The Impression of Specialization

October 1, 2009

I used to work for a small publishing company as a copy editor and proofreader. Trying to move my way up in the company, I took more and more responsibility for one particular publication, and eventually got my name on the masthead as Assistant Editor. When the editor left, I even became Interim Editor for [...]

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Merge Mailboxes for Better Management

September 24, 2009

Do you ever feel like everywhere you turn, there’s somebody or something waiting for your attention? You’ve got  multiple  email addresses –  some personal, some work related;  voicemail at home, on your cell phone, and on your work phone; actual physical mail at home and at work; a two-year-old wanting to push the garage door [...]

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Who’s the Boss — You or Your Inbox?

September 17, 2009

We’ve all got a lot of email to deal with, right? If you’re like me, some mornings you check your inbox and you think “There’s not enough coffee in the world to fuel my excursion into that mess.”
But would you pay somebody more than $2,750 to come to your office and teach you how to [...]

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3,2,1 Contact… How Do You Keep Track?

September 10, 2009

Sometimes customers email you, sometimes they call, sometimes they come to an online chat. Sometimes you call them… Do you treat each of these as isolated incidents?
image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/gifrancis/ / CC BY 2.0
You shouldn’t.
Tracking all your customer communication in one accessible archive is incredibly useful. Here’s a scenario for illustration:
A potential customer emails for information [...]

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It’s Not Just What You Say, It’s How You Say It

September 3, 2009

Tempted to use all caps or colored text to get your point across in your next email? While the firing of a New Zealand woman for her stylistic choices was recently deemed unfair (with damages awarded to the aggro-emailer), there’s still a lesson to be learned by this story, reported by the New Zealand Herald.
According [...]

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Tell the World How Fast You Respond to Email

August 25, 2009

Responding to emails quickly is a key to building good relationships and providing high quality customer service. If you’ve glanced at this blog before, you already know how strongly we feel about this.
At Palo Alto Software, we’re proud of how fast we respond to our customers.

That’s why we created our Response Time widget (the sample [...]

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5 Great Ways to Tag Your Email

August 20, 2009

Tag. You’re It.
We all have our own ways of organizing our lives. I have developed a pretty useful pile system for organizing my desk and home. It might not make much sense to anyone else… in fact it probably looks like a great big mess. But based on the pile’s location, I not only know [...]

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Praise and cake — What a week!

August 13, 2009

Unsolicited testimonials, like surprise chocolate cakes, are wonderful things indeed.
Here at Palo Alto Software, we were the beneficiaries of both last week. First, as a way of celebrating the integration between Email Center Pro and their service, our friends  over at FormSpring sent us a delicious chocolate cake from the best bakery in town.  The [...]

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Don’t Count Email Out.

August 6, 2009

It’s a reality that has to be faced by all users of Web-based applications: there will come a time when your service will be disrupted.
This morning, Twitter experienced a denial-of-service attack  and was down for a few hours. Facebook and LiveJournal were both down for a while as well. At this writing, it wasn’t clear [...]

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If You Don’t Treat Email as an Anonymous Contact, Neither Will Your Customers

July 17, 2009

Email makes communicating easy. But sometimes that ease comes with a price. When it’s so simple and quick and automatic to fire off an email, it can be hard to remember that there is a human on the receiving end.
Every now and then, you’re going to have a customer who doesn’t like your product or  [...]

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