the same time you are and can provide a quick answer or follow up.

Support vs Code Support

SugarCRM Support is the place that you go once you have exhausted all of the options above. One thing that SugarCRM support will not help you with is code level changes. Most of the time if it is in the form of a question such as “where should I put this file for it to be upgrade safe” then they will help. But sending code snippets asking for them to tell you why something won’t work is not part of the contract. Coding is one of those things were there is just to many variables. So, stick to sending in support tickets on product questions that you can ‘t figure out or if something breaks. For the developers, SugarCRM offers the forum and the Developer Zone.

Developer Zone

The Developer Zone is exactly what the title says. It is an area of the SugarCRM site that provides information around developing in SugarCRM. The blog is frequently updated by engineers and other SugarCRM team members which provides you up to date information about addons to various areas of the product. The tools and tutorials sections allow anyone to provide documents written about SugarCRM which range from “Light boxing in a detail view” to “Programmatically Hiding and Displaying Panels Based on the Value of A Drop Down in 5.1.”

SugarForge vs SugarExchange

The questions about SugarForge and SugarExchange come up for almost every new SugarCRM user. The forge and exchange are places to download modules that will add to the functionality of SugarCRM. They are very easy to install and instructions can be found in the Installation and Administration Guide.

• SugarForge

SugarForge is where developers can post modules that they want to share with everyone at no cost. These are use at your own risk modules that you will want to try out on a test machine before deploying to production.

• SugarExchange

This area is where users can buy and sell modules. One things to keep and eye out for in this section is the Certified by SugarCRM logo. This means that when you purchase a module, if it causes a problem with your SugarCRM instance that the SugarCRM support group will assist you. This points out another tip. SugarCRM support will not help you with 3rd party modules. You will need to contact the module builder to get support.

I hope that this has lead you to SugarCRM resources that you were not aware of and that will help you get moving in the right direction. If you have any other resources that were helpful to you during the time you were learning about SugarCRM please comment or email them to me.

Tags: Development, SugarCRM, sugarcrm development, sugarcrm new users, sugarcrm support, support

Send People On Site

Understanding customers and their needs can sometimes be a complicated process. Most software companies today seem to develop and deploy in a bubble only taking customer requests through a narrow channel of managers, product managers, and sales. This channel is in place to help keep focus in the R&D department but can lead to drastic problems on site with customers.

The standard in a majority of software companies is that only certain people deal with the customers. As I stated before, the positions with this “privilege” are sales, management, product managers, and support.  The problem that companies run into with this structure is that the people developing and testing the software never get a good understanding of the headaches that their software causes. They are so shielded by the internal information channel that even if the software is considerably hard to support, use, or customize, they may never get a full understanding on just how bad it is.

This is the case in many places except with the Mercury/HP group. Once SPI Dynamics was bought by HP I was able to get a front row seat on the impact that going on site would have. The Mercury/HP group was extremely adamant about sending engineers on site to fully and thoroughly understand customer issues. I have to say that this was one of the best and most logical ideas I had witnessed in a long time.

Sending developers and QA engineers on site proved to be one of the best learning experiences that one could get. The developers quickly gain an understanding of why customers are having trouble with a piece of software. The QA engineers are able to understand first hand how each customer is using the software which enables them to create more “real life” testing scenarios.

With today’s economic climate not every company can really afford to send developers and engineers on site. Although face to face communication and working on site with a customer allows for the best customer experience there are many alternatives.

The first is a forum. I don’t mean your standard community forum where the company politely asks if everyone can monitor the forum as they get time. Most of the time this does not work and many posts go unanswered leaving a bad experience for large groups of users. What I suggest is holding people accountable. Make it mandatory that each developer/engineer monitor the forum for a certain period of time and assist users in order to better understand their pain points. With this monitoring there should be metrics such as how many people they helped, how many problems were solved, and what problems are reoccurring.

Another alternative is web meetings. A web meeting where users and engineers can remotely share monitors and speak on the phone is a low cost solution that opens the lines of communication.

Lastly is to give them the time to sit with support and help them solve issues. Support is the main channel in which software issues come in, especially when no forum is available. Allowing this time will give developers/engineers first hand knowledge of the frustrations that not only customers run into but also the frustrations of support engineers.

