A simple support principle: don’t close tickets.

Don’t you hate it when some customer support system automatically closes tickets without them being solved? The personal touch is gone and often people who are not helped, refuse to enter their question for a second time. The perception on customer support, your product and/or service and brand will be bad…

A simple support principle would be that you don’t close tickets yourself but ask your customer to do so. If not, (s)he will be contacted. Creating opportunities to touch base with end customers is not a buzzword. It’s simple principle whereby you create a dialogue and you will get to know numerous ways on how you can improve your product, service and brand perception. The feedback from your customers can be used to drive your business as they will be your first brand ambassadors.

At kañooh, we implemented this principle, next to some other customer touch points. So far, this works great and our clients think so too. Try it for your business.

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My 2k14 resolutions

 

1. Focus on what matters most; spend more time with my family and allow myself a break from time to time.
2. Sell ZOYOKO.com as we have no time to make it really happen. If you’re interested in taking over this feel-good brand for mama’s-to-be, just contact me. It’s a startup with great potential and its ambition is kinda cool.
3. Build kañooh and turn it into a CMS momument for the Flemish Government while Paddle will be the brand under which we (ONE Agency and ESN) will market Drupal-as-a-service as an enterprise solution somewhere in the next year.
4. Grow a netwerk of people who I find interesting and nice. Being member of BRYO helps. I meet a lot of young entrepreneurs, I help them free-of-charge and use them as a sounding board for my own business ideas and actions. In return, I hope to meet the ideal business partner to work with on some future projects.
5. Personally, I want to grow my overall strategic business acumen. Sometimes I’m too involved in the nitty gritty. That’ll probably requires more reading on business topics. (Currently I enjoy The Lean Startup of Eric Reis as I just act like it already but now get to know clear arguments to defend this approach)
6. Lastly, I need to write more in English. It’s simple not good enough. So I will pick up the ‘one idea per day‘ (#oipd) creativity writing task again.

P.S. If everything is working out fine, I want to learn a new language. Portuguese perhaps.

I was a first-timer at Drupalcon.

I attended Drupalcon Prague last week. What a great experience it was!

I attend the CxO Event where I met people from all sizes of companies and while topics were crowdsourced (good idea!), the quality of the discussions was really dependent on some of participants in a group. Anyway, I had some input on what the main problem of most companies is; finding people that deliver quality Drupal work. The Drupal community might have been thriving the product to a more complex ecosystem. As we all know the more complex, the more crappy something becomes and how impossible it almost becomes to keep it maintainable and innovative …

As I could also attend the Acquia Partner Day, i left the CxO event and took a seat to have a look into the future of Drupal and Acquia’s products and services. I was mainly impressed by Peter Guagenti (VP Products) presentation about the ‘could site factory’ platform (DrupalGardens v2) and the speech of Tom Erickson (CEO) who surprised everyone by stating Acquia hasn’t been the best partner but that they know and working on it. Acquia has some interesting stuff coming up and even more strategic initiatives that should really so I tend to believe him.

As I was there to do some business, I did two keynotes (Dries Buytaert & Aral Balkan) and only attended a few sessions.
What stroke me is that Dries’ presentation was pretty pixel perfect from a communication-technical point-of-view but that he seemed a bit distracted and not very convincing. It might have gotten something to do with his grandmother passing away (My sincerest condoleances, Dries!). What I remember from his presentation is that he was really diplomatic about the backdrop issue and the forking of Drupal in general in relation to Drupal 8.
Aral was, as always, a great evangelist of ux design for a free world. Funny, to-the-point and great to watch presenting his beliefs!
There is one particular session I want to give a special mention. The session of Sylvain Moreau about Universal Media Assets Management in Drupal with the Scald module was very interesting indeed. When I evaluated the scald module in february, I quickly fell in love with the ideas but was very disappointed about the execution. Now, in september, they evolved it to the what’s probably the best asset module for Drupal’s future. We will probably use it now in our Paddle distribution for kanooh.
For the rest, I had great in-depth meetings with Commerce Guys and Acquia to start and strenghten our partnerships. The future is bright for ONE Agency.

I also got to meet up with some fabulous dev, design and business people i got lost in touch with for several years, and others I only knew from twitter, so I can safely say; Drupalcon, you were great! Thank you!