Random(Ben)

AT & T’s Horrible Customer Service

Ben Hoffman — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 01:03:23 +0000

In general I don’t like dealing with customer service companies because their Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems are terrible. I loathe none more than AT & T. That’s right AT & T, I am looking at you. I have had to deal with AT & T probably two dozen times. At this point I can not dream up a worse hell than being stuck on the phone with you for eternity. So now I am going to play a game, called Problem/Solution. This is where I point out where AT & T phone support sucks and the insanely easy solution.

Problem - Every time I call an automated message tells me “We are sorry we are currently experiencing higher than normal call volumes.” I have news for you, AT & T if there is not a current national or local disaster occurring then there should not be a message about higher than normal call volume. On a bad day I get this message more than once. It’s like AT & T wants me to know that they suck at their job.

Solution - If they really want to be correct the message should state “We are sorry for long wait times we don’t want to pay for more service employees so just wait” or better yet just don’t have one! People wouldn’t even notice it was gone and maybe they would be less frustrated!

Problem - The first thing you hear when you call is a message in Spanish stating if you want your options in Spanish press one. English speakers are forced to wait for what feels like forever. I don’t know about the rest of you but when I am calling AT & T I need something and I don’t want to spend time waiting so they can make sure I don’t speak a foreign language.

Solution - Why not first say in English “If you want English press 1 or hold” and then give the Spanish message and have them press two. I understand you have a large number of Spanish Speakers AT & T but last time I checked there are more English speakers in the US than Spanish speakers. Other companies do this, maybe you should follow their lead?

Problem - After every entry step you read back to me exactly what I put in and ask me if it is correct. If I had to do this once or twice I wouldn’t care but I am forced to enter my account number, phone number, special pass code, birth name, blood type, and the 3 other numbers you want. I feel like AT & T took a page from the “How to be Horrible” book that Microsoft has finally thrown away. This feels like Vista for my IVR. Enter your number, is it right? Are you sure its right? Are you really really sure?

Solution - Tell me up front if at any point you entered an incorrect number press the * key or something else like that. Hey that way I only have to listen to it one time!

Problem - When I finally get through the first 3 circles of hell that are the above problems and I got down to that final menu of options I have to listen to 7 options only to find none of the options fit me. Then I wonder if I should choose one and pray I talk to a person or go back a menu and try another option (this is usually at least a 5 minute ordeal).

Solution - Give me an option to talk to an operator and make it the first one. Do you really route the question to a different group depending on if I am having an issue with my U-verse phone, internet, or cable? Don’t lie, I know you give your service agents a wizard tool to help the customers. So why not let people choose to talk to a human instead of making us feel like we aren’t important. One more question for the agent isn’t a big deal.

Problem - I have to go through a 3 step wizard on my computer to get to the correct support number. That’s right, I have to use an interactive web system just so I can call to use an interactive phone system! Is AT & T actively trying to make me lose my mind? I counted and step one has over 25 options! The best part is when I call in I get asked some of the same questions again!

Solution – This at least seems like the a step in the right direction but AT & T can’t you find a way to reduce my options? I mean seriously, if you had me enter my account number in the web form I bet you could reduce my options by 50%. That seems like a novel solution. Also, give me some numbers of front. Right now it looks like all U-verse related calls go to one number. So why not just tell me call 800-555-5555 if you need help with your U-Verse account. There is no reason to make me jump three hoops just to make tell me the same damn thing I already knew!

In conclusion, AT & T your products aren’t bad but your phone support needs serious help. The above issues are only the ones I have had time to talk about. There are dozens more. Just because you are a giant company and you can get away with running crap departments doesn’t mean you should. Shame on you for not caring. Fixing them may not seem important but I guarantee you are losing customer over this. What other things do people hate about AT & T’s phone support? I would love to hear.

Black Hat and White Hat SEO and the Space Between

Ben Hoffman — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 06:22:33 +0000

Lately there have been a few articles in the news about how Google has punished sites for using what they consider Black Hat SEO tricks. The biggest names so far have been JC Penny and Overstock. Google tells companies to follow their Webmaster Guidelines and specifically read their definition of what constitutes a link scheme. From Google’s Link Scheme page, if your link building campaign does one of these you are creating a link scheme:

Links intended to manipulate PageRank
Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

JC Penny paid for their links

The reason why JC Penny got into trouble with Google was because they paid a Black Hat SEO company to create thousands of links for thousands of keywords across the net. Doing this is a blatant link scheme because it follows rules #1 and #4 of what constitutes a Link Scheme. This was an obvious mistake on JC Penny’s side and it something that will have to deal with.

Overstock gave coll kids discounts for links

Overstock got into hot water for an entirely different reason, they gave students discounts for posting links on their .edu domains to Overstock’s website. This would seemingly only meet #4 of Google’s of what is a Link Scheme.

