The discussion was in regard to answering the phone. The store has a policy that the phone can't ring more than 3 times. So what they must do is someone, anyone, must answer the phone and put the customer on hold. They then route the call to the correct person.

In practice this creates some problems as most calls are for the commercial sales person in the store (the B2B sales guy). There's only one of him, so all the overflow calls are answered by the cashiers, often while they have a customer in front of them or by managers being dragged off the floor to get and hold a call.

A person at the party who is often frustrated by cashiers being interrupted while they're checking out suggested that the store should hire a person dedicated to answering the phone. For the most part retail stores don't do this. The primary reason is that they know there are times where the cashiers are just sitting there, the managers aren't with customers, the receiving guy has finished up and could probably pick up a call, etc.

They simply don't want to pay an extra person and on top of that they want to maximize every second of the employees they have. This makes good sense in theory, but in practice it's more complicated.

The crux of the issue of course is that the phone systems don't route to available cashiers (staff) they simply ring throughout the store. The managers don't want to be bothered and normally have tons of work, so they almost always direct cashiers or front end staff to answer the phone (though remember the calls are rarely if ever for them).

This leads to multiple customer frustrations. The cashier has to stop processing the sale of the customer in front of them to answer the phone, put the call on hold and notify the B2B sales guy. The customer on the phone is always answered by someone who can't help them and in addition they're often forgotten, mis-routed, etc because once the cashier turns it over or puts it on hold their job is done. The transfer of responsibility for the customer is nebulous at best and so it's not uncommon for the person to sit there having simply been forgotten.

In my opinion what they don't understand is there is value in sometimes paying people to do nothing. There's value in someone sitting there ready to help a customer when one comes in rather than having that person running around doing other "stuff" every time there's a moment free or interrupting them with other tasks when they're already busy.

In this example, a dedicated phone person with good skills could be a useful addition. It free's up the cashiers to help in store customers get checked out fast or answer questions they have.

Another valuable asset of this person is that they would own the call. If they put it on hold they could be keeping the person updated on the status of the B2B sales guy (oh he'll be off in a minute, etc) and ensuring the B2B guy remembers the call is there.

A third upside is that some of your customers end up getting a great experience. Shorter lines up front get people in and out, occasionally the phone person can answer a question without it getting to the B2B guy if he's busy, etc.

This is why with HelpSpot I don't worry about optimizing each second, especially for support. It's OK if once in a while there's some down time, it just means those requests that come in during that time will get a nearly instant response and a great experience. That's probably not the case if the support people are programming an intranet in their down time.

Why can't we do this with software? At some point aren't we just adding features for features sake? If you already have thousands/millions of customers who are successfully using the software to accomplish a task isn't that proof that it works well and accomplishes it's goal?

Couldn't a company just say that's it. Not abandon it like you see done all the time, but come out and say that's it. We're done with this product for the foreseeable future, though we'll continue to provide great support for it. A critical bug might cause us to release or in a few years if the market/needs have changed we may revisit this, but for now we're done.

Occasionally you see stuff like this in B2C software (well it's usually just abandoned), but almost never in B2B. What would happen if it was done? Would your sales dry up? Seems unlikely to me, especially if you continue to provide good support.

Everything here is in mint condition, no scratches, dents, all caps, etc. Even original boxes. The entire setup has only been used for a few thousand pictures.

Ideally I'd prefer to sell this as a bundle to one person. So I'm going to sweeten the pot by offering the entire setup for $1800 and include a bunch of free "stuff" listed at the end.

Here's what's available along with what it recently sold for on ebay. If I don't get any takers on the bundle in the next week or so, I'll sell it off piece by piece.

BUNDLE PRICE $1800 - Contact Me

Nikon D90 with 18-105 VR lens (all original stuff from box like charger, strap, etc) - recently on ebay: $900

Nikon 18-200mm - One of the greatest lenses ever made - recently on ebay: $600

Sigma 10-20mm - recently on ebay: $380

Nikon 50mm 1.8 - recently on ebay: $50

"stuff" included if buying as bundle - wireless remote, extra battery, basic filter set along with clear filters on all lenses, good Nikon cap to replace bogus Sigma cap

A few pics of the camera and lenses:

Interested? Contact me.

What I ended up doing instead is to favorite in Twitter (from Tweetie in my case) the tweets that I want to feature on the homepage of HelpSpot. I then grab the RSS feed from the Twitter favorites via the EE Feedgrab plugin which is great.

The nice thing about using this method over one of the EE twitter plugins is that you don't have to worry about timeouts. If twitter goes down your homepage isn't affected because Feedgrab just puts the tweets in your database so you'll always be able to server out the latest tweets fast, even if twitter is down.

By using favorites it also means I don't need a control panel somewhere to select the tweets from, I just keep using my Twitter client and mark off favorites as needed. And at least in Tweetie's case with the search integration I can mark favorites from people who @helpspot us or who just mention helpspot and I pick it up in the search.

October 2004:

November 2005:

Fall 2007->Fall 2009

Fall 2009

Medium vs small isn't about money directly, I think it's more about people. Once you get to a certain number of people there's simply too many to comfortably work on the main product all the time. So instead you let people go off and start new products. That's where it starts to feel wrong to me.

Not that there's anything bad about these new products, not at all. Many times they're great new products, but why? Why take on the burden of another new product? Why take on the distraction of another product? 

Is it just to make more money? Most of the companies I've seen do this lately make plenty of money, the founders have no need to work every again at these companies if they choose not to.

I suspect they think they're doing it for the challenge, but I wonder if that's really true. Building your 2nd, 3rd, 4th product is never going to be the same as the first. Perhaps that's why they do it. Always trying to get the juice they got with the first, but never able to exactly match it so they just keep building "stuff".

I'm not immune to this myself, I have a spec for product #2 all done. Just trying to fight off the urge, I give myself a 50/50 chance :-)

This is silly when you only have one product! However, the desire for a change runs deeper than that. The web has changed. People expect a product name to be it's domain. In addition, people communicate in many other mediums now, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. 

The old URL scheme just doesn't work that well on todays web. So we decided to move HelpSpot out on it's own.

Luckily I had purchased http://www.helpspot.com long ago. Actually before we released the product a domain squatter had it for sale. I figured we'd better buy it, but we were in startup mode and conserving cash everywhere we could. So I had my wife buy it for me as a birthday present :-). Really, that's a true story, I got a $300 domain for my 29th birthday.

Anyway, helpspot.com is much easier to say, describe, recommend, put on a business card, post in an ad, etc etc. I really think it's going to improve our traffic.

We also took the opportunity to launch it in a new design done by the wonderful 31Three and Mike Precious. They did a great job and I think we've captured a really nice feel on the site.

The only downside to the move is that we have a lot of links pointing to www.userscape.com. I kept that domain for the business itself so some of our SEO juice is going to be lost, but I believe the long term upside is worth it.