July 22nd, 2022 – Teachable moments in direct-to-consumer software automations: How NOT to automate the last mile of a supply chain
I ordered a nice Toshiba 75″ 4k LED for about $700 on Amazon Prime day. Amazon has allowed 3rd party vendors to sell items on it’s site for years as long as they meet some basic policy requirements (domestic return address, free shipping on returns, etc). Usually, the 3rd party vendor is a warehouse without a storefront, but strangely enough, this time it was Best Buy, the big box retailer. I didn’t realize that a big store like that could sell on Amazon, but I needed a TV and it was marked down considerably for Amazon Prime Day so I ordered it anyway.
I immediately started getting emails about scheduling a delivery via Best Buy’s web app. I went to the URL in the email and looked at their delivery scheduling app. When I saw that Best Buy’s delivery policy said that someone over the age of 18 needed to be here to sign for the TV, I thought it made sense – I wouldn’t want my TV delivered to a child or left unattended outside. That’s why my building has a staffed receiving room. The room sits at ground floor outside of security, waiting for packages to arrive. The receiving staff signs for packages, keeping everything securely organized. That means I don’t have to actually be there when things are delivered., which is much more convenient. The only negative of using the receiving room is that you have to work within their hours. On a weekday, that’s 11am to 7pm, or weekends are 9am to 5pm.
Anyways, Best Buy’s web app showed a calendar with a few possible delivery date and times. That’s when I first began to doubt the delivery would be handled smoothly. The first delivery window available was 9 days away on a Thursday between 7am and noon. Well, we can’t do that. The receiving room isn’t open until 11am on weekdays. The next two delivery windows were 10 days away on Friday, with one window from 7am to noon and the other from noon to 6pm. So I picked the Friday afternoon window. I was a little bummed that I would have to wait 10 days for my TV to arrive, but no worries. Maybe they were just overloaded with prime day deliveries, right?
Well, today is delivery day, folks. It’s 9:35pm and I still don’t have my TV. So what happened?
This morning around 9am I got a robocall from 1-888-BEST-BUY. The call informed me that my TV would be delivered tomorrow, July 23rd, between noon and 430pm. There was no option to reschedule or talk to a human being available on the robocall, just a brief explanation of their COVID policy and a goodbye. I was pretty bummed they were going to be a day late as I had rescheduled another appointment so I wouldn’t have to leave the office. I did appreciate the heads up, though; now I could turn the ringer on my phone back off and get some work done.
This is where the teachable moments about automation start to come at us hard and fast.
teachable moment #1
Don’t place a call when a text message will do.
Nobody leaves their phone’s ringer on anymore; there’s just too many scammers and robocallers out there. What they do respond to, however, is text messages. Calls get a response rate below 30%, where text messages get read within a few minutes better than 90% of the time. You can still call if you want to, but if you’re not texting your customers then you’re wasting your time.
It’s also much easier to read text than it is to understand speech, especially on a voicemail when you can’t ask someone to repeat themselves. Text leaves a nice, timestamped trail too. It’s easy to see what was said and when.
3:00pm: Around 3pm, I noticed this voicemail on my phone from 1-888-BEST-BUY. In very slurred English that both my iPhone and I had trouble translating, someone mumbled that I had 15 minutes to come meet him downstairs to sign for the TV or they would reschedule the delivery. I looked at the timestamp of the recording. It was from 151pm. Because I was unable to answer that call, the delivery driver had no idea where to leave the TV or who would sign for it. I checked on Amazon’s website. The order was marked as “delivery attempted at 216pm.” The truck with my TV is long gone.
teachable moment #2
Don’t call me from a number I can’t call you back on
If I’m trying to return a call, I should be connected DIRECTLY by dialing the number that was left in a voicemail or on my caller id. Displaying the number for an IVR or transferring me to a call center on the other side of the world is wasteful, frustrating and unhelpful. You might as well block the caller ID for outbound calls.
If you don’t want to buy everyone a phone or give up your employee’s personal phone numbers, you don’t have to. Your phone system should have its own log of outbound calls. You also have my phone number as soon as I call you. You should be able to tell who I’m trying to call back by matching my number against the outbound log. When I call back, your software should see that I’m returning a call. So, the first option in your menu should always be “if you are returning a call from this number, press 1”. If your phone system’s not that smart, I will build you one that is.
