Recently I came into the office to find that one of my two workstation monitors was getting no juice–it was completely blank. I’m pretty sure an automatic Windows update blew out the driver for my dual-monitor controller. After a restart, Windows told me it couldn’t find any driver for the video controller, and wasn’t able to find any compatible controllers online either. Tragedy.

It had been a very long time since I had done this job with only one monitor, and it was fairly amazing how difficult it was to go back to it. As you can see in my screenshot below, there are quite a few things I need to have at close reach while I’m working, and there’s no way to deal with them all on a single monitor without constantly switching between windows to see what’s going on.

Which got me thinking: you guys aren’t doing all your work on just a single monitor, are you? The difference in productivity between a single and dual-monitor setup is definitely significant for anyone who is consistently working with a number of different tools. But I think there’s also a health issue here: I felt much more stressed out working that way. I felt cramped up and twitchy. By the time I left, I was a little burned out. And it was much tougher for me to unwind than is usual, even after a long day.

Working with computers all day can be much more stressful than a lot of folks would imagine. And it’s usually not an all-out assault of stress that you could point to as something that was definitely doing you harm. Rather, it’s a slow and steady trickle of stress that comes from paying attention to lots of little things for prolonged periods of time. Most of us are already only too aware that chronic stress can ruin your health, so you should take every possible precaution to ensure that your workday is as relaxed and pleasant as possible.

One of the very simplest things you can do to reduce your stress level is to reduce visual clutter. Allow yourself a little room to move around in, and you’ll find you feel less… imposed upon. This most definitely applies to what you see on your screen(s). I usually even go so far as to keep all of my windows just a little smaller than they could be so that I can see the space behind and between then more clearly. This establishes a sense of depth and expansiveness on your desktop, which not only gives you the visual impression of having more space for yourself, it also makes it easier to feel like each piece of work is a solid and graspable object, not a vast expanse of overwhelming workload.

So if you’re not already using at least two monitors, and organizing your workspace in such a way as to create a sense of natural simplicity and calm, then why not take a break from whatever you’re doing and get it set up right now? Not only will the increase in productivity easily earn back whatever time and money you spent on the setup, you’ll probably also notice an increased sense of well-being and improved overall health.

A while ago I told you about the new art installation in front of our building. I wasn’t really sure what it was supposed to be at that time or where it had come from or who was responsible. Of course, like any good citizen I relished the triumph of aesthetics in my corner of the city.

On Friday the Tribune carried a story about the sculpture, which is called the “Communication X9″ by an Israeli artist named Yaacov Agam. Yaacov is hopping mad.

It seems the sculpture was originally placed in another part of the downtown area, in an outdoor park that also features massive sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. Chicago loves a great big sculpture, what else can I tell you? Unfortunately, after a couple decades the paint on Agam’s sculpture started fading and peeling, so the city took it down for restoration.

This is where the trouble begins. The firm hired to perform the restoration–for $300,000!–was supposed to consult with Agam throughout the process in order to make sure that the restoration was true to his original work. The firm says they did, the artist says they didn’t. And now Agam is calling the restored sculpture “an unauthorized copy” of his original work and is suing everybody.

The idea behind the piece is that the subtle changes in color would create the perception of motion for onlookers. I never saw the original, so I can’t say how well it worked, but I don’t think I’ve noticed any perception of motion while gazing at the new and improved model.

The first big change is that all of your products and licenses are available under a single, centralized login. That includes free trials and free versions of our products, as well as any hosted accounts, downloadable software licenses, and even reseller accounts. It’s all in one convenient place, organized, and easy to find.

Everything you need to navigate the support center is all on the left sidebar. Manage Your Products, for example, is where you can go to view all of your serial numbers, to upgrade your licenses, to renew your upgrade/support contract or to add phone support. You can also purchase any add-ons that are available for your product right there under Manage Your Products.

A couple of really useful new features can be found under Download Your Products. Aside for the nifty new tabbed interface (pictured above) that lets you easily sort through the different types of licenses you own, take a look at the top right corner of that image. You’ll see a link for an RSS feed that you can subscribe to to be notified of updates to the products that you own.

You’ll find another great time-saver here when you’re ready to upgrade to the latest version. Between the links for full product downloads and the links to download your add-ons, you’ll find Upgrade Patches. Our system will ask you which version you’re currently using and automatically generate a simple patch that you can upgrade with. The upgrade process is then as simple as uploading the patch files right over top of your existing install and running the updater.php script from your browser. Delicious!

There are couple new things to see and explore in your support center account, which of course we believe are self-explanatory (since we made them.) But we’ll be rolling out additional touch-ups over the next few weeks, so post here if there is anything about the new support center interface that you don’t understand or would like to see work differently.

It seems counterintuitive that you should want to offer your customers a money-back guarantee. After all, the customer’s money is really what you came for. Once you’ve got it, and you’ve delivered your product, it makes sense that the transaction should be finished, right?

