One of my little non-technical pet peeves in life is poor customer service.  A long while back while working at a booming consulting firm in the ‘.com days’ (which later imploded of course) the company routinely brought in different types of speakers.  Some for motivation, some for sales training (anyone who can tell me who ‘peel the onion’ comes from wins a gold star), etc.  One that stood out was from Jeffrey Gitomer.  He’s probably more famous for his book Little Red Book of Selling, but at the time he also spoke to our entire staff (non-sales, developer, etc.) about customer satisfaction and was pimping his book Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty is Priceless: How to Make Them Love You, Keep You Coming Back, and Tell Everyone They Know at the time.  I normally don’t buy into these meetings, but Gitomer and his approach grabbed my attention.  Since then I’ve been enamored striving for myself providing the best customer service in whatever I do, but also in finding out why people do/don’t in their businesses.  I completely bought into Gitomer’s mantra about satisfaction and loyalty.  I went to somewhat of a soapbox when I had issues with my homebuilder’s customer service department that I sent their directors a copy of the book when I had such horrible experiences.  I don’t think they appreciated it…then again, they were okay having satisfied customers.

Anyhow, fast forward a long time and here I am today.  I’ve had positive and negative customer service experiences everyday just like I’m sure you have.  Last week though was a shining star in customer service as well as how to treat customers in a tough economy.  Allow me to explain…

We have a television set in our main room that mostly the kids watch.  It is about 5 years old now and is an LCD display.  We bought it when we moved into our current home and it was the best deal based on what we wanted to spend at the time.  It has served us well for the time we’ve had it.  About 2 months or so ago, a small yellow orb started to appear in the center bottom of the screen.  At first I thought it was just time to change the bulb.  Calling my local electronic repair shop, he informed me it was something more serious and a common problem with this particular model (which was branded as Zenith E44W46LCD, now owned by LG Electronics).  He also said it would be about $800 to repair (needed a new light engine).  Crap.  Heck for $800 I could get a new TV!  I did some research and learned that the actual part was about $2 but it was in a larger part.  I decided it wasn’t worth the repair cost and would just wait until the TV blew up to replace it.  My kids would have to suffer :-).  Well over time the little orb has grew to the entire screen and now my kids know that yellow+blue make green.  It got so bad that I started convincing myself it was time to replace it.  I decided to research one more time just to make sure.  In that research I found one small note indicating that one guy called LG and worked it out with them.  I had nothing to lose.

One phone call later I spoke with a nice lady who, after hearing my symptoms, confirmed it was a ‘failure of the light engine unit’ and apologized for the problem.  Remember, my TV is clearly out of warranty at this point.  Without asking me anything about when/where I purchased it (to be fair I think the initial system asked me this information though, so she may have had it in front of her), she said that LG is sorry that their product is failing me and would like to offer to cover the cost of this expensive repair.  Another phone call later, my local authorized repair facility was contacted, faxed a letter to authorize the repair and schedule the work.

WOW.  I was blown away.  I wasn’t told anything about expired warranties, I wasn’t told to step aside.  I wasn’t told to buy a new set.  I was taken care of…completely.  LG Electronics just effectively gave me a new TV and saved me roughly $800 (estimate of course).  Wow, wow, wow.  I was floored. 

I believe this is the essence of what Gitomer talks about.  LG/Zenith aren’t known for their expertise in my mind for LCD/DLP projection sets (in fact my research later led me to buy a Samsung unit for my basement), but this service goes above and beyond and elevated their products in karma points!  It will absolutely make me think twice in my next purchases of home consumer electronics. 

Their call center staff was among the nicest I’ve ever spoke to as well.  I know they’re all following scripts (or perhaps they are not and it is just their southern charm, because clearly by the accents they are somewhere with a drawl :-)) but they have been the kindest ladies I’ve ever spoke with, asking permission to place me on hold, thanking me for bringing things to their attention, apologizing for things that the product failed, etc.  The whole process of communicating with LG Electronics has been amazing, simply amazing.

