technicians. That’s right. 100 technicians. At 8:33am EST today we welcomed the 100th Certified MinuteFix Technician to the team. Welcome Aaron Parsley. It’s great to have you in addition to our other amazing technicians. Thank you all for you hard work and dedication to revolutionizing customer service and tech support.

Callie, Oscar’s Baby Technician

Yesterday was a remarkable day for both MinuteFix and Technician Tim Lally. Calling St. Louis, MO home, Tim is a great Tech certified in A+, MCP, MCDST as well as his MinuteFix certifications. Aside from that though Tim is now our first technician to handle a phone support customer. And handle it he did. In fact, after nearly two hours of phone support on his personal cell phone Tim was able to help Betsy (coincidentally our first phone support customer) with some iTunes issues including duplicate songs and songs that just wouldn’t play.

I think what is most incredible about this particular session is that Tim also enlisted the help of his “staff”. In other words, Tim asked his wife, the resident iTunes expert in the Lally household, and together they solved Besty’s issues. Unbelievable!

Thank you Tim for your dedication and your expert support. You are an inspiration to us all.

I have a very strong belief that customer service is founded in relationships. Customer service is truly about serving. It is about giving of ones own time and resources in order to benefit another. It is also about understanding how to relate to people; empathize with them and support them. Perhaps the most unrecognized form form of this relationship building is done in the home. It is shown on a regular basis in how we relate to our families. In my family today is a holiday in which my family comes together and sets aside all other agendas in an effort to relate to each other. Without prompting we serve each other, we relate to each other, we listen to each other and in many cases offers solutions to each other.

As I sat at the dinner table today - away from my computer - I thought about the community of Techs that I am privileged to work with and how they show me on a daily basis how to serve and relate to each other. I found myself bragging on the MinuteFix community today and how I felt we were well on our way to revolutionizing customer service and tech support. It was a great feeling and as the day winds down I thank you on behalf of MinuteFix and myself for allowing me to be your community manager and the opportunity to serve with such outstanding people.

Since mid-December we have been anticipating the launch of MinuteFix to the general (and paying, of course) public. In the meantime we have been holding a bit of a contest for the Technician who receives the best overall feedback from supported customers. It was a tough race as many of us found ourselves vying for any feedback at all and hoping it would be positive. Well, the time has come to announce the winner!

I would like to congratulate Jenn from Florida for her sweeping victory. She served customers over the last few months with excellent customer support and technical savvy raising the barre for all others. She will receiving a gift certificate for a custom Timbuk2 bag of her choosing. We are very excited to have Jenn on board and I continually find myself thanking her for her hard work and dedication to MinuteFix.

I do not want to forget, however, the runners-up, ANmar and Mark Ambrose; both of who show professional courtesy and outstanding computer knowledge. Way to go guys!

When we woke up yesterday we should have all had an email in our inbox giving us an idea of where we stand. Today is March 15 and the day we have been amping up for for sometime. We were to open our doors to a paying public today. That hope was setback by two days when we received word late Wednesday that our payment system would not be supported until Monday March 17. Not a huge setback though, I don’t feel. It gives us two more days to really get siked about our positioning as the best customer service and top online PC repair company in the world. We will, indeed, revolutionize the way business is done. Neither Diego nor I will rest until we are confident that we have achieved such.

Below is the exact email I sent out in case it got filtered into trash or something. Before I close this post though I just want to thank everyone again for your hard, hard work, your dedication and your amazing and inspiring enthusiasm. Thank you so much!

I will keep this short. As you know today has been advertised as the day we open the doors to paying customers. We have been committed to this date for some time and we thank you for working so hard in preparation for such.

We, unfortunately, received word from Litle, our payment processing company, that they cannot begin our partnership until Monday March 17 as the 15th is a Saturday and they are unavailable on the weekends.

I apologize for this inconvenience and as we have promised to be honest and transparent to the entire community, I wanted to communicate this minor setback to you. I do hope you understand and will still be joining us Monday when we throw open those doors.

If you have any questions or concerns you are always welcome to email me directly or call me. Thank you again for your patience and
understanding.

Regards,
Drew
Community Manager, MinuteFix

I think we have all realized how important it is to connect with each other both in and out of sessions. As with everything, there are pros and cons to working remotely. We don’t have the benefit of working under same roof but at the same time we can work in our PJs if we so desire. As one Tech stated, “[I miss] being able to stand up and take my headset off and yell over a cubicle to ask someone.” But being interconnected over a chat system is certainly something we can utilize to our benefit. We are building a network of the very best, so we can only service our customers better if we can reach out to each others great minds for answers.

