When technology saves you time but does not help your work.

I work from my home in Dallas, while my colleagues are spread in offices from San Francisco, Seattle, Sydney, Brisbane, and London. So I set up my work phone extension to forward to my home office phone, which is a virtual "softphone" from Skype, which will then forward to my cell phone if I don't answer on my laptop. Finally, my cell phone will collect a voice mail if I still do not answer, and it will email me that message in an attachment.

Technology to the rescue

At least that's how I thought it worked, until this week when a couple of people told me that they called and received a "Mailbox full" message, even though my cell phone mailbox is empty. I checked with our internal IT and found out that the number of rings my work line waited before going to voice mail was the same as the sum of the number of rings my home office and cell phone waited before recording a message. And so sometimes my work line would take a message, but it wasn't sending me an email since the system was upgraded, and I had no indicator light telling me that I have a message.

So, today and I have 100 unanswered messages going back to January 28th. I apologize to those who think I never return calls, but I also wonder about how much productive time I had recently without all of those interruptions...

My phone solution

In case you have a similarly disconnected life, after much trial-and-error I finally settled on using a Skype In subscription, a Freetalk wireless headset, and a Sprint data card. The quality has been acceptable for business use for the most part, and it keeps me connected anywhere I travel as long as I have Internet or cell phone access. Just be sure to check the forwarding settings every now and again.

Think you'll never attend a meeting in a Virtual World? Look out behind you!

I've heard meetings expert Corbin Ball speak for several years now about the coming era of Virtual Meetings in Second Life and similar sites. The typical audience response is something close to "not in my lifetime", but Corbin keeps plugging this vision.

I may have been one of the skeptics in Corbin's presentations, but I've recently been converted by three experts in my own house.

Toontown vs. Second Life

The other day I walked over to our computer table to see three of my kids (Kyra age 10, Cade age 9, Izzy age 6) excitedly switching screens and looking over each others' shoulders as they played a new game they discovered at Disney.com - Toontown. Basically, you pick a Disney character to represent yourself, and then you run around a virtual Disney world, talking to other kids' Toontown characters and trying to figure out how to defeat the evil Cogs infecting the world.

To my kids, this environment was more natural than the pictures of real trade shows that I show them when they ask me why I went away last week. Their response is, "You stand in that tiny booth all day waiting for people to come see you?!?"


There is Izzy above, using her dog's name "Ginger" for her Toon.


Izzy talking to a Cog (they are bad).


Izzy talking to a town employee for help.

The Coming World of Virtual Trade Shows

As the Toontown generation becomes the working class, the age of virtual trade shows is inevitable. Inc. magazine recently published an article ("Nice meeting your avatar") on three leading providers: InXpo, Unisfair, and ON24. I've also seen Digitell at the Meetings Tech Expo shows and have explored their version of Active Worlds platform.

I tried the Active Worlds platform but found the experience lacking. There were too many key controls to move around, visiting booths took longer than I was willing to spend, and the booths were too cumbersome to customize (in my opinion). The experience was too close to reality - at a real show I don't mind walking across the floor for five minutes to find a booth, but I'm used to everything being instant at my computer.

The systems will improve, however, and if it's in Inc. this month then it will be in Forbes next year and in Newsweek the year after that. By then you may have attended one yourself. If so, please let me know about your experience.

Losing customers without letting go completely

I just cancelled my home VOIP phone service, which Lingo raised to $33/month from $21/month in 2003. The service agent was polite in handling my cancellation request, and then she offered me the option to downgrade to $7/month for a “basic plan", which allows free incoming calls forwarded to my new phone number and $0.03/minute for outbound calls. Since many people still have my old number, I took their offer because it's worth $7 not to lose incoming calls while I transfer people to my new number.

Losing customers the wrong way

No one wants to lose customers, but companies handle this inevitable situation differently. AOL made it easy for me to sign up for a "free trial", but I found it almost impossible to figure out how to cancel after the trial ended so I wouldn't get charged every month. I finally cancelled and never would consider going back. When my wife cancelled our weekly house-cleaning service, the owner lost her temper and verbally berated my wife before slamming the phone down. The business owner never got to hear my wife ask about the bi-monthly or periodic service we wanted to switch to.

Let go, but keep the door open

Lost customers are still customers, and the conversation around cancelling a service is also an opportunity to offer another service of value. For example, a meeting planner may want to cancel their online registration service, but still retain access to their data for past events. So we offer a low-cost basic service that allows access to existing data and retains their web site and event configurations in case they return to use our service in the future. Many clients don't know that they need all of their historical data, but they are terrified of losing it - and they'll pay us to keep it stored, just in case they need it later.

