The following is an extract from our book, Scrum: Novice to Ninja, written by M. David Green. Copies are sold in stores worldwide, or you can buy it in ebook form here. Unlike a scrum master, whose responsibilities are focused on the development team, a product owner has a shared responsibility to the team and […]
Continue reading %Scrum Roles: Product Owners and Team Members%
Updated on the 5th of January, 2017 to provide instructional material to accompany the example from the original article.
Customer complaints are a daily reality for most businesses.
Your product or service might be top of the line. Your customer service may be best in class.
Doesn’t matter. You are still going to get complaints.
And that’s actually a good thing.
Today, we’re going to discuss why customer or client complaints can be a huge asset for you business and then show you how to harness those assets by crafting an ROI-boosting complaint response letter.
Customer retention is the top priority for any business wishing to achieve long-term success.
So if our goal is retention, why are complaints so valuable? In short, customer complaints are a gold mine of valuable data that help us understand our customer base and improve retention.
For every customer who complains, 26 others remain silent. In other words, complaints give us insight into potentially pervasive problems that are bothering a large segment of our customer base. When customers complain, they are actively teaching you how to improve your product.
Additionally, when you successfully resolve a customer complaint, their odds of doing business with you again actually increase compared to if they had never made a complaint in the first place.
The key phrase here is "successfully resolve", and that’s what we’ll be covering in the next section.
When responding to a customer complaint, it’s important to do three specific things:
You may have noticed a theme here, and that theme is specificity.
Customers don’t want a vague non-response that insults their intelligence. If you are going to respond to a complaint, it’s important to be very specific.
First, actually address each portion of the customer’s complaint. If the complaint came via a brief or mid-sized message, respond to each point. If it was a lengthy rant, try to address the main (or rational) points.
Next, take ownership of anything your business messed up or could have done better. If you made a legitimate error, say sorry. If your customer was confused about something most people understand, apologize that the experience wasn’t more intuitive.
Most importantly, make it right. Resolve the issue. Fix the problem. And then tell the customer EXACTLY what you did to ensure that they are happy in the end.
Finally, tell your customer about how you will their experience with your business better in the future. In some cases, this might just be a fix on your end. In other cases, it might require the customer to better understand your product. Either way, tactfully propose a solution that ensures the customer’s next experience with your business is a positive one.
To better understand these points, let’s look at a real-life example from Andrew Neitlich.
I got quite frustrated with my experience with Yahoo!’s Overture advertising service yesterday when loading up terms for a new site. I don’t know if you agree with me, but I find Google’s advertising interface much, much, much easier to work with than Yahoo!’s.
So I filled in a customer feedback form and sent in my complaint to Yahoo! Mostly I did this to vent, as I didn’t expect a response from a huge company like Yahoo!. Most companies don’t respond anymore to individual online complaints.
Yet Yahoo! responded with a terrific, personalized letter. (Had I known I’d get a response, I would have provided much more detailed feedback). I print the response here, because it is an excellent example of how to respond online to a complaint. I still like using Google much more, but at least I’m not going to cancel my Yahoo! account and stop advertising (which is where I was at yesterday). Notice how they cover in detail my issues, apologize where appropriate, explain their service, and give advice about things I can do better.
Here is their response, printed here as a template you might use for your sites or even clients:
Continue reading %How to Write a Good Response to a Client/Customer Complaint%
As our applications become more complex - with Composer dependencies, Webpack build scripts, and per-environment variables - we inevitably reach a point where testing all of these different intricacies becomes slow and laborious, especially when you're tearing down and rebuilding the entire environment for each test. Likewise, code style might deviate over time and creating a production ready deployment archive requires a specific set of steps to be followed.
Suppose that, to test your application, you need to perform the following steps:
composer install to ensure the dependencies are installedphp -l against each PHP file in the codebase to check for syntax errorsIf any of these steps fail then the software should be considered unsuitable for deployment until the errors have been addressed. As your software becomes more complex and the number of tests increases over time it can take many minutes to run the full suite which slows down your developers which in turn slows down the release process.
To help overcome this you can introduce a build server into your development workflow. A build server runs a piece of software that enables you to run a series of steps over and over again in the background, and if one of the steps fails the build server can inform you of the issue. If you've contributed to an open source project you may have seen a build server such as TravisCI or CircleCI in action. For example, every pull request on the Laravel project is tested by TravisCI to ensure the change doesn't break any tests, then StyleCI ensures the code change matches the project code style.
Jenkins is a popular open-source build server that this year had its 2.0 release. One of the principal features of this new release is the inclusion of the (previously optional) pipelines plugin as a core feature.
A pipeline is a set of completely customizable steps that can be run in order to test and build your code. Pipelines are written in the Groovy scripting language which has a very simple syntax that is easy to get comfortable with. For example, if you wanted to describe the test steps described before as a pipeline, it might look similar to this:
node {
stage("composer_install") {
sh 'composer install'
}
stage("php_lint") {
sh 'find . -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 php -l'
}
stage("phpunit") {
sh 'vendor/bin/phpunit'
}
stage("codeception") {
sh 'vendor/bin/codecept run'
}
}
The node statement tells Jenkins to assign a single build node (Jenkins can run either in a single-server mode, or a multi-node setup). Inside the node block are multiple stages which each perform a specific action.
Jenkins will run each of the stages in turn and if any of them should fail then the entire build will fail and Jenkins will stop executing.
From this simple example you could easily add additional stages with other tests, tell Jenkins to send a Slack notification for successful or failed builds, push successfully tested code into a release branch or mark a pull request as good to merge.
Jenkins is very easy to install and for this tutorial we're going to use Laravel Homestead to give a consistent virtual environment so you can play with Jenkins locally.
