Issue with software are inevitable, but more than ever it’s how humans are dealing with and responding to those issues that is key. In our case, our online shopping platform’s move to a new data center caused their order numbering system to be corrupted, resulting in duplicate order numbers which in some cases (including ours) resulted in a lack of emails sent out for those who purchased downloadable products from our store over the weekend that the data center move happened. In our case, we investigated things with another software package who worked with this platform that handles the actual download delivery from our store orders and they informed us of the data center software issues the day after they happened. We were able to manually fix our orders and got all customers their downloads. But 6 days later, we finally heard from the platform informing us that there may have been issues with our orders over that weekend. 6 days. An eternity in Internet-time. Had we not discovered the issue ourselves (due to a customer complaint!) and manually fixed it ourselves, we could have been looking at multiple days of botched orders and, obviously, more than a few unhappy customers.

Tip #1: If there’s trouble, let your customers know immediately – even if you don’t have it solved yet.

Timely communications means everything when it comes to taking care of customers, and shows you’re truly interested in their well-being. Delaying notification of trouble for days sends exactly the opposite message: we don’t care about you, and we’ll let you know when we decide to. A company would much rather hear of trouble first from it’s vendor, rather than from customer complaints.

I responded to their notification with a rather pointed email expressing my unhappiness with their 6-day delay, and told them that due to this, we’re seriously considering another online platform (which I had been looking at for a couple of weeks prior). I made it very clear I was very unhappy with how they handled the incident. Their response? Nothing.

Tip #2: If a customer takes the time to write in and express concerns or complaints, consider it a golden opportunity to rectify the situation and act immediately to do so.

A truly concerned company would have responded to my concerns in a timely manner, and at least offered some sort of explanation and/or apology for the delay. Our platform vendor did neither, and their actions yet again sent the same message as before: we don’t care about you.

Sometimes it’s as much about what you don’t do, as what you do, that can send the wrong message to your customers. In this case, it showed me that when the chips were down and there was trouble, our vendor felt fine in waiting 6 days to inform us of order problems, and we had to learn about it from a complaining customer. That’s the kind of confidence-buster that cloud-based businesses simply cannot afford. The result: we’re shopping for a new online store platform.

Your order is currently under evaluation by our antifraud specialists. We perform this verification to prevent unauthorized use of your PayPal account and personal details. In order to validate your payment and complete your order, please provide us with the following documents during the next two business days:
- a copy of a photo ID (identification card, driver`s license or passport) of the PayPal account holder.
- Proof of Valid billing address: Utility Bill.
Please make sure that the documentation you provide is valid and legible. The name and address on your documentation must correspond with the information registered in your order. Your documentation should not be older than 6 months. Send only documents received by mail from the Utility companies. Send all the information and documents required as soon as possible to complete the review process.

This company actually expects its customers to send of copies of the same kinds of documents that one can use to apply for a credit card or loan, open a bank account, etc in order to “validate” a $9.95 payment through Paypal, a service that already has built-in buyer and seller protection provisions?
Hmm… what if I don’t get my utility bill in the mail because I have online billing? And my driver’s license or passport cannot be older than 6 months? In California, our driver licenses are issued for 5 year terms, and passports are issued for much longer periods – so much for that.

My first reaction was that this might be a sophisticated phishing scam to get people to give up identity documents, but amazingly, it’s not a scam – I checked it out and the payment processor is legit. But it serves as a great example of how policies that come across as unreasonable paranoid or inappropriate in the context of what’s being sold can alienate customers and damage a company’s reputation quickly.

Let’s see what lessons can be learned here:

* If you’re worried about theft of your intellectual property, don’t treat your customers like criminals. Some companies that are concerned about e-commerce theft including Amazon and others have a simple solution: for those transactions they’re concerned about, call the seller on the phone and verify his or her information.

* When you’re designing security or anti-theft policy, make the policy proportionate to the risk. By demanding customers jump through ridiculously elaborate “hoops” that are way out of line for the type of purchase you’re trying to get them to conduct, you will probably just drive them away.

* When you partner with another company, make sure you know all the details about how that company is treating your customers. In this case, it was the payment processor, not the software vendor that was making the outrageous claims. But it’s the reputation of the software vendor that will be damaged by this kind of paranoid, unrealistic demands being placed on customers. I’m not a customer of the payment processor, I’m a customer of the software vendor, yet the payment processor is sabotaging the vendor’s customer relationship badly.

* Take reasonable precautions to guard against theft, but don’t come across as paranoid or unreasonable to the people you want to do business with. Can you imagine if a dry cleaner asked its customers to sign a 3-page binding agreement with all kinds of tough-sounding legal language and demands simply to drop off a few shirts for cleaning? Or a mall parking garage forcing everybody who came in to park their car to sign a contract in the office simply to park their car in the garage for an hour while shopping? In both of these situations there are basic legal protections already in place for both the customer and the provider of services that don’t require demanding the customer to undertake unreasonable actions simply for the “privilege” of purchasing a good or service.

A useful thing to do from time to time is to take a look at your entire sales cycle and focus on how your company appears to prospective and current customers at every stage of the cycle, from initial contact through product or service delivery. Study each and every possible interaction a customer can have with you or any third parties that handle any aspect(s) of the cycle for you, and try to identify and resolve situations that could result in customers being treated unreasonably.

This app is so usable it makes writing a breeze. Choose your favorite styles (my favorite is the Griffin/Targus stylus or the Alupen) and simply start writing. A wide variety of pen tip widths and ink colors let you stylize your writing as you like. Some of my favorite features of NoteShelf:

Wrist Protection – one of the biggest issues with most handwriting apps is marks appearing on the page where you rest your wrist on the iPad. Turn on wrist protection in NoteShelf and the app will detect where you’re writing and position the wrist protection limiter below that. As you write down the page, the wrist protector limiter moves with you – very handy.

Great Paper Types – beyond the usual blank page and lined page, there are a number of templates including a day planner, shopping lists, meeting notes, journals, and even music notation paper for composers and songwriters.

Bookshelf Organization – the program includes an iTunes-esque bookshelf page with all of your notebooks displayed – each one is a click away.

Exporting Notebooks – email, export pages to iTunes, and now cloud export to DropBox and Evernote make moving your notebooks around a snap.

When taking handwritten notes, I need an app that just works. No crashes, no weird user interface – just an app that gets out of the way and records what I write easily and quickly with maximum flexibility. For that, NoteShelf takes the cake.