3:10pm: I called the 1-888-BEST-BUY number back. Instead of connecting me to the local delivery driver, it connected me to the main IVR for all of Best Buy’s retail and online services. First, the robot asked me to state in natural language what I wanted. I said “where’s my TV” and the robot didn’t understand. Then I said “where’s my delivery?” The robot understood that. Then it asked for an order number starting with “BBY-“. All I had were Amazon order numbers, which all started with “111”. So, I said “I don’t know”.
I then waited on hold for 15 minutes. When I finally spoke to the first human being, he asked for my Best Buy account details. The first operator didn’t understand when I told him I had no Best Buy account, had ordered a TV from Amazon and they were the 3rd party seller. I told him I had an order number, but he refused to talk to me unless I signed up for a Best Buy account. After about 90 seconds of incredulous silence, I told him that was unacceptable and repeated that I have an order number. He demanded I sign up for an account and I just hung up.
teachable moment #3
Automation cannot completely replace human beings
If I’m calling for customer service, it’s because I have a problem. Some problems are easy to solve with automation, but the ones that aren’t should be handled by humans. If I have a difficult problem that needs a human response, I’m going to be even more upset if I find a dead end in your automated system that means I have to start over.
Whenever possible, leave the option to press ZERO to get a person. If you can’t afford to have a human being triage all your inbound calls, you still have to leave a way to get a human on the phone after I navigate through your automated menus. If I make 5 or 6 selections in your automated menu system and I still haven’t got the answers I need, then my problem is too difficult for a robot. Just put me on the phone with an operator.
3:30PM: I tried Amazon’s customer service number next. It required me to log into my account to verify that I was me before I was even allowed to talk to the robot. That didn’t go well. The link they texted me required me to enter a password that I never saved to my iPhone. I tried 4 or 5 times, then gave up. The robot on the other end asked me permission to send me the verification, so I called back and told it no, it couldn’t send me a link to verify that I’m me.
I then was directed to a set of unhelpful menus that didn’t answer anything I called about. I couldn’t even get Amazon’s robot to admit that I had purchased a TV from them. The robot was stuck on a different item I ordered the same day (a connector for some track lighting I’ve been working on). Pressing zero did nothing but repeat the same information about the wrong order. Amazon’s customer service phone robot was just far too automated.
I went back online and tried to do web-based chat with Amazon. They directed me to a “contact the seller” page, which is really just a way to send an email to Best Buy. So I sent an email to Best Buy via Amazon. Unfortunately, the response from Amazon is “expect a response from the seller within 48 hours.” This was not getting me any closer to talking to my delivery driver, who is driving around in a truck with my TV right now.
teachable moment #4
If you can’t fix the problem right now, set a meeting and exchange direct phone numbers. The better solution is to text the customer a direct phone number to call at a specific date and time. Then text a reminder with a reference number an hour before that time. If the customer calls from the number that got the text, they should talk to a person right away. If the customer doesn’t call, call and at least leave a voicemail.
Don’t tell me you’re going to call me back (because you won’t)
3:45pm: I tried calling 888-BEST-BUY again. This time I got an operator who was willing to look up my order based solely on the Amazon order number. I explained the situation and she transferred me to a third operator. The third operator put me on hold for a few minutes while she talked to the local delivery team. Then she told me I would receive a call back within the hour. That call never came.
teachable moment #5
You should always be careful to check other retailers websites when you’re shopping on Amazon.com. Even on Prime Day. Even if Jean Baptiste sings a catchy song about buying camping supplies during every other commercial break on FreeVee. Always. Amazon.com is not always the best deal, especially when 3rd party sellers are involved.
Amazon Prime Day isn’t always a sale
6:00pm: I called 888-BEST-BUY and waited on hold three more times to get an operator who would talk to me without registering for an account. After five and a half hours and six different Best Buy customer service operators, I gave up and asked, “can we just switch to in-store-pickup?” Brief hold. No. “What if we just cancel the order?” Response: You can’t do that thru Best Buy, you have to do it thru Amazon. So, I go back to the Amazon order and it says I can’t cancel until at least 3 days after the delivery was expected.
