Fred's Blog

I am growing a serious moustache this month, for Movember.

It is not pretty, and I feel really sorry for Geraldine, who spent a whole week’s holiday with me and the moustache.

Please support my growing efforts and the great charities that help more than 2,800 men who will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year. You can give a donation through the Movember site.

Thank you!

I did a presentation at the Dublin Web Summit two weeks ago. It is a short presentation of some of the things that seems to keep our DoneDeal customers happy.

Tips to make your users happy

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Download slides for the presentation

Nikita & Fred

I was invited to visit the Bridge2College programme in Trinity College today. It is a great initiative to try to change the old school system in Ireland.

Basically, they have set up a true learning environment, as compared to the normal memorize-until-the-leaving-cert-approach that most students are exposed to.

They offer students a really exciting year to work with interesting techie projects in teams. Great for learning about teamwork and about project work.

The mighty Paddy Cosgrave is arranging another Dublin Web Summit on 29th October. This time the format has changed from an evening event to an intense 12-hour event with over 50 speakers.

Don’t know how Paddy does it, but he gets some fantastic speakers, including the founders from Twitter, Skype, WordPress, and much more. It should be a great day, with a lot of food for inspiration and hands-on advice.

My session is about a really important, customer service, and how customer service can help grow a business.

Most web sites are set up with the goal that customers can handle everything themselves, and therefore the customer service is often overlooked.

In DoneDeal we put a lot of focus on our customer service. Granted, we work hard to make sure the web site is easy to use, so our customers do not have to contact us. But those who contact us are guaranteed a response, normally within an hour.

At the moment 200,000 people visit DoneDeal each day, and we get about 160 emails each day to our customer service. We see those emails as invaluable feedback, our only chance to get to talk directly to our customers.

Great, my own personal blog has officially been launched. Unfortunately there was no big launch party with bikini-ladies, instead it was boringly launched from the home office, with only my two dogs attending (they don’t really look like they care).

Anyway, during my time setting up DoneDeal I have come across many different problems/challenges/issues that affect our business. I would like to share our solutions with you, and hopefully it will help you improve your own business.

Here are some areas this blog will cover in the future:

• Ideas for creating better user/customer experiences
• Tools that we use to improve our own business and life
• Techniques to help you spread awareness of your business/ideas