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Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

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Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#251

Post by desireco42 »

GenWintergreen wrote: post #213
chrissnell wrote: post #190

My answer here is more relevant to an e-commerce company but the basic idea can be adapted to any company. So, back in 1994, my dad and me started an ecommerce company (bikeworld.com) that sold bicycle parts online. It was an extension of his brick-and-mortar bicycle business and I took a couple of years leave from college to help him build it. He did one thing early on that generated amazing word-of-mouth support: s…

Goulet pens, a favorite in the fountain pen community, includes a tootsie pop with orders. It's super nice of a touch, even for a person who doesn't dig them.

I love Goulet pens and Brian is doing fantastic job.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#252

Post by GenWintergreen »

sperglord wrote: post #234
GenWintergreen wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goulet pens, a favorite in the fountain pen community, includes a tootsie pop with orders. It's super nice of a touch, even for a person who doesn't dig them.

No one digs them. It's no longer the great depression.

I happen to. You may want to use use a less universal quantifier.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#253

Post by hoschicz »

bshimmin wrote: post #134
technotarek wrote: post #128

Using web dev tools / inspector during a screen cast demo, either to modify a style or to show a site/app's responsive behavior. Simple, I know, but it comes off as some form of wizardry to many clients.

I think you want to be careful with that - you don't want to make the magic that we do look too easy. "Can you just quickly change all the fonts on our massive, complex site to Comic Sans? I saw you do it in the demo the other day and it looked like a two second job..."

Then just explain to them, why it won't be so easy.

"Comic Sans is licensed by Microsoft and can't be used on the web" "When we build websites, we first write it in another language and then pass it through a program that translates it so that browsers understand it. Adding Comic Sans would require us to make changes deep in the 'translator' program that is supplied by a third party." "Comic Sans is cancer, see these links. Designers all over the world hate it. If I had a site with Comic Sans on it in my resume, I would seem very unprofessional to a lot of potential clients."

I usually explain them the problem I'm facing in non-technical terms.

Of course, and I bill my time spent doing this.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#254

Post by hoschicz »

hoschicz wrote: post #253
bshimmin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you want to be careful with that - you don't want to make the magic that we do look too easy. "Can you just quickly change all the fonts on our massive, complex site to Comic Sans? I saw you do it in the demo the other day and it looked like a two second job..."

Then just explain to them, why it won't be so easy. "Comic Sans is licensed by Microsoft and can't be used on the web" "When we build websites, we first write it in another language and then pass it through a program that translates it so that browsers understand it. Adding Comic Sans would require us to make changes deep in the 'translator' program that is supplied by a third party." "Comic Sans is cancer, see these…

Ad quote 2: When I showcased it to you, I edited the code for browsers directly.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#255

Post by geckoquaint »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #194
raverbashing wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you export it to xls? ActiveX Excel controller ("in my time this was called COM", etc)? Open source library?

PHPExcel for, you guessed it, PHP. An order of magnitude less hassle than CSV ("the files you generate are wrong, but only on some computers! Fixitfixitfixit!!!"), and surprisingly powerful.

Note: Last time we used it for large data report generation results were slow and consumed huge amount of memory.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#256

Post by t0mas88 »

jerf wrote: post #153
vog wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're lucky. We always try to explain that CSV is a mostly-clean format while XLS and XLSX are a mess. Yet, most of the time customers insist on XLS export, and we are happy if they at least acccept XLSX instead.

But CSV isn't a mostly clean format. It's a collection of dozens of formats, some of them clean, some of them not, and with no way of labeling which one of the dozens you have in the file itself. Whereas XLS and XLSX, for all their binary cruft, are at least capable of unambiguously (AFAIK) representing, say, a string with a quote and a newline in it. (If there are encoding issues, well, same with CSV.) I suspect you…

Let me create a headache for you: there is no "CSV as created by Excel with the default settings". There are a lot of different ones for each language setting of Excel, and they are incompatible. So if you're going to work anywhere but the US or even have just some foreigners in the US as your users you're in for a total nightmare doing "Excel CSV"

The worst thing Microsoft ever did to Excel was even translating the formula functions in different languages. So SUM() isn't actually called SUM() in half of Europe...

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#257

Post by reubenswartz »

I wouldn't say "blows them away", but apparently, customer service is generally bad enough that these things often provoke a pleasantly surprised reaction:

1. Make it clear that solving their problem is paramount. Not your policies, not getting off the phone ASAP. Sometimes it's something you can help them with directly with your product, sometimes you can't, but just treating them like a person you want to help instead of someone to hang up on is apparently unusual. (This is also a good fit for a lot of the techie folks on HN.)

2. Send a handwritten note. My handwriting is terrible, practically illegible, but people like that I took the time to write to them with pen & paper. Ironically, I didn't do this for a long time, because I thought it would look cheesy, but I gave it a shot and realized I like the little bit of gratitude it brings into my day-- that's really why I do it.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#258

Post by cyberferret »

JshWright wrote: post #247
cyberferret wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. we do this too. Whenever we develop a web service for a customer, we set up uptime monitoring on the server where the app is hosted, but I also set up ping uptime checks on most of their other server infrastructure as well. Just last week, I was alerted at 5am that a client's email server had gone offline. Nothing to do with us, we don't look after their emails at all, but I immediately texted their IT guy to le…

Perhaps this is just a product of working at a very privacy-centric company, but I would be _super_ creeped out by that...

Context: We've worked with this client for 10+ years, I know their IT team really well. They are not a super huge organisation, and we are a tiny (read: 3 man) operation too, so the reliance on each other's services is something we consider important to keep everything moving forward.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#259

Post by majewsky »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #188
ape4 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then exporting the CSV into Excel and doing something becomes part of the workflow. That could possibly be better done in the application.

Not unless your application aims to encompass the entirety of running a business. Otherwise it's just plain user-hostile greed. Personally, I do love whenever applications allow to export data and lack of such feature is IMO strong negative.

It's also much more efficient for me as a developer to offer an export interface instead of having to implement all the reporting functionality myself.
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