How do you Trim the Fat when the Meat is Already Lean?
No matter how much I try to stop time or even slow time down, I have not been successful in creating more hours in the day. But when you’re a small business in a trying economic climate with increased competition, you find yourself stretching yourself more and more just to keep up the pace.
DDH Software is not a lot like other companies, and that’s probably my fault. Because I was an engineering major and not a business major, my confidence lies in what I can tackle from a technical nature, and not from a business perspective. For that reason, I’ve always played it safe relative to finances and thus we’ve never taken on any investors, or even run any debt.
And thus whenever times got tough, like when our mainstay platform (Palm OS) started to die a slow death, we have had to react conservatively. And we’ve had to thus stay lean, personnel-wise. This means having very few employees, and spending our time and money wisely to get the most out of it.
A few years back we did away with phone based technical support – it was just too expensive to to on a product with such low cost and volumes. I really didn’t want to axe it- we knew how some people valued phone support as great customer service, and it was a unique feature we offered in this day and age, and were proud of. But when you only have a few employees and most of them are on the phone all day long, we found we were very stagnant in terms of development and moving the product forward.
So we switched to relying more on email support and also using an online chat based support tool. The online chat meant one person could help 5 people at the same time, and it definitely reduced the resource requirement we had.
But now because of today’s economic climate, we’re even leaner than ever. Our already small staff is further reduced and now basically even having one person doing chat support cripples us as a software development company. For this reason, we decided to try to do away with chat support for the time being. We hope that by having the additional time for development we can better keep up with the many platforms we support, and provide more compelling solutions. And it helps us be more financially conservative in a time where we all really need to be.
Of course, email support options are still available, and we’re still staying on top of them and getting responses out in a timely manner. And we still have our Yahoo group which stays active with both us and lots of helpful fellow customers. So I feel that we’re still leaving customers in good hands, support wise. But I do want to share my apologies for having to cut out this feature of support we’ve offered- to some users I know it’s a very important feature. Here’s hoping that we can still provide excellent customer service via email and forums, and additionally improve our effectiveness at provide compelling software and updates to you!
Your email support is great and your website is functional (could use some updating), but please do something about your forums.
Forums are my preferred way to learn about software. I regularly visit several technical forums. I saw a link on your website to visit your Yahoo! support forums. I thought great, I’ll see if my questions have already been answered. You can’t even view your forums unless you’re a registered member. I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to register so I sent an email question (as mentioned above). I had a few more questions so I decided I’d bite the bullet and register. I needed a Yahoo! account first, then I need to register on the forum. This seemed like a little too much to me, just browse a forum. I created a Yahoo account and then filled out the forum registration. The next day I get an email saying that I was rejected as a member of the forum. What are the requirement? I bought HanDBase and bought the desktop add on for Windows (running it on Linux through WINE) and will be buying the Mac Desktop now that it’s out.
I think a functional forum can drastically cut back on your support demands and help users learn about your product. What you currently have for forums is not functional. Maybe 8 years ago hosting your own forum wasn’t something most companies should do. Today, there’s several open source forum packages that you can easily host yourself (see phpbb for one example). I’d also suggest having the forum be part of your website and not running it through Yahoo.
HanDBase is by far the best database application for the iPhone. Being new to it I know I could learn a lot from existing users. A forum is probably the best way to do this.