Feeling defeated, I sigh deeply and click the TV to look at it’s Amazon.com page longingly. I then notice that the Amazon Prime Day price is the same as the price it is now, even though Prime Day was over a week ago. Then I go on BestBuy.com and lookup the same exact TV. Best Buy’s site lists the TV with a free Echo Dot, 3 months of Apple TV+ AND It’s available for in-store pickup or delivery Wednesday. AND ALL AT THE SAME PRICE. All I have to do is tie it to the roof of my car and drive 1.7 miles back from Best Buy’s the South Loop store.
If you are interested in making your customer service systems better, send me a note and we’ll get you set up.
-Sully
April 19th, 2022 – Mandelbrot Moved!
For those of you who don’t already know, I moved my office to the West Tower of the landmark Marina City buildings right in the heart of downtown Chicago. Set up an appointment and I’ll take you out somewhere in River North – we’ve got some of the best restaurants in Chicago right at our feet, the theater district is right on the other side of the bridge and you can walk down the riverwalk to the lakefront in about 20 minutes. Best decision ever!
September 23rd, 2020 – Mandelbrot Publishes Outbound SMS Demo File as a Mandelbro-versary Gift to the FileMaker Community
We’ve all been there- there’s something you want to write in FileMaker but you just can’t figure out how to make it work. So you go on the community, you go on google, you read tons of documentation and HOPEFULLY, you get the help you need to solve your problem. It’s how coding is learned.
Then, one day, you realize you’re on the other side of the coin. You start hearing the kind of questions to which you have the answers. Sometimes you even hear half-cocked answers to those questions and you know a much faster, simpler, or cleaner way to do. That’s when it’s time to give back.
I had such a moment a couple days ago when a customer asked me to give him the simplest form of an outbound SMS script. So, in a couple hours, I created and sent him a branded demo file that is the fastest, easiest way to get outbound SMS up and running with Twilio. It doesn’t require Claris Connect; just a Twilio account with enough cash in it to support the messages and a Twilio phone number.
It’s a demo file, so it’s completely unlocked. Feel free to tear it apart, adapt it into your own code and share it. I’m just happy to send something back into the community that has given me so much these past 2 years. Download it for free here. Happy Birthday, Mandelbrot!
April 30th, 2020 – Mandelbrot Publishes Bolt On Picture Messaging for FileMaker, Mandelbrot MMS
Two Fridays ago, our friend Patrick Cranston over at CranstonIT gave us a call. His team has been providing FileMaker development and hosting services to an outpatient drug rehabilitation clinic. The clinic gives its patients prescriptions to help reduce their chemical dependencies. Those prescriptions have a high potential of abuse or resale, so a desire for monitoring was expressed to the team developing their FileMaker solution.
The solution they arrived at was actually quite simple: patients would receive a text message at a random time requesting a photo of the remaining doses of their prescription. The patient would then take a photo of their remaining medication and send it back to the same number. The photos would then automatically attach to the patient’s record in FileMaker.
Now, the development team over at CranstonIT is really sharp. We have no doubt they could have created a way of doing this from scratch. Instead of spending weeks writing their own MMS connector to do just that, they took a much faster, much cheaper shortcut: they asked us if we could do it with Mandelbrot SMS.
At the time, the answer was “almost.” Mandelbrot SMS was already 80% of what they needed: real-time, familiar, conversational messaging that bolts on easily to any FileMaker solution in a few minutes. The only item that was really missing was MMS – text messages with pictures as well as text.
Here at Mandelbrot HQ, we had already begun a version of Mandelbrot MMS. The project was shelved in March due to an unexpected surge in demand for other Mandelbrot services, much of it due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With Patrick’s recent interest, we renewed our effort into MMS and completed the first publicly available edition. Mandelbrot MMS has just been submitted to the Claris Marketplace and is available now from the Mandelbrot LLC store.
Here’s another customer’s review.
The most amazing part of the new MMS system is the pictures. Our customers used to email pictures to us, which is not nearly as easy for them as a text message. Now we text the customer from our MMS number, they text us back their photos and the photos automatically attach to their FileMaker records. The text conversation is right there too. Our whole team understands the situation without having to talk. It’s fantastic. We’ve stopped losing information and we repeat ourselves a whole lot less. It’s also nice not having to use our own personal cell phones for texting customers. We can finally leave them on after work again.