But this idea makes customers nervous. What if they buy the product only to find out that they can’t make it work for them the way they had hoped? What if they misunderstood the promotional literature and come to find that a critical feature is missing? What if they just plain change their mind? We’ve all experienced these worries when making a purchase, and your customers are no different. Your job is to put their minds at ease. Because nervous people don’t buy. They put it on hold and then forget to get back to it. It happens. You can probably think of plenty of times when you did this yourself.

Enter the money back guarantee. If you know you can get your money back, you worry less. You feel less pressured. You have some breathing room. So you go for it. As a business owner, you’ve told your customer that you are willing to shoulder the burden of their potential buyer’s remorse.

This is actually a win-win situation, because if you know that you’ve represented your product accurately, and that it is of a high quality, you can already predict that the vast majority of people who buy from you will not ask for their money back. You have the advantage in the situation: you already know that your customer needs what you are offering. As long as you are actually delivering what you promise, the only people who will ever take you up on the offer are the ones who simply misunderstood. And, frankly, you want them to return the product to you for a refund. Otherwise you’ll have a dissatisfied customer out their talking about all the things your product can’t do. This build up a perceived deficit in what may otherwise be a great product. The moral of the story is that you only ever want happy customers who will tell people nice things about you.

Offering a money back guarantee not only alleviates your customer’s anxiety about purchasing, it also conveys confidence. If you’re willing to give them 30 or even 60 days to make up their minds about whether the product is worth it, they know you mean business. If you’re selling crap, this strategy is not going to work for you. But when you’ve worked hard to produce a product that meets your clients’ needs, the sales you will gain by using this strategy will vastly outweigh the refunds you end up paying out.

In my previous post, I talked about some of the reasons to start doing web surveys. Of course, for someone who has no experience with this way of gathering information, starting to run surveys can be a little daunting. As always, you’ll want to make the user’s experience your first priority. This means taking a little extra care in crafting the surveys themselves and the ways that you promote them.

Survey early, Survey often

Don’t go back through the last 5 years of business data and figure out everything you’ve ever wished you knew about your clients and their habits and dump it all into one survey. It would be great if all of your customers were willing to spend 30 or even 60 minutes answering your questions, but they are not. In fact, if you ask them to do this, they’ll probably lose a lot of respect for you and be less likely to do business with you again. You’ll probably have better results doing a short 5-6 question survey every few months.

Mix it up a little

Since you’re adding frequent, short surveys, why not hook them into different actions that your site’s visitors are usually taking anyway? If you have a membership area, you could add in a quick survey between the login page and the member’s area. If you offer something for download, you could stick one in before the download is served. Make it feel like a quick, relatively unobtrusive extra step in the middle of an action that your clients are used to performing anyway. If you play this right, you can actually gain an extra layer of data that might tell you about the different types of answers you get from users engaged in different types of activity on your site. Continue reading →

One thing that really amazes me about the Internet is the level of value it’s brought to information. Just look at Google: one of the most recognizable and powerful companies in the world. Based on what? Possession and leveraging of information. It’s an information economy, and the more information you have, the more leverage you can wield. And yet, how many businesspeople do you know, even in the world of web business, who chronically undervalue the information available to them? Chances are, you’re one of them!

It’s very very easy to get all tangled up in products and services and policies and marketing, and to forget the most important part of the whole process: the information. If you develop and market and offer a product that no one wants, people are just not going to buy it no matter how great a job you’ve done every step of the way. Then again, maybe you’re offering exactly what people want, only they don’t know it because your marketing materials phrase it in a way they wouldn’t have thought of. Or maybe it would be great if you had just thought of this one critical thing.

So how do you gather information about what people want, what they need, what they like, dislike, hope for, dread, are excited about, will leave and never come back over? It couldn’t be simpler. You just ask them.

That’s why web based surveys are so powerful. They allow you to tap this type of information directly at the source, a little bit at a time. A lot of people aren’t sure exactly where web surveys fit into their business model, so I’ll break it down for you real simple. Are you ready? Here are 4 outstanding reasons to have your web surveys up and running yesterday:

1. People will tell you exactly what they want.
2. You will give it to them and become extremely wealthy.
3. Other people will want to know what you know.
4. You will give it to them and become extremely wealthy.

Okay, okay, I know. This all sounds a little extravagant. But the truth is, the best way to sell more is to know your market better. And if you just ask your existing customers what they really want, they’ll be happy to tell you, because they’ll understand that you’re ready to give them exactly what they want. It’s a beautiful thing, because everybody wins. Especially you

So what kinds of successes and failures have you had in your information-gathering efforts so far? And how do you think you could use web surveys to improve your business?

On Thursday I described how to successfully offer web-based support that your customers will love. But what if you’re the customer? Is there anything you can do to minimise your time investment and maximize your gains? As a matter of fact, there are a number of things you can do to ensure that you receive the best support that the company you’re working with has to offer.

• Be very descriptive.

