Well, it’s that time of year again. So, we figured we would start to give back a little. We have launched the Support Sentry Support Forum to help provide faster and easier access to commonly asked questions as well as help to build a bigger community around our customer service and anti-spam products. We are growing and we hope that you will remain a part of the Support Sentry family.

Please join up and post in the new forums and happy holidays!

One of the most common questions we get is, “how do I stop SPAM to email addresses on my website?” If you don’t know what SPAM is, you don’t use email. SPAM or unsolicited email has become a bigger problem than people ever imagined. Back in the early days of mainstream internet use, an email that was sent to someone without their permission, would likely end up in some system administrator’s mail box at your ISP and you would be reprimanded…if not completely shut down. But, as Spammers soon realized, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of other ISP’s out there that were waiting to take their money. This is when SPAM really began to become a problem.

Programs were soon created that would, “crawl” the web looking for email addresses that were posted on newsgroups, websites, forums or any other place that was publicly available. For webmasters, this became a huge problem as email is one of the easiest and most convenient ways for our users and customers to interact with us.

Today, if you publish an email address on your website, it is safe to say that your email address receives a least 1,000 spam emails a day, rendering that account virtually useless. Well, we decdied that there had to be a better way. We wanted to be able to use email addresses like info@ or sales@ and not have to be dictated to by the spammers of the world. We started by releasing our Spam Block software that allows webmasters to reclaim their violated addreses. A free service, Spam Block, uses what you might call a “Double opt-in” system where any email sent receives an auto-response asking the sender to verify the email. Essentially, the email the sender receives requires them to click on a link, and then enter a security CAPTCHA code (funny looking letters and numbers) to ensure that the sender is a real person. This system can be deployed on any email address you want to publish on a forum, website, newsgroup or other place where a bot or spammer may come across it.

We loved this technology so much, we decided to integrate it into our Web Support PRO customer service software. Now all of the benefits of our anti-spam technology are available to our Web Support users. Simply turn on the “double opt-in” setup for a particular account and all emails sent to a particular address will need to have the sender verify it’s authenticity.

So, if you operate a website and need to publish email addresses, or you want to re-claim email addresses lost to spam, our Spam Block or Web Support PRO services may be of interest to you.

Hi just a rant here, if you run a website and have to offer customer service keep this in mind, as this is how the little guys can compete and even outperform the big guys.

I have noticed a scary trend with some online retailers recently. Overstock.com will not let you cancel an order once it has been placed period. Their reasoning is that “the orders go to the warehouse so quickly that we can not cancel the orders” That’s funny to me because I placed a pre-order for an item and then decided to get it locally instead and they would not let me cancel even though the item wasn’t scheduled to ship for 2 weeks! Then just this last week I ordered something from Motorola, I got a call from their service department saying that my billing info didn’t match and that I needed to call and fix it. Well I was going to be leaving town and decided I could not wait for the order any long so I called up and asked them to cancel my order. “I’m sorry sir we can not cancel this order because it has already been sent to our shipment processor” I told her that I thought that was really funny since I had gotten the message that my billing information was not valid. She said they had called my credit card company and cleared the shipping address and that my order was already on the way. So I asked for my tracking number…….”ummm I am unable to provide that to you at this time”. So you say my order is on the way and I can not cancel, however you can not provide me a tracking number?? That’s just wrong.

If you run an online store please do not copy the poor customer service that these large companies and their outsourced to india (we’ll get to this in another rant) customer service team is providing. If you take an order, allow the person to cancel the order until you have shipped it and can provide them a tracking number. It can be no other way with online retailing.

Can less be more? I think so. I have noticed recently in my communication with customer service representatives that they are much better at talking less. Waiting until I have completed what I am saying and even when I interrupt (yes, I do that sometimes) them, they will wait until I have completed my rant. This is a very good tactic for customer service teams to use as it allows the customer to get everything off of their chest as well as keeps the “tone” of the conversation as low as possible. Not allowing the conversation to escalate to anything above a normal tone is very helpful and will keep the customer’s heart rate in check.

So, if you can keep your customer service staff from interrupting your customers and get them to listen to everything your customer says, before responding, the customer experience should vastly improve.

Oh my, tough day at the office. The building is getting painted (on the outside) and the paint fumes are insane. I have to say, water based paint is the way to go. I don’t care if it peels off in a few years…it does not kill brain cells, blur your vision and give you a headache. So much for a productive day at the office. Good thing I did not have any important phone calls today….or did I?