Ben Schultz, Illinois Energy Windows and Siding, inc
April 2nd, 2020 – Mandelbrot Adds FileMaker Server Hosting on AWS EC2 Training Guide as Productized Service Now Available in Mandelbrot Store
There’s a million reasons to host your own FileMaker server on AWS EC2. Maybe your solution needs more (or less) CPU, RAM or storage than the off-the-shelf versions of FileMaker Cloud 2. Maybe you need your server to be compatible with earlier versions of FileMaker Pro Advanced. Maybe your solution needs to be hosted somewhere closer than is currently available. Maybe you can’t justify the cost of your current hosting solution and you’re looking for a cheaper alternative. Maybe you need something more flexible with command line access. Or maybe you just want to learn what all the fuss is about. Whatever your reasoning is, I wrote this document for you.
March 20th, 2020 – Mandelbrot offers COVID-19 relief pricing for AWS provisioning services
It’s getting really real out there. Everything, including a large portion of business, is cancelled for the foreseeable future. If your FileMaker shop is like ours, your customers have asked you to take their on-prem solutions to the cloud for the duration of their local shelter-in-place order. To help ease the fears of the community, Mandelbrot is offering special COVID-19 relief pricing for AWS provisioning services. Check this page for details.
February 15th, 2020 – Sully confirmed as session presenter at Pause On Error (St Louis, March 30-31st)
Pause on Error has an attendee list that reads like the FileMaker hall of fame. It’s two days of the community’s best and brightest jammed together in order to let new ideas and techniques flow freely in an open, collaborative environment.
We’re proud to announce that our fearless leader, Mandelbrot founder Dave Sullivan (Sully) has been confirmed as a session presenter at this year’s conference in St. Louis. Sully, of course, is thrilled.
“I’ve been doing a ton of work that’s aimed at helping businesses survive in a world where nobody answers their phones. I’m so beyond stoked to help everyone!”
His topic will, of course, be “How to use Twilio without being evil.” Sign up to attend Pause on Error here.
January 25th, 2020 – 60 Second Proof Of Concept YouTube series begun
Hey Mandel(br)o(t)rians! Check out my new YouTube series, 60 Second Proof Of Concepts With Sully. The series is meant to highlight some of the technology we’ve added to other customer’s solutions. Start with episode 1 and watch them all: you might find something useful for your own solution! -Sully
January 22nd, 2020 – Twilio SMS basics whitepaper published
I just wrote this as a freebie for a webinar series I’m working on. Enjoy.
December 29th, 2019 – Second Teaser video for Mandelbrot PBX posted
Check this out. Mandelbrot PBX should be available on the FileMaker Marketplace before the end of Q1, 2020.
December 19th, 2019 – Happy Holidays from Mandelbrot LLC, now relocated to Oak Brook, IL
With the dust starting to settle and our move from Lisle, IL firmly in the rear view, we’ve had some time to reflect on 2019 and the road ahead. Here’s a few items on the road map for 2020.
- Reaching out to every FBA member in the US and Canada.
- Mandelbrot PBX, our new product for 2020.
- Webinars, whitepapers and training on the topic of Twilio integrations.
- A push toward a philanthropy.
We also just pulled down some interesting reports about the value of multichannel marketing and custom apps. Have a look.
Nov 9th, 2019 – Twilio WhitePages Pro Lookup integration demo posted to YouTube
Nov 1st, 2019 – Mandelbrot SMS v1.0 Marketplace Edition published
October 21st, 2019 – FMS on AWS EC2 hosting now available through Mandelbrot LLC
If you’re interested in setting up a FileMaker Server on AWS EC2, you may find this document is a useful place to start. It’s not perfect but it will definitely get you closer to where you want to be than just going for it on your own. If you have any comments, suggestions or would like Mandelbrot LLC to help you set up an EC2 based FileMaker Server, please contact us here.
October 14th, 2019 – MANDELBROT LLC JOINS FILEMAKER BUSINESS ALLIANCE
OCTOBER 14TH, 2019 – LISLE, IL – It is with great pride that we announce that after years of planning and forethought, Mandelbrot LLC has joined the FileMaker Business Alliance.