The first step is to install Laravel Homestead - there is a useful guide here. You only need to get the virtual machine up and running, we don’t need to configure any sites in the homestead.yaml file.
With your Homestead virtual machine up and running, SSH into it with vagrant ssh.
Homestead ships with all the dependencies we need, namely Git, PHP and Composer so we just need to install Jenkins itself. Following the Jenkins Debian package guide we need to perform the following steps.
Run wget -q -O - http://ift.tt/2gq3rAf | sudo apt-key add -. This command adds the code-signing key to Aptitude so the Jenkins packages from this repository will be trusted.
Next, the package sources list needs updating so Aptitude knows about the Jenkins package repository. Execute echo "deb http://ift.tt/2gq0mjB binary/" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.
Finally, we need Aptitude to update its cache of available packages, and then install Jenkins:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install jenkins
Installing Jenkins will take approximately five minutes as it has quite a number of dependencies that also need installing.
Once Jenkins is installed, open http://ift.tt/2iIlPTz in your browser (or your virtual host configured URL like homestead.app) and you should see a page titled “Unlock Jenkins”.
Inside the VM, run the following command - sudo cat /var/lib/jenkins/secrets/initialAdminPassword and a random string of number and letters will be printed to the console. Copy and paste that string into the text field in the browser and press "Continue".
You’ll be presented with two options - choose “Install suggested plugins” and wait a few minutes while the plugins are downloaded and installed.
On the next screen, enter the details of an admin user and press “Save and Finish”.
Jenkins is now installed and configured!
With Jenkins set up, we’re going to create a new build job that will do the following:
laravel/frameworkClick the “create new jobs” link on the dashboard (or the “new item” link - they both do the same thing).
Continue reading %Re-Introducing Jenkins: Automated Testing with Pipelines%
When words and letters are printed, they have to wear the clothing of a typeface. Like our fashion industry, typography has its own trends, famous designers, and also fashion faux pas’s..
Just as wearing crocs and lycra to a business meeting is probably a bad idea, writing your resume in Schoolbell or Comic Sans isn’t likely to set the tone you’re hoping for.
We not conscious of it, but whenever we read anything, we are doing it through the someone elses’s visual styling decisions and this deeply impacts on the way we perceive the message. There have been countless studies analyzing the power of typography. From the way people scan through documents to the power of certain fonts to manipulate the way we think, results have pointed to the influence of font choices on cognition.
As a marketer and a typography enthusiast, I’ve always been intrigued by the complex connections between fonts and our decision-making process.
Now, I know I’m not the only one to talk about typography and branding, but I think there are four interesting tips you may not know about.
Websites like Medium, [Teamweek]www.teamweek.com), and DevTasker(a website I worked on) are like yoga studios from a typography perspective.
The information is blindly following the KISS design principle(Keep It Simple Stupid) and it makes it extremely easy for the user to grasp what’s going on.
However, avoid being simple in a dull and repetitive way. With the flat design, minimalism, and Helvetica on the rise, designers tend to limit their capabilities to safe design techniques which usually lead to plateauing.
The same way that printing more money isn’t the solution for poverty, adding more information, or text in our situation, isn’t the solution for a lack of clarity in their message. The most valuable asset a brand can provide anybody today is clarity and simplicity.
You see, despite your constant pursuit for creating top-notch content, grabbing your user’s attention is a hassle if your content isn’t aesthetically pleasant. SocialMediaExaminer is one of my favorites examples for content cannibalization. They have millions of people reading their innovative articles and the quality of their content is terrific. However, the information is a bit cluttered.
Having content written in different fonts popping out from everywhere leads to ‘content inflation’.
The actionable advice here is: try to say more using less content, and if you find that difficult to do or impossible, well…
Typography in branding is important because it carries the message of the brand. Very often you can actually understand a brand’s identity just by looking at the typography before you even read the words.
Big brands are looking for a font that can be read globally and expressed everywhere. A brand font should have personality. It should be legible for an eight-year-old as much as for a sixty-year-old. It has to be used in print and digital regardless of the size and format.
Creating an innovative font and developing a unique brand experience is really hard to achieve. It’s not just 26 letters and the English alphabet, it’s about expanding it into a variety of systems and languages.
To be completely honest, creating your own typeface isn’t something that you should pursue if you are a startup or a local brand. The logistics of creating a font are simply horrendous and Samsung can relate.
When they designed the Samsung One font, they wanted to unify the visual branding across multiple platforms and formats. This font’s purpose is to reach and be imprinted in the consumer’s mind as being Samsung’s visual personality.
Samsung is not the only company who designed their own font. Google is known for their famous Roboto and Apple has used their own adaptation of ITC Garamond the Apple Garamond which has been used for more than 18 years as their corporate typeface.
Even Donald Trump has his own font and it’s called ’ Tiny Hand’. The font is a satire created by the folks from BuzzFeed and it copies the handwriting of the Donald.
Also, if you want to learn more about branding and typography, I recommend following Designhill. They offer amazing tips on how to create an awesome brand experience, and they are your go-to guys if you are looking for a good graphic design marketplace.
Believe it or not, choosing an ink-friendly font like Garamond in the detriment of Helvetica or Times New Roman can actually help you save a lot of money. If you work in some sort of institution or if you’re printing tons of documents everyday, you should consider the fact that ink is more expensive than perfume.
Sadly, buying a new printer can often be cheaper than refilling the cartridges, considering the fact that one litre of printer ink is about $5000.
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But being legible isn’t just about making the font bigger or about letter spacing – although that might play a part.
Continue reading %4 Killer Typography Tips from the World’s Biggest Brands%
