Hopeless Customer Support

February 8th, 2009 Filed under: Rants, Reviews, Web | Tags: technology, web

Ok, just want to get this off my chest. If you run a company and offer customer support you should do it to the best of your ability or not at all. Why waste my time not to mention your time and money offering completely useless customer support. It just makes me not want to deal with you or your product/service.

I am currently trying to find an online photo service where I can upload and share photos of the days happenings at my preschool. Of course I want these photos to be private and only viewable by parents of the children. I was looking at Snapfish and read through their sharing documentation before sending this question to their customer support:

Hello,

I work at a pre-school and would like to share the photos of the days activities with the parents. Is there a way to share my entire photo library with select people without having to invite them to each album. For example, I would create a new album for every day, but I don’t want to have to send each parent an e-mail everyday to invite them to view that days album. Ideally I would like to just send one invite to each parent which would give them access to everydays album including the ones that have yet to be created.

Thanks for your time,

Ki Mansell

In all honesty I expected them to reply saying that this was not possible (because it isn’t mentioned at all in their documentation) but they would look into adding this functionality to a future update if other customers asked for the same ability. But instead I got this:

Dear Ki,

Thank you for writing to us.

Please note that while sharing the the album or photos, you can add one or more email addresses and share the photos.

Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

Obviously they didn’t even read my initial e-mail, so I replied with this:

Wow are you serious. Did you even read my question? I understand that you can share photos or albums with others by adding their e-mails, I make reference to that in my question! What I want to know is if their is a way to invite people to view all albums including ones I am yet to upload. Saving me and them the hassle of sending them an e-mail invite everyday, which is what I would have to do if I created a new album everyday, correct?

Not impressed,

Ki

I am yet to hear back from them…

UPDATE:

They replied today with basically what I thought they would have in the first place. It’s almost like they read my blog post…

Dear Ki,

Thank you for writing back to us.

We extremely regret the delay in replying your email.

We’re sorry, that feature is not available at this time, but we are always looking for ways to improve our service.

We review customer feedback regularly to determine what Snapfish customers most want and your comments will certainly be a part of that process.

Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

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Webby Chat

January 21st, 2009 Filed under: Life, Reviews, Web | Tags: technology, web

Trying out a new piece of web magic. Webby Chat is a little bit of javascript that adds a sliding chat window to any website. You can see the button on the right of the page. I can see this as being cool for busy or more social sites but probably won’t be much use for whataboutki.com. That being said I’m always a sucker for new gadgets, so I have added it anyway.

Webby Chat is slightly customizable allowing you to:

choose which side of the browser it will appear on

whether it is open by default

how wide the chat box is

where the webby chat button will appear

It still has its problems though, not letting you choose your own name is a pain, and the sliding window goes over your sites content in Firefox. It’s still in beta though so these will all be fixed in the future you would think.

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Old School PDA

January 19th, 2009 Filed under: Life | Tags: technology

I saw this along time ago on Life Hacker I think. Basically it’s a bunch of cards stuck together with a clip. I’m using it to keep track of my daily to-do list. I have yellow cards on the front and red on the back, which allows me to easily keep track of two lists; Yellow = Daily To-Do, Red = Things to put on whataboutki.com.

I tried using my iPod Touch to keep track of my lists, but it takes to long to type out the notes. Plus I don’t like caring my iPod at work because the kids quite often get hold of it. Nothing beats a good old pen and paper.

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