{"id":300,"date":"2009-09-22T17:53:12","date_gmt":"2009-09-23T00:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trypnotik.com\/?p=300"},"modified":"2025-04-21T08:36:14","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T14:36:14","slug":"serve-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.trypnotik.com\/blog\/serve-man\/","title":{"rendered":"To Serve Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"HELPI was surfing on SEO blogs the other day and I ran into a super little SEO campaign management tool called Raven<\/a>. I clicked on their video tour and I was very impressed with the functionality of their platform and the way they created their help system.\u00a0 It seems like they thought of just about everything in beta, and rolled it out finished the first time.\u00a0 Of course I have not used their system yet, but I will try them out as soon as I start another SEO project.<\/p>\n

As the video went on I caught little details here and there.\u00a0 The link manager was the first detail I noticed.\u00a0 It gives you standard categories for your links and allows you to record paid link transactions.\u00a0 This stuck out to me as very intuitive, even though I have never purchased a link in my life.\u00a0 To a seasoned professional, that one could be a no-brainer, however it struck me.\u00a0 It served as an example a well thought out, deliberate attempt to make their system as useful possible.<\/p>\n

Of course that’s what every online business wants to accomplish, but this is probably the best model I have seen.\u00a0 The video goes on to describe more features, SEO tools and what they do.\u00a0 The coup d’etat was when they described their help platform.\u00a0 Each page has Help and Feedback links on it.\u00a0 Clicking Feedback will make a text box appear that allows you to send bug reports and feature requests.\u00a0 The Help link gives you help related to the page that you are currently on…brilliant.<\/p>\n

My goal is not to give Raven’s services a rousing endorsement.\u00a0 Raven’s little video just made me think about the customer service model I worked on during the years I worked for Name.com.<\/p>\n

I worked in the customer service department at the ICANN accredited registrar, Name.com<\/a> for a bunch of years.\u00a0 I went to my interview in a small, two room loft above Paris on the Platte, just off 15th st in downtown Denver. There were 10 people working there at the time: Randi, Scott, Ben, Dave, Sam, Michael, Owen, Reggie, Ravi and Bill the CEO. The company was nearly 2 years old at the time, and I was hired to help Ben and Randi in customer service so Scott could begin to concentrate on other things as well.<\/p>\n

Nearly everything we did was manual, and almost nothing was automated. Registrar transfers, authorization code requests, account transfers, fraud prevention, etc. It was pretty much all done by hand.\u00a0 It could get to be very tedious at times, but it was a great way to learn about regulations, rules and processes involved in domain name registration.\u00a0 It wasn’t quite a well-oiled machine, but we knew what we were doing and there was something new to learn each day.<\/p>\n

When the platforms were created for Name.com, and their separate, sister company DomainSite<\/a>, the system was clunky, and not very scalable.\u00a0 As we grew, we had to change the way that our system worked.\u00a0 That became a chore.\u00a0 The Developers were already busting their asses on other stuff, and bug fixes, feature requests and other tweaks were sometimes difficult to get done.\u00a0 At times it was frustrating; for both us in the department, but more so for the customers.<\/p>\n

In my four years there my biggest pet peeve was answering the same questions over and over and over again.\u00a0 If I had a nickel for every time I explained how to change your name servers, via telephone and email, I would likely have made more then the sum of my quarterly bonuses.\u00a0 When Name.com overhauled its interface, and became the flagship company (prior to that, DomainSite got more attention), one of the things I worked on was rewriting the Help section.<\/p>\n

My goal was to help develop a system that made it so customers wouldn’t have to contact us. The problem is that I had no idea how to do it, and not create more work then what Development was able (willing) to do.<\/p>\n