I am sure some people have had negative experiences with LG (and if they have they’ll probably comment below), but I can only speak of my one interaction with LG here, and it has been a hugely positive one that has turned me from a satisfied customer willing to deal with a failing 5 year old TV for which I probably would have replaced with some other brand, to a more than satisfied, dare I say loyal LG customer who will consider them first for any future purchases.  And no, they didn’t ask me to write this as a condition of repair, nor am I receiving any additional benefits from sharing my story.

Thanks LG, you excel in a time when it counts the most.  I applaud you.

I was honored to be asked by ComponentArt to participate in a judging panel for their just now released 2009 Summer Silverlight Coding Competition.  The grand prize is USD $10,000. 

Yes, that’s right: USD $10,000!

ComponentArt is even kicking in 2 runner-up prizes of licensing to their products, which is also a sweet deal!  The contest is simple, and you are not required to use ComponentArt controls…in their words:

Applicants are not required to use ComponentArt's products to enter the competition (or as the legal jargon requires us to say: NO PURCHASE NECESSARY). We'll obviously let you use our products if you want to, but the purpose of this contest is to increase awareness of Silverlight features and applications already released, so we would like to keep it open to the entire Silverlight developer community.

Be sure to read the full contest rules for all the details.  There is a number of judging criteria that will be ranked by 9 total judges: myself, Laurence Moroney, Mike Snow, Dino Esposito, John Papa, Steve Smith, Milos Glisic, Phil Tucker, and Corey Cahill.  As you can see, this is a judging panel made up of Microsoft, ComponentArt and community leaders.

Obviously your application needs to be a Silverlight application, I hope that’s clear.  It must be accessible via a public entry point and if authentication is required, adequate credentials will need to be supplied.  If after reading the rules you have questions, please ensure you contact the email provided in the rules and FAQ for the contest.

What are you waiting for?  $10K up for grabs!!!!

Here are my current Silverlight book recommendations…

In my previous post on moving to free HDTV, I had talked about my desire to change our home television “stuff” in an effort to remove basically a bill that we weren’t taking advantage of at all.  Part of the irony in this whole exploration was that by the time I figured out a solution, the whole digital-TV-signal-broadcast-rule-thing was going to happen.  Luckily, I received some good advice and product suggestions.

If you read the previous post you’ll notice that I acquired a Philips MANT940 antenna from Walmart.  $38 investment not bad.  I crawled up into my attic space and put it in a non-optimized location…and it worked anyway.  I tested it on the only HD tuner I had in the house at the time, my WinTV 950 adapter for my eyeTV software on my Mac.  It worked great.

My problem was still that my TiVo units were going to be a loss and I didn’t want to fiddle with IR blasting anyway.  Then someone recommend I take a look at the HD HomeRun unit from SiliconDust.  I got a few emails from people who had it.  I had some Amazon credit and they had a good price, so I went for it.  I figured if it sucked, just return it.  The concept of the HD HomeRun is that it is a digital tuner with two inputs and delivers the signal over your LAN.  This was the most intriguing to me.  I had a lot of suggestions of Media Center PC.  I love Media Center PC, but didn’t like the thought of having a ‘computer’ in my living room or basement near a TV.  It doesn’t feel right (and I didn’t have coax wired to where my Media Center box was anyway).  But HomeRun would allow me to deliver it over the LAN, so my existing box could pick it up as a tuner.

The HD HomeRun arrived.  I opened it and plugged it in.  One cable to the network - not gigabit :-( - and the other was the new antenna I acquired.  I went to my Media Center PC and ran the HD HomeRun setup software provided.  It scanned for a tuner and didn’t find one.  Crap!  I thought I was going to be screwed.  I did some searching and noticed that I wasn’t alone with the "Discovery Error 4001” message I was receiving.  It seemed like an incredibly known issue, which is weird why they are shipping units with the issue.  I logged a support ticket with my device ID (required) and they sent me a little executable to run.  I ran it and it suddenly was discovered in the scan.  Weird.  No explanation of what the issue was.  I didn’t necessarily care, and moved on.