Therefore, we’re happy to announce the chat platform of choice for the MinuteFix technician community: say hello to Skype. Diego, Oscar and I have talked long and hard about this choice and we feel this is going to be a great resource for MinuteFix for a few reasons:

1. Shared groups: Skype supports the notion of shared groups. As the community grows, we will need to have a chat platform that allows us to organize our teams: Windows, Vista, Office, Antivirus and Security and General Support. It will be very important for our technicians to be able to get help from others when stuck on a problem. As you all know, the network makes us all that more powerful. We don’t know everything, nor are we expected to, and there is nothing getting a little help from a friend. Shared groups organizes all of you who are part of the teams to work with each other. You won’t need to manually add each member, we will do it centrally. That way, when you are in a team, you will instantly be populated with all of the other technicians who are part of that team. Skype’s shared groups helps us organize ourselves and be able to better manage future growth. Skype also supports group chat, so a message can be sent to all members of the group, and we can all interact as if we had the community in the same room. Anyone who has the answer, or is available, can reply.
2. Phone support, down the road: We expect to roll out support over the phone for those technicians who would like to engage with the customer by talking. Skype has a very solid VoIP network (despite their 2-day crash last year, which, good for us taught them a lesson) and can work very well for serving as our phone support system. Skype allows us to manage calls to phone numbers very easily too. While on the subject of phone support, our idea is to launch with support for chat, solidify the product, build a solid following of consumers, and once we have the technology squared away, roll out the phone service.
3. Skype means business: Skype is very business-focused. Unlike MSN and Yahoo messenger, Skype is really focusing on providing a business-ready service. That is good for us because our chat platform is going to be a critical form of communication, and we need to treat it like business (which it is).

As with all new endeavors I want to take just a second to review a few ground rules and common behavior that will help us get the best out of this new tool.

1. Use group chat only for help with support, not for personal communications. Start group sessions when you are stuck with a support issue and need some help. If you know someone who might have the answer, chat to them directly without involving the entire group.
2. Try your best to be clear and to the point in your request. Use few words to get the words across. At MinuteFix, time is of the essence.
3. Don’t overuse it. We need to keep this tool useful, and if it becomes annoying due to overuse, technicians will tend to shy away from it. Use the forums for open conversations.
4. If you are starting a group chat to get some help, let the customer know. Use words like “I am putting this request out in the community, do you mind holding for a moment?”
5. If you are currently engaged in a chat session, remember that your priority is your customer. He or she is paying for your time helping them, not helping someone else. You can either ignore the chat session by leaving the group chat, or respond only if it does not cause a delay in your current session.
6. Skype allows you to set your online status. Please make sure that you set your true online status at all times. If you are online, you might get a chat request.
7. Skype does not currently allow management roles for shared groups. I will manage the groups centrally by adding Technicians to the respective groups. Contact me if a change needs to be made.

So please keep your eyes open for invites from me to particular Skype groups. I think this is an exciting advancement for us and I look forward to chatting with each of you!

We’ve come a long way. Just think of this video when you are supporting Windows Vista. You’ll feel better.

Thank you so much for your patience during this Beta time. It is not always the easiest time and is often filled with changes, transitions and fixes that are sometimes obvious and sometimes not so visible. Whatever the case, I think it is important to communicate what changes have gone into effect. Off the top of my head….

• You can now “Tell a friend” from a link at the top of all the pages.
• We increased our SEO (search engine optimization) in order to increase customer traffic.
• The SSL (security warnings) are gone.
• There is a new section on your technician page where you can immediately see the last 3 blog posts, the last 5 forum posts, as well as links to the forum, our wiki and our Ning community.

Again, thank you for your patience and stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Part of running a web company is just really keeping it in tip top shape. And in order to do that when the site is live we sometimes have to pull it down inconspicuously so as to push out something new. Well, that time happens to be now. At 8:30pm PST we will be doing some maintenance to www.minutefix.com in order to release some new features (more infor to come), fix our current email bug and push a few other, quite small, things out. We hope you understand and look forward to a newer, even sleaker MinuteFix.

This is a completely random link and may have nothing at all to do with customer service or tech support or the like. In fact, I may be asked to take it down. However, I think it is exciting to know that the tech dreams of MC Hammer have finally come true and how his Silicon Valley based DanceJam “YouTube for dance videos” is launching at long last. So, if you have no idea what I am talking about or you think you are hiding away a video completely worth posting, check out this article on the one, the only DanceJam.