Xmas at Ufindus

There is not much to report at Xmas but despite our sales and development offices being closed I am afraid some of us have to come to work. Ufindus.com answers hundreds of thousands of requests for information each day and takes a little bit of maintenance to keep going. About once a week we need to check backups and verify data integrity and despite all our automated systems we like to watch over it with a human eye. Today is the day we need to do that so I am in work for a few hours. Then its the long weekend before we all return back to work on Tuesday. Xmas is over so quickly!

Petars update at Ufindus

Thankfully this week we have managed to roll out a tested and seemingly reliable new system to help us and customers keep track of their payments. In my opinion it is vital that we are utterly efficient at all aspects of our business and in the past we could be found calling our customers for the first time who had missed several months payments for various reasons and asking them for arrears.

Now everybody dislikes being asked to pay arrears and so in some cases our customers would just lose faith in us and ask to cancel the package at this point. Unfortunately this is bad for both the customer and us. We have usually built the site and created listings, often with the customers site found on many search engines too but the customer has lost faith and doesn't like the idea of being asked for many months payments at once. I understand that feeling.

Now at Ufindus we have a 21st century system that allows tracking of payment requests from customers and gives us up to the minute (not weeks or months behind as previously) information that allows us to inform the customer that we have a problem and get it rectified before the accounts falls behind.

Now you may think it is easy to collect a once a month payment from someone and it is in isolation. At Ufindus however we collect over 200,000 monthly payments each month. Thats 10,000 each and every working day. About 500 per day have a problem due to customers changing accounts or other reasons and almost every one requires one or more calls to resolve. This takes a huge effort and more importantly efficient systems to track the workflow. At last thanks to Petars we finally have that facility at Ufindus and this will see huge benefits both for our support teams and our customers.

There is much work to do at Ufindus but the introduction of Petars is the first stage of a comprehensive review and restructuring of our business that I am overseeing. I am personally sure our customers will feel the benefit as we go through this. Ufindus.com will become synonymous with excellent customer service and the very best systems during 2007.

Renawal Terms and Petars update for Ufindus.com

At Ufindus have been working for some time to clarify our terms and conditions. As with most large organisations, terms get added as the years go by but rarely get taken out. As a part of our ongoing customer service reviews we have spent a part of the day today getting the relevant managers from the various departments at Ufindus together in a room to review our terms, in particular around the renewal process and to simplify and improve them for all our customers.

Along with the new systems to be introduced in the early part of next year we are going to be also bringing in improved renewal notification systems for customers. The current notifications of impending renewal, in writing, are 60 days before our customers renewal date. These will be replaced by the Ufindus statements that we already send out monthly. In the final three months before renewal they will be targeted around the renewal process to make it clear to our customers what they need to do to ensure their packages will continue to function smoothly.

They will include no less than three renewal letters sent 90, 60 and 30 days before renewal. These improvements are being introduced following feedback from customers and can only be brought in as part of our systems review so it will take a little longer than we would have liked but they are on the table now.

Today the launch of the new Ufindus payment management system called Petars was put on hold for a few days while a few teething troubles that arose out of our testing process are ironed out. We were hoping to bring in this massively improved system this week via a soft launch and rolled out to all our teams during next week however it now looks like the soft launch will not complete until Monday and then a full scale launch could be delayed until after the xmas break.

New system for customer support agreed

Following our decision to add additional "super agents" in our Ufindus offices to supplement our support services we have today held a meeting to discuss better customer focused ways of dealing with our support issues.

Following this meeting we have decided to introduce a new system called QAD that we handle support calls and post in an entirely new way and reminiscent of the way old way companies used to handle their support. Most importantly when our customers call or email support in the future they will get to deal with the same person in the majority of cases while their issue is resolved. If that agent needs to bring in services from other departments he or she will do so while retaining overall responsibility to deal with the customer and to ensure the case is closed satisfactorily. There will be no passing from department to department. This is something we all find frustrating about call centres. After all even the team at Ufindus have to call our banks call centres on from time to time so we know what it is like.

In addition there will be regular messages by email and text message when we are sorting something for the customer to keep them informed and access to a case notes screen to see the full details of what is happening.

This system will start development next week and will be implemented for post and email support early in January and during the first quarter for all support enquiries.

We are sure at Ufindus that this will ensure our customers get from us the highest level of support and something they are not only used to not expecting from us but over and above anything they are used to in everything they do in life.

