Iarfhlaith Kelly - Code agus Craic

Locking in your customers doesn’t work. People use what they want to use. If they’re not happy with your service they’re going to leave whether you want them to or not. So opening up your service and giving your customers the choice helps your company look honest and encourages people to trust you.

Earlier today I had a run in with a company that clearly doesn’t get this concept.

Last week I needed to send a fax in a hurry. I didn’t have a fax machine in the office and the faxing service that’s offered in the main building hadn’t opened yet. I was running out of options. So I decided to look online for a faxing service that could send the fax for me. After a short search I found eFax which were offering a 30 day free trial. This sounded perfect because I only needed to send this one fax, after which I could close the account and avoid being charged.

A Decent Online Fax Service

First impressions were good. The sign up process was easy and once logged in, finding my way around the system was fairly intuitive. The eFax system works by assigning your account with a unique local phone number which you can use to send and receive electronic faxes as if they were normal paper faxes. It’s not a new idea, or a new company, but I hadn’t used anything like it before and was pretty impressed by it all. (Actually, any service that helps to break down the barriers between the offline and online worlds usually impresses me.)

Anyway, I sent my fax and I was happy. Crisis averted.

All I had to do now was cancel my eFax account. Unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as I had expected. In fact it was downright difficult. Here’s what happened:

There Was No Cancel Button

As part of the sign up I had to hand over my credit card details. eFax charge a minimum monthly fee of about €7 but with the free trial you get the first 30 days for free. I was keen to cancel my account before this subscription fee kicked in but was disappointed to find that you couldn’t cancel from within the service. There was no cancellation button to be found anywhere.

Online Help - Was Not So Helpful

I decided to try their FAQ section to see if there was any tips on removing or cancelling an account there. But just like in their logged in service, there was no mention of it.

Live Chat Was Like Talking To A Robot

Having given up on the FAQ section I decided to use their live chat facility to manually request that they remove my account. After a short wait, I was through to one of the operators. I quickly explained that I wanted to cancel my account but received a stream of unhelpful, pre-written replies that could just as easily have been delivered by a robot.

Eventually I discovered that I was using the wrong live chat service (sales only) and that eFax had a special dedicated chat line for people who want to cancel their account. It’s also hidden and unadvertised. So here’s the link: https://www.efax.com/en/efax/twa/page/chat

Clearly, they don’t advertise this link on their site to make it even more difficult to cancel an account.

Queue Position 8  - Not Good Enough

Once I managed to get the second live chat up and running (it doesn’t work in Firefox) I was greeted by the message that I was number eight in the queue and that I would have to wait approximately 20 minutes before someone could chat to me about cancelling my account.

The frustration was starting to get the better of me.

After 16 minutes of waiting and a fresh cup of tea I got talking to a support monkey who was eventually able to cancel my account. But that wasn’t before he tried to convince me to stay on until the end of the 30 day trial or before he asked me to fill out a questionnaire on why I wanted to cancel my account.

Lesson of the Day: Trust and Openness Matters Online

I left the chat with a sour taste in my mouth and a severe dislike for the underhanded way in which eFax have designed their ‘free trial’ service.

Let’s not forget, I was happy with the service up until the point where I decided to close my account. Yes, I was cancelling it but there was every chance that I might reopen it in the future and also recommend it to others. But now, after the way that eFax tried to lock me into their service I will never use them again and I won’t be referring them to anyone.

For as long as I can remember, businesses have deliberately attempted to confuse consumers by using over-complicated pricing plans that are hard to compare against the competition.

In today’s Ireland, this is especially true for mortgages, broadband and other telecoms services like mobile phone plans.

Have you ever tried to directly compare mortgage rates? It’s tough because many of them are measured in different ways (variable rate, fixed rate, tracker rate, LTV mortgages, etc.). Using different metrics makes it impossible to directly compare each product. The same goes for broadband. It’s hard to directly compare pricing plans.

But this isn’t going to last much longer.

The Game is Changing

There’s a shift in power that’s moving in favour of the consumer. It’s becoming easier for everyone to see through these deliberate attempts to confuse. Social tools have allowed us to become more organised, and more informed.

Comparison sites like Google’s Product Search, GoCompare (UK only) and PriceRunner (also UK only), are helping consumers make informed decisions that are no longer based on a glossy brochure or a smooth talking salesman. They’re based on the views of their piers and the community. They’re also based on cold hard facts.

It’s Already Happening

Recently, the major mobile service providers here in Ireland have had to launch simplified plans that are more flexible and are easier to compare to the competition. Pat Phelan has done a great job highlighting O2’s new Clear plans that have obviously been launched to counteract Threes new Relax plans.

The Best Value Will Win Out

The move to more transparent pricing models is great news for consumers. It will mean that we’ll always know who’s offering the best deal (on price or service) at any particular time.

This will force businesses to provide more competitive transparent prices instead of offering a set of confusing price plans designed to be hard to compare against the competition. In the end, the business providing the best value will win out.

And that’s great news for all of us.

This morning, Microsoft launched a preview of what they’re calling the Mesh Operating Environment (MOE). It’s an online platform geared at solving the device divergence, data convergence issue that I wrote about recently.

From the new www.mesh.com website, here’s the official description:

“Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about— available wherever you happen to be.”