The overall theme is to not shelter the people who have the most impact on the software. Help them understand the problem that customers run into so that they can have more of an understanding of their pain. Many times it is easy to sit back and dismiss software issues when your in the bubble. Working with someone directly who is having a problem helps both parties create an understanding and be more willing to help each other over time. In addition, multiple departments working together promotes cross training and understanding.

Tags: forums, on site, support, web meeting

Call your own call center

As a consumer of many products, it always quickly becomes apparent how much a company values it’s existing customers when there is a problem. The standard problem solving strategy always starts with Googling, but sometimes you just can’t find the right search string. At some point the consumer decides to call customer support.

The call center is where most companies absolutely fall flat on their face. The first step is finding the number, sometimes this can be done quickly via the website. Other times you have to go through many layers of pages which try to direct you to a possible solution. This usually ends in clicking the box at the bottom of the screen that says ” this article did not answer my question.” From a business perspective this is understandable. The general public will likely have the same core questions that can be answered with a simple search through the knowledge base. For the more tech savvy customer you will inevitably call support when you can’t find your answer.

Problem one is poorly designed automated phone systems. If a customer has to go through to many levels of keypad menus then they will automatically start to have a bad experience. This will not help the customers feelings when they hit the next issue. Let me take a moment to explain what to many menus consists of. The first way you can tell is if the menu system goes more than three menus deep. If the customer has to listen to all options and pick more than three times then they are likely to start down the path of frustration. Secondly if each level of options contains more than five options then they will quickly tire of listening and remembering. From this analysis one could say that if there are more than 15 total options on the menu system then customers will grow weary. Alternative to dial pads are voice recognition systems. Personally I have not had many problems with these systems. They usually understand what I am saying except for the system I called the other day which prompted this post. If the system does not understand the user more than 2 times during the call then the user should be automatically put into dial menu mode. The phone system should also have metrics on how many times this happens. Using these metrics you can quickly determine if voice recognition is working accurately or not.

Now that we have a full understanding of menu system issues lets look at the second and arguably the biggest problem which is the flow of data. Most of the phone systems used in call centers ask you to input information before you speak with a representative. For call center automation this is a great process. Important data is relayed to representatives before the customer even gets to their phone. The problem with this is that I have only called one company in my life were the data was pulled up before I got to the representative on the other side.  For every other company I have called I was forced to put in information that in no way helped me in the future. I diligently entered and confirmed my information only to be asked for the exact same information again. To further break the flow of information we can add in hard transfers. A hard transfer is when you get transferred to another person who has no knowledge of the conversation that you just had with the first representative. Effectively starting over from scratch and telling them your information for the third time along with a second spewing of your issue. Soft transfers often result in the same problem but generally go a little better. So instead of an 9 on the pain in the butt meter they get an 8.

Last but not least there are the people, the human that is reached that is meant to help fix your issue. I thoroughly understand the business requirement to have this as a tiered system with the most knowledgeable people at the top. The issue that I see most customers run into is the inability for the first tier to understand when the question is beyond their knowledge or when to stray from the script. Many companies make each and every customer go through every step in the script even though the customer may be a pro user of their product. For many products their are gigantic warning signs that tell the representative about the users product knowledge. If the customer knows all the lingo or can tell you the steps in your own script then they probably don’t need to go through it. Or they need to go through it just for a sanity check but very quickly instead of the normal snails pace. In the end, all of this information should be tracked. The knowledge level of the customer, how many times they have called before, and any other data that can make call routing more efficient. As always this of course depends on your product or business. If most calls are one time calls instead of ongoing support then there is no need to log such granular customer information. If in fact these are on going relationships then the system and representatives should have the most granular data possible to give the customer the best possible service. This will give the customer the feeling of personalized service but with call center efficiency.

Calling your own call center is a must. This should be done on a weekly or monthly basis depending on your call centers volume using a fake name so nobody knows who you are . The testing process should start just like a customer. First find the number and then go through the steps marking down all inefficiencies as you go. Since you will be doing this every week you will need to have a grading card that outlines the various areas of the process that you are checking. The true test is to have others do it as well. As an insider you are already aware of to many of the processes to objectively grade the system. This “insider” status will make you more likely to create excuses for why something doesn’t work instead of focusing on the grading the system itself.

Tags: call automation, call center, customer support, ivr, support