The Gray Zone

When you compare what JC Penny and Overstock did a huge difference emerges. JC Penny had the intent of increasing their Page Rank through any means necessary. Overstock found a way to leverage the internet community into increasing their Page Rank. Overstock never paid anyone money to post these links. They simply created an incentive for students to post links to them. If Google was punishing them for attaching an incentive to creating links to their site then there are a great deal of companies that should also be penalized. There are tens of thousands of companies who do this daily. Honest companies like Das Keyboard who enter you into prize drawings to write reviews or link to their products. This wouldn’t seem to be much different than what Overstock did, except Overstock did it on a larger scale and were more successful.

So that begs the question, does Google punish sites for being overly successful at SEO or for breaking the Webmaster Rules? To me it seems like there is a real gray zone where Google is making their own decisions and punishing whoever they choose. What concerns me is are they making decisions and taking action based off of bad press and trying to save face or in the interest of doing the right thing? After all, Google found out about what JC Penny did from The Wall Street Journal and about Overstock from an SEO Forum.

One last thing: Maybe Overstock gamed the system or maybe they exposed a whole in Google’s Algorithm. How can a handful of .edu links make such a huge difference? There are literally thousands of .edu sites in the US and many of them have sections controlled and maintained by students. Until Google makes a change to how strongly is weighs links for .edu’s we will continue to see people try and game .edu links.

of what constitutes a Link Scheme

IE6 will be dead in 12 Months

Ben Hoffman — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:16:01 +0000

I like many other web developers have been waiting for the end of IE6. I find Internet Explorer 6 frustrating to work with and it differences with modern browsers is infuriating at times. I have been watching quietly for the last year as the number of IE6 users has steadily dropped. My opinion has been that once it falls below 1% I should be able to easily convince any company I work with that there is no need to test in IE6. Below is a graph showing usage by month worldwide of the 3 most used versions of Internet Explorer.

Full Data at http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201003-201102

I used this to find an average loss of IE6 users to be around 7.5%. At that constant rate of loss less than 1% of browser in use will be IE6 in October of 2012. So why will it be dead in 12 months? I predict a number of things going into it.

People are moving to Firefox, Chrome, and Safari more rapidly as the network effect takes hold.
More major companies like Google will push people away from IE6 by putting notices on their site that their software is no longer 100% compatible with it.
While IE9 doesn’t have an official release date yet, if Microsoft wants to stay in the Browser game they need to release it before 2011 is over. When IE9 comes out, a lot of people will switch.
As the number of IE6 users dwindle the pressure on the remaining users as resources become more and more focused on them.
When CTOs see what the browser landscape looks like at the end of 2011 and see that staying on IE6 is a technological death sentence, they will put the capital towards getting rid of it. Right now corporations are the where almost all IE6 users are coming from in the US.

The holdouts in all of this will be old big corporations and countries trying to rapidly build their technology base as cheaply as possible. The reasons for both are the same, the cost of upgrading is too prohibitive. Even with these hold outs it will be a brave new world for most of us. Microsoft even has a countdown website of sorts. I look forward to the end of IE6 and I cannot wait to celebrate its demise!

One more prediction: Once IE6 disappears, IE7 will be the next target and should be see less that 1% market share by the end of 2012. While IE7 isn’t as horrible as IE6, there are few business reasons to use it, IE8 more or less replicate it and Windows XP can upgrade all the way to IE8.

RoutingHandler for Favicon.ico and other special files

Ben Hoffman — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 14:01:34 +0000

A while back, I wanted to include the then new URL Routing features in C# 3.0 in a website I was building. I didn’t want to use MVC though. I found a great article by Scott Mitchell at 4 Guys From Rolla that had almost everything I wanted to know about Using ASP.NET Routing Without ASP.NET MVC.

There was one thing though that was missing. How to deal with special files like the favicon.ico file. I found out that the serving was not sending the favicon.ico file but was serving my not found page that my registered routes defaults too when it could find no activity for /{Activity}.

I wrote a question on Stack Overflow, entitled, Using URL Routing for Web Forms and StopRoutingHandler for Favicon, I didn’t get any answers and I eventually answered it myself. Since then over 1,000 people have viewed my question so there must be some merit to it.

The easy solution is to just use this code:

routes.Add("RSS", new Route("syndication.rss", new RSSRouteHandler()));

One thing I didn’t realize and it drove me nuts was that Firefox would continue to work incorrectly even when I cleared the cache and refreshed with ctrl+F5 and stopped and restarted VS2010 debugging. The only way to get my favicon to work was to close Firefox and open it again and then run the debugger.

Once I figured this out I found a number of other helpful files to use the StopRoutingHandler on.

routes.Add(new Route("robots.txt", new StopRoutingHandler()));
routes.Add(new Route("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}", new StopRoutingHandler()));
routes.Add("RSS", new Route("syndication.rss", new RSSRouteHandler()));

Since you always need a robots.txt you will always need line 1. If you are using any of Microsoft’s Ajax generating code then you will need line 2 because Microsoft creates their Ajax files as .axd’s. Finally, you will probably have a different RSS feed than me so your Route string will need to be changed for line 3 but if you have an RSS feed you will need it.

These 4 lines of code made a huge difference for me and it did take me a little while to figure them out. Hopefully, this code will help others.