Sounds like the perfect solution, except it’ll only support windows devices (for now). See Scoble’s review for the full background to the launch.

Why Am I Interested?

This is Microsoft’s first real attempt at an online application. When it’s fully launched (probably in October this year), it’ll no doubt prove extremely popular, and as a developer I need to make sure that my own applications will be ready when this happens.

Microsft’s Mesh is going to provide a few interesting ways for developers to hook in their own applications. It’ll support ‘two-way RSS’ and have a RESTful API. Both of which combined enable other applications to fully interact with the MOE.

So why am I interested again? I’m interested because if this is where the community is going, my applications will need to provide tight integration options with it.

Critical Mass of Adoption

Once there are enough people using it, and I don’t think that’ll take too long (there are over 10,000 beta testers alone), Microsoft’s Mesh will likely become a one stop shop for online file management.

If it’s possible to integrate this online file system with existing web applications (my own included), which I think it will be, then people’s expectations of traditionally ’stand-alone’ web applications will sky rocket.

Having fragmented data strewn across the Internet at various locations may not cut it anymore. People want their data in a central location (at least I do), so if I stumble across a web application that does what I need and also integrates with my existing online storage, I’ll be sold on the spot.

Now all I need is a beta preview account to help me prepare. Anyone feeling generous?

We used to think that device convergence meant that a single device would replace all of our other current digital media devices. With the concept of ‘The Cloud‘ this idea has been turned on it’s head.

I use multiple devices every day to access my email, browse the Internet, manage my schedule and read my blog feeds etc. Keeping each of them synchronised used to be tricky. But with the notion of keeping your data in ‘the cloud’, there’s no need to keep your data sync’d up. It’s all online and can be accessed by any connected device.

Multiple Devices, One Cloud

Recently, the cloud has become the latest in a line of buzz words on the Internet. It’s cropped up it’s head a few times in the past but it’s back in vogue again because there’s been an adoption of various standards that allow different systems to talk to each other more easily. iCal is one, RSS is another. Providing an open API as part of an application release also helps developers to build new ways to interact with it.

Here’s what I use to maximise the benefits the data cloud:

Email

I use Google Apps plus Gmail (I use my own domain too) and take advantage of IMAP support so I can keep using my favourite mail client whilst leaving my email somewhere accessible when I’m out and about.

Calendar

My phone has a calendar, so does my laptop. I also want to be able to access it online when I’m away. The solution for this is a combination of gCal, Lightning and my Nokia N95. Using a service GooSync I can keep my Google Calendar and my N95 sync’d up, and using a great Thunderbird plugin called Provider for Google Calendar I can keep Lightning up to date with everything as well.

Task Lists

I’ve struggled to find the perfect to-do list software. I need to be able to keep the list updated from any device and it needs to be really quick to use. If I can scribble it on a notebook faster then I can enter it, then nine times out of ten that’s what I’ll do.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far: Start off with an account on Remember the Milk. Then add their Firefox plugin that adds the task column to the Gmail interface. Then add the iCal stream to Lightening. This is an almost perfect solution but at the moment, the iCal stream is read-only. For ultimate happiness it’s got to be a two way connection. Hopefully this will happen soon.

What’s Next?

Online file storage still hasn’t taken off for the masses. Amazon’s S3 service has helped a lot of developers to outsource their storage needs, but it’s not a realistic option for general consumers. Services like Box.net offer online storage but, it’s still a little pricey. Where’s the Google Gdrive that we’ve heard so many rumours about?

I’ve got this almost all figured out. But if anyone’s got a better combination of blurring the divide between online services and offline apps, then lets hear them.

Summary

Point 1: The Cloud is becoming a reality

Point 2: It’s not there yet.

Point 3: It’s happening because of adopted standards

Point 4: I use online services with my desktop software using iCal, RSS, Firefox plugins and open API’s.

Point 5: Online Storage still needs to be solved. Gdrive perhaps?

Ok, so I’ve just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, and so far I’m pretty impressed with the new admin interface. The upgrade itself went pretty smoothly and also prompted me to create a scheduled database backup, which is something I should have done straight from the start.

A New Interface

There’s plenty of useful new features, mostly for the admin end of things. The two I like the most are the new multi-upload capability and the widigitized dashboard. And as any modern web-based software should, it sports a host of Ajax style features including new editing tools, and an updated plugin section.

Heating Up the Competition

Earlier in the month, whilst setting up this blog I considered a number of other blogging tools, including B2Evolution - a branch off from the original Wordpress, Movable Type, and Textpattern. After some testing and poking around I decided to go with Wordpress because of three key reasons:

• The flexible open source GPL licence
• The simple intuitive interface
• A straightforward templating system

I don’t think any of the other blogging software out at the moment can match Wordpress for it’s ease of use and customisation, yet there are still some who are moaning about it’s lack of features for multi-user blogs.

Bending it Your Way

Wordpress is an open source project and much if it’s development is contributed by the dedicated members of it’s community. If the new release of Wordpress doesn’t provide you with what you need then I say it’s your own fault for not getting involved and encouraging it’s development in a direction that suits you.

I for one am, so far, delighted with the new release and encourage the continued development of a great tool that is largely responsible for the explosive growth of bloggers on the Internet. To the nay sayers, all I can say is “get involved!”.