The tools of customer care in a Web-based business

Ryan Manville pointed me to a form-builder application called Wufoo. The application is great for simple forms – but check out the "Welcome" email they sent me when I created a free account. It is like a checklist of the tools that you need to run a modern Web-based business.





Compared to this checklist, how are we doing at Certain Software?

• Account Information: YES – We can give you a dedicated URL for your account


• Documentation: YES – We have documentation and a Knowledge Base, but only accessible to customers


• Blog: KIND OF – We recently opened a company blog, but don’t yet have any posts about development or upcoming releases


• Feedback: YES – We have a general inbox for customer comments


• Forums: NO – We are currently investigating a Forum application, but we haven’t published one yet


• Founders Blog: YES – We have one founder Blog, but it would be nice to have a couple more.

The New Global Certain Software

On March 4, 2008, Certain Software and Amlink Technologies announced a merger to create "the largest global supplier of technology solutions for the meetings and events management industry". The adjective "largest" comes courtesy of the fact that we can chose the metrics to measure by. I count this as the fourth announcement in the past year of the creation of the "largest global supplier" among meeting software vendors (Starcite, Active Network, Cvent, and now Certain). I've personally never put much stock in the claim of being the biggest; to me it is more important to be the best solution provider for each invidual customer.

It's like that Bank of America commercial says, "Our goal isn't to process a billion transactions each day; our goal is to process one transaction correctly, and then repeat that a billion times."


How does it help me for you to be the "Largest"?

As a customer, I would think, "This merger is great for you. I'm sure some people earned a well-deserved payout and you'll be able to consolidate some back-office functions. But what's it going to do for me? Will you stop developing the product I use now and force me to switch to another one, which I probably didn't choose for specific reasons when I purchased your product? Am I going to call my account manager of five years and get a nameless call center technician half-way around the world?"

This is a challenge for us. At our first merger transition meeting, we established four goals for our quest to be recognized as THE global technology solution for the Events and Meeting Planning Industry.

• Seamless transition - Achieve transition without disrupting current business operations from the customers' perspective (and from the employees' perspective when possible)


• Global company - Certain is one global company from the market's perspective (customers, prospects, partners, public) and from the employee's perspective (internal operations)


• Increase revenue - We need revenue growth in order to fund the ongoing operations and development required by the market we serve


• Control costs - We plan to increase profitability through higher revenue while controlling costs

Notice that our first goal is to not affect our customers negatively. We are fortunate to have two strong companies and products, so it is more important to not break anything than to quickly "fix" something.

But we do want customers to notice benefits in their service soon, so one of our objectives is to work toward a 24/7/365 support network of internal experts - not outsourced call center techs. With primary offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Brisbane (Australia), and London, we have permanent employees in native English-speaking countries located in time zones spaced approximately 8 hours apart. (Yes, Perth would have been exactly 8 hours apart, but I guess Trevor Gardiner liked Brisbane better when he established Amlink there.)

Second, although we will continue to develop both the Events Pro and Certain Registration products separately for the rest of 2008, we've already begun to see the excitement generated internally by putting hundreds of years' of global event management software experience into the same room. We hope that customers will be beating down the doors to use our first jointly-developed product, but in the meantime, we won't slow down product support on either of our core platforms.


Don't mergers mean layoffs and product cuts?

I think that most people in our industry look at Starcite as the model for software consolidation, but our situation is very different. Starcite acquired RegWeb because they needed an online registration product, and they continue to support that platform today. B-There came in from bankruptcy, and thus its products and services were in jeopardy whether or not Starcite had completed the acquisition. Starcite and OnVantage merged while OnVantage was still digesting the merger of Plansoft and SeeUThere. By then, Starcite had acquired or built 3 solid registration systems and 2 basic ones, plus 3 meeting expense consolidation tools, two or more hotel databases, and dozens of offices world-wide. It's impractical to expect that they would have continued to support and develop all of those products and employees.

Certain and Amlink, however, were in the position of having both strong products and financial positions. In the past 10 years of selling online registration software, I believe that the two of us were finalists in only one opportunity I worked on (the National FFA Organization, where I missed Trevor by a couple hours). Certain Registration was born as a Web-based Software as a Service (SaaS), while Events Pro is a traditional client-server Windows application. Certain is primarily U.S.-based, while Amlink's largest office is halfway around the world and dominates its chosen niche in Europe. Looking at these facts, it makes more sense to expect growth from this merger than cut-backs.

So what's next?

I'm tackling a new challenge of leading the new Certain's merger transition committee. I have little global business experience, a 4-week old infant at home, and a mile-long list of objectives. But we'll tackle these as a team and make progress each day, and occasionally I'll share some lessons learned here.



Being a big sister is exhausting!