Knock! Knock! Who's there?

I bought a DVD last week and as it turned out the DVD is only suitable for Region 1 DVD player. I didn’t know that! Do you? Don’t pretend; it’s okay to admit your ignorance too. Who knows these details! In fact, I was in a hurry so I just asked the shop assistant to help me look for the title of the movie that I wanted to buy. She picked up the DVD, I paid and left. In the evening, I put on the DVD in the player just to find out that my player did not support DVDs from Region 1. I searched for the contact number of the shop and I called.

The conversation went ugly when the person who took the call scoffed at me for not knowing the region type of my DVD player. His suggestion was to play the movie on the Region 1 player. Yeah! I have 5 types of DVD players in my house; the one in the kitchen is the Region 1 player. In my effort to appear civilized and cultured, I told him that it was their staff who gave the DVD to me and it was the responsibility of the employee to notify me that the DVD is not good for this region. “We have all kinds of DVD! You think we have one type only ah?,” he again blamed me for my ignorance. “Since you bought from the girl, you settle the matter with her lah!,” he added. “What time did you come? Morning? Afternoon? Night? Dawn?” he toyed with my feelings in a very irritating way. I was flabbergasted to learn that VideoEZY could employ someone who is not only unprofessional but also very hostile to the client. I lodged a complaint via email to the shop and VideoEzy but after one week, nobody replies. I guess one client is not important enough for them to care.

My husband and I have made our executive decision to not buy or enter any VideoEZY outlet til the day we leave this earth. Therefore, Speedy will get our money and we do spend a lot on DVDs and BluRays every month. The point is: it’s pretty easy to lose a customer.

Support is an important part of any business. Shall the person who picked up my call tell me that I could swap the DVD with the correct Region type within 2 days; it would make me a happy customer. Shall he apologize on the girl’s behalf and tell me to come to the shop and he’ll see what he could do, that would make my day. Apart from solving the problem, the way you attempt to solve it is equally important.

In these days and age, people are getting impatience than before. A delayed response to an enquiry or a support request could risk a business opportunity or could lose you an important client. And most important of all, customers must have channels to reach you and you must be able to feedback to them in a timely manner.
Strengthen your support system, tap on FingerTec’s support resources online, alert on all enquiries and support requests, I bet you will not only retain happy customers, orders will come in due to rave reviews from your current clients.

When your customers knock, make sure you answer. And for the uninitiated, Region 1 is for America.

Oh how you wish our technical team would look like this (and wishes could come true)

by Norana Johar, COO, FingerTec HQ

United We Stand, Divided We Fall

Last Saturday, on the 9^th of July 2011, the whole nation was anxious to see what’s going to happen in the so-called illegal rally of Bersih 2.0 in Kuala Lumpur. After weeks of demonizing the rally from all angles, and threats from the authorities to clamp down hard on the demonstrators, the whole nation waited at the edge of their seats. All major roads to the city were closed. People were diverted away from the city, and advised to stay at home. Announcements to not partake in the illegal rally flooded major newspapers and even electrical road signboards. Civil servants and scholarship students were warned not to join the rally, or they would have face the consequences. Roadblocks that were staged on Wednesday to check for imaginary weapons had caused massive jam in the already heavy office rush in Lembah Klang and anger throughout the KLites. And as the last resort, the authority announced 91 names of key people to be banned from entering Kuala Lumpur. Thousands of police officers and police reserves were planted on various sites in the city to keep the demonstrators away and to maintain the peace.

So when the day came, people waited to see whether the clamp down had deterred the spirits of the demonstrators. They waited to see how many would turn up and successfully slipped the fortress. By 10am, 1,000 were seen on the road and the numbers increased by the hour and despite the rain, tear gas and water cannons attacks fired by the police and FRU, more than twenty thousands turned up to flood the roads of Kuala Lumpur for a peaceful rally demanding Electoral Reform for clean elections. The demonstration went on regardless.

I’m not being political in this article but this event goes to show that united we stand, divided we fall. All these people stand united for a cause and they didn’t let any threat to discourage their fighting spirit. They may be small in comparison to the whole population but the impact they created were huge and they rocked the nation to its core. They didn’t let the big boy dictate how they should do things. They stuck to their promise to stage a peaceful rally, so peaceful they came, peaceful they walked and peaceful they left. Whether they achieved their objective or not had become secondary, the more important thing was, they tried.

It’s important to be seen, it’s important to be heard, it’s important to create an impact. It’s especially true in business as well. Why do we constantly insist on success stories, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, website links from all our esteemed partners around the world? The answer is simple; we want to create an impact. One party couldn’t do it as large as a large group could. Let’s stand together and unite to create an impactful marketing for the FingerTec brand. An update of Twitter about FingerTec in India could create an impact for FingerTec in South Africa. Let’s build a community of FingerTec Worldwide that’s available worldwide using the available technologies. Let the big boys do as they please – we will go our own way and if we are sustaining our way, we might just create an exceptional impact one day. Godspeed.

by Norana Johar, COO, FingerTec HQ