Adii Pienaar

If there's one thing that I've been tolerating less & less in recent years, it's the bullshit excuses that companies sometimes offer up, disguised as customer service. Let me explain with a recent experience:

Two days ago, I quickly stop at the little shopping center on my way home after work to pick up some flowers for my wife (I know, so romantic). I'm in & out within 5 minutes, only to find that I lost my parking ticket (the center has paid parking, but the first 30 minutes is free). I go to the management office, where I'm told that I will need to pay a penalty fee for my lost ticket, which is the equivalent of being parked there for 24 hours. Not only that, but I need to complete an "application" form of sorts and they need a copy of my ID.

Trying to determine the rationale behind this, I was told repeatedly that he - as manager - can't do anything about it and that he was only applying the "rules". I thought it was daylight robbery of course.

So here's my issue with that: why have a manager in the first place if he is not allowed to manage the situation correctly. Surely common sense should prevail here and good customer service would dictate that they should've helped me, instead of man-handling the whole situation.

In fact, I was being a good customer. I go there often and I went there again to spend more money there. Why should I be punished for a silly mistake? I understand that rules exist for a reason, but business owners & managers need to be able to bend those rules from time to time; especially if that means you're delivering happiness to your customers. In my opinion, there's just no excuse for this bullshit handling of such situations.

By offering bullshit reasons for your even more bullshit actions, you are only alienating your customers.

On Monday we launched a brand-new user dashboard at WooThemes (which felt like suicide at the time) and it's not been without the expected launch bugs.

I've learnt in the last 3 days that the best way to fail is to fail fast & fail publicly. Since launch, I've been personally answering every single e-mail from an user with an issue on their WooThemes account. This has given me so much insight into the kind of bugs that exist in the system and has empowered the team to prioritize the bugs accordingly.

Failing publicly also means that we've got some great motivation for fixing this sooner rather than later: our whole user base is watching us. I'm sure we'll be judged not by the bugs that were present, but our ability to deal (or not deal) with this situation.

At this stage, we're just being as transparent & honest as possible with regards to everything that is going on and must say that 99,9% of WooThemes users that I've interacted with have been very kind about this. I guess we could've delayed the roll out to do more testing beforehand, but that would've just delayed the project and it would not have guaranteed a bug-free launch. So we would've had to deal with this exact situation regardless.

If you're gonna fail, do so fast & publicly. And don't forget to react transparently & honestly; your customers will love you for that!

I'm typing this as WooThemes prepares to roll out on of our biggest projects to date and I can't help to remind myself of all of the articles that suggests rewriting one's code is like committing startup suicide (more here, here & here).

So we're rolling out a completely revamped and re-written user dashboard, which includes a new payment processor, new checkout-related features, major UI / UX overhauls and a brand new user admin backend. That's amongst other things. This is literally the foundation on which WooThemes has been built for about 3 years now, so we're changing a lot of history and a shitload of code.

I know this overhaul isn't product-related (which is what Steve Blank's article suggests would be suicide), but it still feels massively stressful rewriting the core of our business. As I sit here typing this, I'm both thrilled to finally launch a project that has been in the works for 18 months and that will greatly propel WooThemes forward. But along with this excitement, I'm stressed, anxious and I've never doubted any project this much.

Why?

At this stage you might be wondering why we decided to go through this re-write... When we eventually set up WooThemes, we used a proprietary platform (to get set up in the most agile, cost-efficient way possible), which we've been hacking and hacking as our needs & user base has continued to grow. This has meant that we now have a very workable platform (we wouldn't have grown this far if we hadn't), but without further hacking we've become very limited on a load of fronts.

We've also been absorbing a lot of recurring support requests, because there just hasn't been a way to fix those within our existing system. Yep, 18 months of 10 - 20 e-mails a day that could've been solved by a fix. (This another reminder of how "boring" it can be running a company.)

It's not been an easy road getting here; partly due to outsourcing problems, bad project management and feature-creep. I'm just so glad that the day (feels like judgement day) has finally come and that we can unveil all of the hard work that has gone into this. If you're reading this, the roll-out has been a success (albeit not bug-free), which means our attention is now fully focused on powering our way to the next 3 years.

We've seen so many online industries being disrupted in the last couple of months (think AirBnB for accommodation & Hipmunk for traveling). In fact, I think "disruption" (using the current "trendy" definition) has become a business model in itself: just change things around completely within an industry, offer a superior product / service / experience and you're good to go.

The one industry that really needs some disruption badly is online payments. Sheesh, with more online businesses being started than ever before, I can't believe that something as completely shit as PayPal is still the #1 go-to for most of these startups. Payment processing is the lifeblood of these startups and yet we still have a variety of inadequate solutions available.

I think online payments fail for a couple of reasons (individually or in some cases, a combination of these):

• The best solutions are almost never available to anyone outside of the States. The startup economy is truly global now and there's no excuse why payment solutions haven't been democratized across the board.
• International and cross-country money transfers are still a mess, doesn't matter which service you use. Surely our politicians / reserve bank officials / economists / whoever can come up with something that's even 1% better.
• Customers don't just trust any payment processor and rightfully I don't think they should.
• Oh and did I mention PayPal, with its robotic support and complete inability to ever resolve a dispute fairly, is from the devil? I don't trust PayPal with more than $100 of my money. Ever.

I could probably go on, but these are the main reasons I see for the below-par experience with the solutions we have available at the moment.

With this at the back of my mind, I recently pulled the trigger on my first angel investment with InspirePay (where I'll also be an active advisor). The thing I liked about InspirePay was that they were actively trying to make things better and I especially think that there aim to democratize superior payment processing globally is fantastic (albeit ambitious).

Maybe it's just me... I'm from South Africa and as a result we've been excluded from using some of the better payment solutions out there. Maybe if we were based in the Valley I wouldn't have felt this way... What do you think? Got similarly frustrating experiences to share?

I got an e-mail notification this morning from Kiva to let me know that my account had automatically sent out the balance to a new loan. Usually I just archive these notifications immediately, but this morning it reminded me how much I actually loved this feature. Let me explain...

I love everything about Kiva and I try to increase my lending on there every other month. In the past, I would lend out the money and then wait for it to be repaid. But I didn't always keep up-to-date with that repayment balance, which meant my account would accumulate for weeks (to $200 / $300) before I would send the money out on loan again. Essentially that meant that the funds I had earmarked as donations were just sitting - inefficiently - in my account.

A couple of months ago though (along with their redesign if I remember correctly), Kiva added an auto-lending option. What this does now, is that as soon as my account reaches the minimum loan amount of $25 it is sent to lenders in the demographic that I've specified (out of interest, I have a soft spot for food-related projects in Africa). In my mind, this is the perfect solution, because it doesn't even require me to log in, yet Kiva is getting the most out of my (passive) engagement as I'm still re-lending the money at a much more efficient rate.

Set & Forget

User engagement is one of the leading metrics that startups are using at present and is much more accurate than - for example - total amount of users. Leading VC, Fred Wilson, also published a great article a while back on how you shouldn't be excluding your logged out users.

So in a world, where user engagement is everything (especially since it may just positively influence Customer Lifetime Value), it's these kind of "set & forget" features that can increase user engagement easily. Low-hanging fruit basically.

This same logic can apply to monthly subscription plans that are cheap. I know of a couple $5 subscriptions that I forget about every month, even though I barely use the service. Sure, this doesn't drive user engagement, but it brings in some passive revenue.

Just a few thoughts... What do you think? Does any of the services that you use have these "set & forget" features?