The HD HomeRun config is pretty intuitive and you select the tuner input, the type (antenna) and then what type of application will be accessing it (Media Center).  It scans, finds the channels and done.  It comes with guide software as well, but seems a little pointless as Media Center has all that built in as well.

The Media Center found the unit as a tuner and went through the normal process.  Quick and painless.  A walk down to the basement to the XBOX 360 and turned on to watch free HDTV via my new HD HomeRun.  Awesome.  Thanks for the recommendation for that unit!

The second thing I wanted to do was use my Mac and eyeTV on the same unit.  Didn’t work.  I should clarify that I probably had a bad assumption.  It found and configured the HomeRun as the tuner, but I couldn’t watch any stations as long as another machine was using the tuner.  Suck, but I understand I suppose.

I’m very pleased so far with the HD HomeRun solution and get to play around with Media Center now.

Question: Media Center gurus, how can I search for a program to record a series?  I could only find the ability to record a series if I find it in the guide.  I’m looking for the TiVo like functionality of searching for programs by title.

I’m going to hook up another Media Center Extender in my living room to see how that works out.  I see some MCE’s come with DVD players so that would be cool and I might try that. 

The HD HomeRun also has a QAM tuner as well.  The cable companies are required by law to send the digital signals of local broadcast channels over QAM without a customer paying for equipment.  I look forward to trying this feature.  The cable companies aren’t required to send the HD signal though, so you may not get the HD quality.

If you already have a Media Center PC (Vista) and an XBOX, I’d recommend looking at the HD HomeRun if you are looking to rid yourself of cable as I am and only care about over-the-air HD channels.  It’s been fun to investigate and learn. 

Dear Cox, please cancel.  Thanks.

Today, we posted on the .NET RIA Services forum an updated roadmap for the timing and thoughts around the product offering. 

What is .NET RIA Services?

Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

Here is the current thoughts around the offering…

July 2009: Updated CTP

We will have an updated build of RIA Services in CTP form.  This is still considered a preview.  The current thinking is that we’ll remove any production (go-live) restrictions, but it will be a ‘use at your own risk’ product, not the typical official “go live” support license.  This is based on feedback our users are asking for.  We want to continue to evolve the product based on feedback, but also heard loudly that people want to use it now.

This build will have the goal of getting most significant breaking changes out there and remedied.  We’ll also update better shared code, extensibility and code-gen features.  This will also bring a first pass at better integration with ADO.NET Data Services.

PDC 2009: Beta

The obvious continued bug fixes based on what we know as well as customer feedback submitted via the .NET RIA Services forum.  The list of feature enhancements at this build stage is still being determined but some things being considered include better presentation model support and deeper hierarchy support.

This stage will also aim to bring support for VS2010 and .NET 4 and move to ADO.NET Data Services as the underlying protocol.  This builds on the path being taken for the July 2009 CTP.

First part of 2010: RTW

At this stage we’d polish up the product/tooling and prepare for the version 1 release.  Localization, stress, additional security analysis, perf…all these things happen between the beta and RTW.  We’ll also keep in line with current product changes if they occur (i.e., Visual Studio/Silverlight).

These are the current plans.  At each stage we will be keeping up with the associated Silverlight builds as they are available.

Seeking feedback

Right now, the RTW is targeted for VS2010 and .NET 4 as the primary tool/framework story.  We would love feedback on this (essentially, how important is .NET 3.5 SP1/VS2008 support).  We’re also asking that based on your work with .NET RIA Services that you provide feedback of key scenarios that are essential for you in a v1 release.  What do you think of alignment with ADO.NET Data Services?  What about ASP.NET MVC, etc?

Please use the .NET RIA Services forum to give your feedback.  The team there is very active and listening.  It is the best place to communicate with the RIA Services team.