everything's not lost.

if there are two ways to do something – do it the hard way?

a customer said, that there was a problem with the delivery of an e-mail and that she got an error message (probably from the MAILER-DAEMON), so i asked her to forward that mail (she didn’t think of that before, nor did she tell me the recipient e-mail so I could check the logs on my own).

what i got was

• an e-mail with “here you go”
• the e-mail had an attachement
• the attachement was a pdf file
• the pdf file was the scan of the mail
• the scan was a OCR scan as well, so i could copy/paste*

uhm. works for me… but hey…. why not use the “forward” button in your mail-client? :)

reminds me of the times (yes, happened more than once!) when I asked for the screenshot of an error message and got either a scanned print OR a snapshot from a digital camera when someone made a picture of the screen. once someone used the flash for the photo and I couldn’t see the error message because of the reflection.

fun times, fun times.

* copy/paste was useless by the way since the print that has been scanned was scanned a little distorted so there was no use for that :)

CastleCamp Kaprun is over and I have to say that it was a real pleasure being there. my fourth Barcamp (2*klagenfurt, 1*vienna) but the first to have a dedicated topic: tourism. since I work in tourism and like the idea of Barcamps and also like free t-shirts, I had to be there. based upon the list of participants I knew and expected a few of our customers to attend, that’s how I could convince my boss to give me the company car and pay my accommodation.

LOCATION

the Barcamp took place at the Kaprun castle, you have to check out the official location-pictures. pretty awesome I must say. a great place, looking forward to the 360° panos from Stefan Kuzmanov. interior pix (thanks once again to dChris from Austria Tourism for his digital fisheye :)

ORGANISATION

it’s hard to believe that Rainer has never been to a Barcamp before, because he organized everything so well. apart from the location, the breakfast and lunch were great and delicious. also, all the coke, mineral water, coffee and Red Bull and stuff you want. the wireless LAN worked like a charm, there was a microphone for the introduction- and feedback-round (highly missed in Vienna). everything was A-OK. i wasn’t at the afterparty because I paid a friend a visit, but it seems like I missed some great music. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT. :)

SCHWAG or “I’m just here to get my free t-shirt and then I’m gone.”

so far, every Barcamp had it’s own t-shirt and they are always very welcome, but this time there was no t-shirt for anybody. way better: there was a nice sweater – the regular Zell am See – Kaprun sweater with only a few small logos on the bottom side. looks nice and is a great idea. very handy because it’s getting colder and colder – this weekend in particular wasn’t very warm :)

PARTICIPANTS

as said in the feedback round and in the video for Hannes (I think I don’t want to see it :o) i thought that a Barcamp specialized in tourism is a great idea – there was already one in Eichstätt. there were people from all different kinds of related companies with different backgrounds and interests and it was amazing to meet them and get to know more areas of the tourism industries, their goals, their problems, their approaches, their ideas, etc. very constructive and as always: the session-timeframe literally killed a few ongoing discussions. this is the fourth time I saw this happening, but of course the problem is that you can’t go to another room and continue, because you want to see ongoing sessions. how to solve this in future barcamps? longer sessions? longer breaks in between? set up a discussion board? but then you’d have to have registration and posting an so on, maybe too much to ask for some?

TOPICS

I’d say there was a fair share of the usual topics such as SEO, social media and web 2.0 stuff, but also some interesting conversations about guests from different countries in tourism destinations or hotels or a session about Open Street Map by Helge in substitution for Peter. OSM sounds interesting and I have to talk about it with my co-worker. and hopefully a lession could be learned: a Barcamp is not a place for a sales pitch. you don’t get to choose your audience – if your session is interesting enough, there will be an audience. if not, not. deal with it and try to be constructive in other sessions, not invasive :)

ALL IN ALL

for the time being, Rainer set the bar pretty high for future Barcamps I think. I’m looking forward to the next year and I hope to see many people again in Klagenfurt and on various other occasions :)

just read the feedback forms of the training i gave today in front of 15 people. i love it when i read stuff like this to the question like “what did you think of your trainer?”:

very professional

very competent

he knows what he is speaking about

i mean, come on, isn’t that something you’d expect from a trainer that you pay good money to tell you something about a system from his own company? :)

hm, that day started well. not. turns out, i’m a prick.

here’s what happened:

• customer sent a mail with a question
• based on the evidence i knew the answer. still, i forwarded the mail to my co-worker to check it and answer it.
• my co-worker sent the mail to the customer, including me as a CC address.
• i was right and wrote a short message back “they asked that already 4 times now :)“
• i had clicked on “reply to all” and of course, the customer got the mail as well. how embarrasing.
• the customer replied with “well, a little confusion here and there should be allowed to everyone ?! greetings, sandy”

i want to die.

working in customer care means, that you will have to find the right words to communicate facts in a language the customer most easily understands. this applies to communicating problems as well. no bullshitting around with technical terms, metaphors are hard too, so try to avoid it.

and a very big part in communicating in support is the ability to ask the right questions to get the answers you need to help the customer. i can do this pretty good, if i may say so. the other way round is a bit more tricky – bringing the customer to ask the right question in the first place.

there is a story i love to tell because a) it really happened and b) it’s a perfect example*.

meet sarah. sarah is our main contact person from a customer. sarah, of course, is not her real name. and she could be a man as well, just to clarify that it’s not about women but about people that don’t have a clue ;)

now to simplify the premises let’s just say sarah is the main contact and there are 15 other contacts in other locations. each contact has it’s own access data. it’s a bit more complicated than that, but enough background information for now. here’s an email she sent to me:

Hi Thomas,

can you please change the passwords for some locations?

thanks
Sarah

if you don’t get it while reading it the first time, you might be my target audience at work.

here’s what i should have replied:

Hi Sarah,

i’ve changed the passwords for some locations.

bye
Thomas

and not a single bit of information more. of course, i didn’t reply with this mail, because – believe it or not – i’m more interested in helping than in proving my point. the way i replied was a short, friendly message like “sure thing, no problem. just tell me the locations and the prefered passwords each”.

before you might think, that her mail could have been just the question, if it is possible, to change passwords, i have to disappoint you – the mail is a direct quote as written above, no misunderstanding here.

other fine, but not so funny examples are mails like these:

Hi Thomas,

I’m getting an error.

bye
Harry

(…)

in these cases, i refuse to think about it for even a second and only respond with a nice “what kind of error message” message. there’s an error message on the screen that is telling you something, if you want me to do something about it, at least have the courtesy to read and forward it. i’m good, but i’m not that good.

the good thing is, most of the customers are learning to forward the full error description, but it’s a hard process to teach ‘em.

* and to be fair it’s quite funny as well :D