Mandelbrot LLC President David “Sully” Sullivan joins the FBA after 18 celebrated years, 8 promotions, 7 departments, half a million prefilled squirt guns and millions in net revenue generated as an in-house FileMaker developer at Illinois Energy Windows and Siding. Sully’s departure to the FBA came shortly after the exit of Illinois Energy founder Dave Sonner after 28 years of service to the suburban Chicagoland community.
Less than two weeks after Sully’s exit, Illinois Energy president Brian Campbell contracted Mandelbrot LLC to manage, maintain and enhance their FileMaker solutions. It is with the utmost respect and gratitude that all of us here at Mandelbrot LLC thank Illinois Energy for their faith, friendship, dedication and years of continued support.
With new freedom to operate in a virtually unlimited number of industries, Mandelbrot LLC is poised to create big waves in the FileMaker world. Watch this space – there’s going to be a LOT of new products, services, blog posts and whitepapers before the end of 2019.
September 13th, 2019 – Mend.fmp12 walkthrough (beta) uploaded to YouTube
If you’re looking for a tour of a recently developed FileMaker App, check out the one below. Still needs testing, debugging and a few last features, but you’ll get the gist. If you’d like a free copy of the demo file, you can request one here.
July 27th, 2019 – TelePath DevCon Teaser Video Uploaded to YouTube
We’re headed for FileMaker DevCon and hopefully, you are too! If you’re not headed to Orlando next week, watch this:
If you’d like to know more about how we can help integrate phone and text support into your FileMaker solution, drop us a line HERE.
July 17th, 2019 – SMS messaging for FileMaker Cloud is now available from Mandelbrot LLC – No monthly fees and $0.0075 per text
A client of ours recently asked us to integrate Twilio’s inbound and outbound texting into his Filemaker Cloud solution. No problem for us Mandelbros. Just a few short weeks later we finished developing a custom .fmp12 file and an AWS Lambda function that are handling the task quite nicely.
We love using AWS Lambda for this use case because there are no monthly fees and unless you receive hundreds of thousands of text messages in a month, you’ll probably never exceed the free tier. Twilio is also really an amazing company, offering tons of really, really cool microservices. They currently charge $0.0075 per inbound or outbound text, so you can really send quite a lot of messages for a very, very low cost.
If you would like to integrate inbound and outbound texting into your FileMaker Cloud solution, click here and let us know – we’ve already done the hard work of integrating the Twilio, FileMaker and AWS’s systems together for other customers, which means we could have you up and running in a matter of hours, not weeks.
March 14th, 2019 – TelePath beta testing begins
Great news!
You heard it here first: TelePath integrations will be available to the public soon. This groundbreaking app will give a lot of small and medium sized companies the ability to really turn up the heat on their competition.
TelePath is a call center solution that integrates the power of FileMaker, AWS and Twilio to turn your telesales/marketing reps into superstars. TelePath allows a single agent to email, call and text multiple phones at once from anywhere with a WiFi connection. Then, each call is recorded and run through a transcription and AI service that guides your agents to success without the embarrassment or tedium of listening to thousands of recordings. TelePath uses the data to profile both your agents and customers based upon how they interact, giving you the ability to automatically match the customer’s needs to the correct agent’s strengths.
Contact us as soon as you can if you’re interested – we’re only taking one company per vertical.
January 17th, 2019 – Basic Inventory System Proof of Concept
Greetings, Programs!
Just finished a quick proof of concept for a prospective client. They are a company that liquidates hotels that have closed. The application makes it possible to use an iPhone to take a photo,assign a barcode, category and price to each item to be liquidated. The price and photo are immediately published on their website’s store, allowing customers to check inventory and buy items online. Contact us if you’d like a demo.
January 5th, 2019 – Spider Plots for IE
Hello Mandel-Bros!
Just published the code for a set of radar plots for Illinois Energy’s canvassing and telemarketing teams. The challenge for these folks was not being able to understand the rise and fall of the quality of their team’s performance without pouring over dozens of data tables. Spider Plots helped them visualize several metrics at once for each teammate in a single, easily read graph.
The code is based on the chart.js javascript library. Chart.js is actually quite nice for visualizing complex data. I chose to hard code the whole library into their FileMaker solution rather than link it in case the library is deprecated at some point in the future. You never can tell when some part of the internet is going to disappear and a dead link takes a critical chart with it. Hard coding the whole library makes it possible to work with the charts offline as well. Click HERE for a peek at what their solution looks like.
-Sully