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Showing posts from March, 2011

Why Customer Support Is So Important

I was pretty surprised to read emails from my customers who do closed captioning for their videos, saying things like, "it really is amazing to have such great service" and you "offer amazingly responsive customer support". Why am I surprised? Because I just can't believe that other companies and especially software developers aren't seeing customer service as a rare chance to really connect with their customers as I do. I am fortunate not to get too many technical problem reports on MovieCaptioner. I can't say it's really luck, though. At first I had my share of issues to deal with, but I listened to my customers and from their problems I was able to see the weak spots in my software and focus on fixing them. Sometimes this required fixing an obvious flaw in the software that just didn't work as it was supposed to, but sometimes it was more a case of controlling the way the user could interact with the software to guide them away from possible

Free Refills!

Don't you really like it when you go to a restaurant and there's a sign that says "Free Refills" on your drink? Well, I know a lot of people think I'm crazy, but that's my philosophy when someone purchases my software. Once you buy, you're in the club. You get free upgrades for as long as I continue to offer the software. Isn't that the way it should be? Why do software companies charge a premium for new versions of their software when often it's just a bunch of bug fixes anyway? Why should I have to pay for someone to fix what they should have gotten right in the first place? The way I feel is that free upgrades are a nod to my previous customers, a way of saying "thanks!" for supporting the software early on and helping me to improve it. When MovieCaptioner was first released a few years ago it had its share of major bugs, and being new to the software arena, I knew that I had to make up for my lack of programming ability by always stri