For some odd reason finding a shuttle service from Philadelphia or Philadelphia International Airport to other places ended up being a bit more difficult than I expected. For others, in search for shuttle services check out:
I’ll be attending the Wharton Africa Business Forum today. I may try to Twitter some/ part of the conference so if you’d like information from a specific session please let me know.
Some of the keynote sessions I’ll be attending include the following speakers:
Mandé Sidibé
Chairman of Ecobank
Former Prime Minister of Mali (2000-2002)
Yibrah Tesfazghi
GE President & Corporate Regional Executive for Africa
H.E. Amina
Salum Ali
Ambassador of the African Union to the United States
Akere Muna
Vice-Chair Transparency International and Member of the African Union Audit Commission
Euvin Naidoo
President & CEO of the South African Chamber of Commerce in America
Microsoft Outlook Connector is a free program that you can use with Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to access and manage your Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail or Microsoft Office Live Mail accounts. I tried setting it up for my Windows Live Hotmail account and captured some screen shots during the setup process. Unfortunately, it didn’t go quite as well as I was hoping it would and ended up with the dreaded ‘Not Responding’ error.
The past few weeks have been quite busy – new projects – new experiments – new hosting providers – new server issues and now in perfect timing a new way to learn a language. Mango – offers a new way to learn a new language. After taking French for six years in High School and not being able to converse in it at all, I figured it was worth a shot. So far, the program has proved very impressive and not being able to benchmark it against a Rosetta product weakens my recommendation. Nevertheless, if you’re looking to pick up Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, French, Greek or German try them out. As for me, it’s Adios – Spanish for Goodbye.
Start with the customer and work backwards. Those two things, passion and customer-centricity, will take you an awful long way. – Jeff Bezos
It’s not a big deal finding a toll free number for a company, but finding a toll free numer that can eventually lead you to a live human operator is becoming an ordeal. Thankfully the good folks over at Quickbase have a customer service chart with shortcuts you can take to avoid the typical corporate Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system – the press #1 followed by 2 followed by 3 followed by ‘Please Try Again – A Response Is Required’ system.
Two numbers I definitely need from the chart are for Amazon.com (800-201-7575) and for Comcast (800-266-2278). In the past my computer manufacturer’s number would have been on the list, but unlike Dell, Gateway has a much more friendlier and more efficient customer service team and as a result I’ve never had to wait more than 2 minutes to speak to a customer service representative. In fact just two days ago when I called to have my laptop CD-ROM drive fixed, the whole troubleshooting process and new shipment confirmation was done in less than 5 minutes.
As a consumer, if I can speak to a company representative in less than 2 minutes and get a problem fixed in less than 5, you’ve essentially got me locked in as a life time customer.
Yesterday I received an email from a Hotmail Product Manager asking if I was still having trouble with connecting to Hotmail via Outlook/ Outlook Express. I was baffled; my blog post about my negative experience with Hotmail was heard and after a couple of e-mail exchanges my problem was resolved. Although, a large part of this solution was probably because of my beta testing experience with Microsoft, I’d like to think that that Aditya Bansod took time to listen to my feedback and act on it, and ultimately reflect very, very positively on the new ultimate listener on the block – Microsoft.
As I blogged about earlier, I think that a company that is willing to exceed the wants and expectations of the customer ultimately wins the battle. In my opinion a listening company encourages constructive feedback back to the company and also creates massive positive word-of-mouth advertising. After this experience you’re going to have to work twice as hard to get me to switch to a competitor’s product and to any company customer loyalty is the ultimate prize.
Thank you Aditya for listening and solving my Hotmail problem. It seems like the new team working on the Kahuna/ Mail Beta is dedicated to changing the service lockin perception and has already laid an amazing foundation to support this change.