We aim to make our customers call to Ufindus as painless as possible. I am only sorry we didn't do this earlier but sometimes we all have to learn where we went wrong so we can do a better job of things in the future. This will be a great new service for Ufindus customers.

Extra highly trained customer service agents at Ufindus.com

Yesterday I attended a meeting to discuss improving our customer services. Like many other large companies, Ufindus have a phone system that allows queueing of incoming calls and we separate our staff into departments depending on skill levels. In addition when you call our support centre twice about the same issue you will speak to different people in all likelihood.

Now years ago, customer service wasn't all like this. Companies have been forced to operate such systems and have even been forced to move services to India etc to the utter frustration of their customers. Indeed at Ufindus we even have a back office support centre in Thailand ourselves although they do not offer direct customer support.

Now given that we recognise this frustration and given that the whole of the management team at Ufindus are aware that our record of dealing with our customers has not always been up to the standard we would aspire to we decided to undertake a comprehensive review of our procedures. The final details of which are being confirmed but once the system is in place you will no longer call Ufindus and speak to a different person each time to resolve issues. Your case will be allocated to an agent with all the skills and powers to resolve your issues and you will be able to reach a resolution to your issue with that person. In addition for each case you will get a quick access code and there will be no waiting in queues for that person. If they are busy when you call, our system will automatically schedule their next job to be a call back to you.

Although implementation will not be quick or easy we hope to have much of the new systems and procedures in place at Ufindus by the end of march '07. Many of the changes will come much more quickly than that. We hope that our customers will appreciate our new, old fashioned approach to customer service.

Criticism of Ufindus

I have to say that sometimes you have to just accept criticism and do your best to learn from it. Microsoft must get really sick of people slagging off their products when actually they are quite good and work well for the majority. I feel sorry for Bill Gates and the team because I suspect they all work hard to be the best they can and never want a customer to be unhappy.

There are echoes of this at Ufindus you see. Over 500 people in the Ufindus family, the majority of whom I know are working hard and care very much about the customers we serve but sometimes it seems we just can't make people happy. Sometimes we will have to accept the criticism on the chin.

Take an example today of a Ufindus.com customer who has posted on a well known blogging site that allows people to sound off about what they are not happy with from companies they deal with. Now this Ufindus customer has been on there and posted how unhappy he is with his website because he got a nicer one designed elsewhere.

I accept that the customer purchased our basic package and the sites are functional. They were always meant to be. They are produced in house using our own software package called Rapidsite that is very search engine friendly but is also staggeringly user friendly. Its a package that allows us to produce you a simple site and then you can do unlimited customisation and changes and add as many pages as you like. We encourage our customers to do so but if they dont contribute themselves the site will remain basic.

You cant upload a picture the wrong size because it makes them right. You cant choose the wrong dpi because it checks this. You can put text in the wrong place because it wont let you. You can't design your page so that a search engine rejects it because again it wont let you.

Its not dreamweaver because it is not meant to be. Rapidsite is our own, proprietary software produced in house and has had months of work invested in it. It was meant to empower our customers to be able to update and improve a simple website themselves and this is what it does.

It also has amazing results at getting search engine listings because the sites are simple, clean and well formatted for the engines.

I could go on for hours listing the benefits of Ufindus's Rapidsite software but what do people pick up on. The problem is that it is only for simple sites. It doesn't take a design studio to use it and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg. In fact the whole up-front fee including us building your first website and supplying you the software and hosting and statistics package is just £199. Yes that's right £199.

Now I get really tired of hearing that we are conning people because actually that is incredible value and lets not forget what you can buy for less than £200 quid. Sure you can get a nicer site. In fact we have a department in house where site designs start at £599 plus software costs but that's not the point of this package. Its to get you going. To get you listed on Ufindus which gets millions of searches per month and often gets you listed on all the major search engines.

So coming back to the guy who posted the comment on the engines about how bad the site was. He is currently on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN and Ufindus for his £199 with his Rapidsite. Now I will let you decide if that is good value or not. He seems to think not.

Much of this nonsense posted on blogs is generated by our jealous competitors. Sound familiar. I just hope that the rest of Microsoft's success rubs off on us. I hope that while bitter competitors go round busily slagging Ufindus off we will continue to make the majority of people realise that actually its pretty good value.