Haje has written half a dozen books and thousands of articles. He is the CEO of Triggertrap, has crashed fewer motorbikes than you'd think, is a huge fan of agile product development, once set his face on fire whilst juggling, and loves performance arts.
He freely admits that some of these things are more worth being proud of than others.
The Ilex Introduction to Photography: Everything you need to know to take great pictures, whatever your camera.
The ultimate guide to photography for beginners, coming soon to a bookstore near you!
Today, I went along to the Silicon Milkroundabout, a jobs fair aimed at startups. I figured it would be good to go along and get a taste for how recruitment works on a larger scale, and to have a chance at talking to a few companies.
What struck me, was that there is a huge difference between the different companies present. Some of them were very clear about what they do, who they are, what their ambitions are, and who they are hoping to hire, whereas others do not.
Getting it wrong is a huge problem; You’re in a market competing for a lot of talent, and if the people who might potentially want to work for you don’t know what you do, they’re unlikely to come talk to you. Read more »
I’ve written about Virgin Media’s completely misunderstood approach to social media support once before, as an example in how empowering your customer support representatives is so important. Of course, being the ever-so-optimistic person, I figured that perhaps they are an organisation that is still finding their feet from a social support point of view.
So, yesterday, when I spotted that somebody had vandalised the Virgin Media box up my street, I decided to get back in touch with them. When I did so, I made a couple of assumptions:
Luckily, Twitter is a great tool for that; my tweets are geo-tagged, and so I tweeted them a picture of the box. I also decided to add the reference number of the box in the tweet itself.
Now, let’s pause here for a second, and think about the following: if you worked for a large a large utility company, and you received a tweet stating that some hardware you operated had been vandalised, what would you do? Read more »
This week-end, I participated in a Hackathon organised by the Metropolitan Police. It was an interesting challenge; I’m not much of a coder, and they don’t usually let me near any of the felt-tip pens, but I figured I could use what I know about the police (I am a Special Constable), and about the methodologies of running a small business, to contribute in my own way.
The Met is a great organisation, but it has a few challenges around technology. The key one, in my mind, is that they are spending a staggering amount of money for old tech – again and again – so I decided to demonstrate the concept of a rapidly iterating Minimum Viable Product. 
Read more »
Sat slightly off-centre, slouched in a plastic chair in a room that emanates a time when people could still smoke in government buildings, a young man with an unwieldy beard and slightly poorly fitting hipster glasses gets up.
“Hello, I’m Haje,” he says, and clears his throat. “And I’m a nerd”
“Hello, Haje”, the crowd says, in disinterested unison.
Okay, so I’ve never quite been in that situation, but I have tinkered with technologies – and especially online tech – ever since I mysteriously got my first modem to work, and so one of my Frequently Asked Questions, is related to which tools start-ups should be using when they are first starting out.
So, without further rambling… The top tools for start-ups! Read more »
So, you have a well-oiled customer support machinery, where you’ve picked the tools that work for your business, you’ve trained your support crew to get the responses right, you’ve decided to get rid of the canned responses that infuriate your customers, and everything is going well, right?
Good. Congratulations. There’s just one more little thing I’d like to mention: Empowerment.
I have recently been Tweeting back and forth with a large internet provider, which turned out to be an infuriating exercise in futility. This particular internet provider is very good at community management – in other words, they try to contain any infuriated customers, and they reply surprisingly quickly. However, as far as I can tell, the army of twitter-enabled drones don’t even have access to the regular customer support tools – and they certainly don’t have the power to actually help. Read more »
A lot of organisations embrace ‘macros’, also called pre-written or ‘canned’ responses, in their customer support workflow. In theory, that could work very well: If you have a number of questions that come up again and again, having to type up the same answer several times per day is incredibly inefficient.
The unavoidable truth is that even though a question looks as if it is ‘the same’, it will never be identical. The tone of the question might be slightly different, for example, or you may find that one question is subtly different, or asks for information about a different aspect of the same thing. Read more »
When you run a business-to-customer company, you’ll very quickly find yourself receiving customer support requests. The exact nature of the requests depends on your business, of course – people may need help setting up software, they may not understand how to use a particular feature, they may have found a problem or bug in your website, or they may be asking where their parcel is.
What is universal, however, is that there’s an oddly unintuitive dark art related to doing good customer support.
This article could serve as a checklist, to ensure that your support requests are dealt with in the best possible way.
To take a quick step back for a moment, it’s worth keeping in mind what the purpose of customer support is. The best way to determine that, is to think about why companies do support at all.
It doesn’t really matter what type of organisation you are, the key purpose of support is to take a confused, disgruntled, or unhappy customer, and inform, re-gruntle, or happi-fy them. The key to making this happen is all about empathy, and being able to grok what a customer needs, and how you can fulfill this need. Read more »
At Triggertrap, we used to do a lot of selling via Amazon.com, with the orders being fulfilled from a warehouse in Hong Kong.
The way Amazon is structured, it means you don’t get to pick your shipping lead times yourself, it is set by Amazon, and based on country. So, if you are based in Aldergrove in Canada, your shipping time is estimated as 5-10 business days. If you happen to be a 10-minute drive further south, in Lynden, Washington, USA, the estimated shipping time is 18-26 business days.
Now, I’m sure Amazon have legitimate reasons for having a 21-day span between deliveries to locations that are a lazy stone’s lob away from each other, but that doesn’t help us… Read more »
In our day-to-day lives, we rather frequently run into situations where something doesn’t work – whether it’s your car, a piece of software, or your boiler at home. Reporting an error is often a haphazard affair – but if you’re working in any industry, you can make the process a lot more effective if you create a well-crafted bug report.
So… How? It’s actually not very hard, and there’s some simple rules you can follow to make the techies’ jobs as easy as possible. Why would you bother making their lives easier? Well, it’s not because they’re lazy (although some are, I’m sure), but because the easier you make it, the quicker the problem can get solved.
Remember that a good bug report does one thing: It enables an engineer to understand why something is a problem, and then ideally gives them enough information to be able to reproduce the problem on their own system. Read more »
Deliciously organised opinions, philosophies and vaguely coherent ideas for your perusal.
Recently posted on ye olde website.
I've written a book or two. Have a peek!
Books that came into being as a result of me shuffling a lot of papers around.
Any factual mistakes in these books are probably my fault.
Best described as 'miscellaneous', I suppose.