Assume that your problem is unique, and offer up any and every piece of information you can think of that might help the support team solve your problem in one go. Chances are, the support team doesn’t actually want to give you any kind of runaround, or to keep your issue pending for days on end while they await further information from you.

I can’t tell you how many people have submitted frenzied tickets to our own support center begging for fast help getting their software back online, only to leave out any information about how we could actually access the software, or even what specific error they were seeing. You want quick help, and the support team you’re dealing with wants to give it to you; your job is to make sure they can do that for you.

• Keep it relevant.

If you need fast help getting your widgets working, this may not be the ideal time to explain how the widgets fit into your business model. Support staff are twitchy and tend to have ADHD–try not to distract them

• Take a moment to review the situation before you submit.

It can be very difficult to keep a cool head when you have an urgent issue that needs attention. But before you submit, take an extra few minutes to examine the problem, re-read your own support request, and make sure that you’ve included a clear, complete description of the problem and exactly what you have done to try and fix it.

Most web-based support systems will knock you back to the end of the queue if you submit a second request, so the extra time you take before submitting could save you a great deal of waiting time later on. Also, when you’re feeling frustrated, it’s really just too easy to lose your head and forget about basic things. Ask yourself: Have I fully described the problem? Have I mentioned everything that happened in the time leading up to the problem? Have I provided everything that is needed to investigate the problem? Have I described everything I’ve done since the problem first occurred?

• Make sure the ticket gets submitted.

Some online support systems have extra steps before the ticket is submitted; make sure there are no more buttons to click or windows to scroll through. Most systems will tell you directly that your ticket has been submitted and even give you a ticket number. Most will also send you a confirmation e-mail.

• Make sure you know how you’ll be answered.

If you’re expecting an answer by e-mail, make sure you got a confirmation e-mail. It may also be a good idea to go ahead and whitelist the support address just to be sure. If you didn’t get an e-mail, check the company’s support web site. In our support area, like most, there is a page where you can view your open tickets to see their status and any replies.

Most of these tips come down to the very same things I talked about when explaining how to succeed in providing support. They’re based on the same principles you can use to succeed in just about any kind of communication: try to consider the other person’s perspective. Think about what they need, what they want, and what you can do to understand them. Your communication will always be more effective when you have a level view of the field and all the people involved. You’ll get more done, and will make people feel motivated to help you.

Since we started giving away fully-functional, free versions of our most popular software products with no strings attached, we’ve been fielding some phone calls from disgruntled users of other people’s services.

You see, if you download and install a free copy of SupportTrio, for example, the bottom of each page of your support center will have a tasteful “Powered by SupportTrio” message with a link back to our site. To be honest, I’ve actually been a little surprised by how few disreputable vendors have ended up using our free software. For the most part our clients tend to be extremely upstanding members of the web community. But there are a few companies using free versions of our products who have failed to meet their clients’ expectations and have been generally unreachable.

So these hapless clients follow our “Powered by SupportTrio” link in hopes of finding anyone who might be affiliated with the company that is ruining their day. By the time they do that, they tend to be pretty upset, and so it can be difficult to help them understand that we really don’t have any affiliation with sites that use free versions of our products. After all, we only use full versions.

Now I’m going to tell you a secret. If you follow this simple principle, you can reasonably expect that 99% of the people you speak with will love you by the end--especially the ones who start out by feeling and acting upset.

The secret is that people are not barbarians; people genuinely want to be reasonable. The only time that people behave unreasonably is in the face of a situation that they experience as unreasonable. So, let them know that their experience and their reaction both basically make sense. Empathize. Tell them you know how they feel. Say, “Wow, that sounds really frustrating, I wish there was something I could do to help.”

That’s it! That’s all you have to do, and everyone you talk to will feel comforted and taken care of, and they may even keep you in mind for when they need some web-based software of their own!

A lot of people wonder if they can really make web-based support work for their business. Will clients tolerate having to do everything online, waiting for replies to their tickets, wondering about the response time? Don’t people just want to talk to you on the phone?

When it comes right down to it, web-based support is often simply the most cost-effective and efficient way to assist your clients. But there are some things you’ll need to do to make sure that your online support center is convenient, friendly, and responsive from the client’s perspective. Continue reading →

I’m experimenting a bit with Firefox 3, since the stable release should be out soon. There are still some issues: the bookmark manager, in particular, seems to get confused when I move bookmarks around, moving them to the wrong spot; even cloning separators rather than moving them. Stress-testing some AJAX didn’t work out so well, crashing overnight.

But one bright spot is its memory usage. It’s much better than Firefox 2, and despite some of the present quirks in the 5th beta, I’m pretty happy with the program overall. The Web Developer add-on has been updated for the latest beta, and Firebug (on its own site) has a beta version that’s compatible with Firefox 3, too. (Firebug is indispensable, really, particularly when debugging AJAX.)

Now all that’s left is for my RSS reader to be updated. Well, that, and of course the crashing should stop. The crashing should always stop.