For the past two days I have been working on hacking OWN support, or to put it more specifically, trying to do proactive technical support for questions you haven’t asked yet.

While this problem is easily fixed by saying “RTFM” we find that doesn’t reflect too well on our customer satisfaction. Saying it politely doesn’t work either “Could you please, please, please read the documentation?” and the bloat of trying to reach people in the way that they expect the information to be presented is starting to grow. There are videos, whitepapers, frequently asked questions, blog posts, wikis.. the reality behind this approach (as disorganized as it may seem) is that it’s as such by design because both of our customers that read the documentation don’t actually read it but scan the page for the content they are looking for. So jamming everything in a single place, single location leads to information overload and effective shutdown of the nervous system which then leads to a support request anyhow. While we have built a templated response system of canned responses, its pretty demotivating for the support staff to work on problems that have already been solved a thousand times. It also reflects very poorly on my organization because it kills the problem solving skills:

“If you don’t feel stupider by the end of the day you aren’t doing your job.” -Vlad Mazek, June 12th, 2008

Who would want to work under those circumstances? It takes me about 10 minutes to get back to the complex things I generally work on after I’ve had to explain to someone how the Internet works in their lingo and technical competence. And people ask why OWN doesn’t do retail work or answer sales calls - it’s a filtering mechanism folks - it separates people that can read and click on things from the people that need the following:

DRaaS

I am calling it Documentation Reading as a Service. Basically once a new order is processed by Shockey Monkey the system will look to see if this is the first order of this type. If it is, the system will generate an appointment request in the partner account managers system and shoot a copy to the customer as well to negotiate a time for DRaaS to be rendered. In addition to the email coming out with all the documentation, FAQs, PDFs and other filler nobody will ever read, we’ll now have an appointment for the OWN drone to call the client and render DRaaS:

OWN: Hi, this is _____ from Own Web Now, you just signed up for ____ and I wanted to give you a call and thank you for your business.

Client: Wow, you’re not an Indian?

OWN: Thank you very much so kindly. Now listen, I wanted to give you a ring and introduce myself and just go over a few things with the service that might save you a lot of time and a lot of grief as you go along. Do you have maybe 3 minutes?

Client: No, but I know you’re going to call me back so I’d rather talk to you now than dodge the callerid for the next month. Shoot.

OWN: Ok, so you signed up for ___. Now just like with all of our products, the support is free and unlimited, you can open as many tickets as you want and we’ll respond within two hours. If its urgent you can set a higher priority for a few $ more and we’ll work on it immediately. Now, I see that you got _______ service, are you familiar with it?

Client: Yes, I’ve been in IT for 200 years, actually Pascal stole my idea for a calculator and the queen saw right through him when he tried to show it off.

OWN: Wow, that is fantastic! Amazing story. Ok, well, I won’t take up too much of your time, just remember when you’re doing ______ - read the entire FAQ title section in a hyper exciting voice.

Client: (God, I hope she didn’t call my toll free number)

OWN: So thats pretty much it, you’re now an expert at ______.

The big idea with DRaaS is to answer the support questions we know we’re going to get and also give them an idea of how the whole system works so that they at least have a starting point when it comes to documentation. When people see a 30 page document they do what every 8 year old does - there are no pictures in this book! So if the DRaaS gives them a jumping point to at least realize how the system works they can look up details on their own. You can read more about it in my upcoming book, DRaaS Encyclopedia, available as a preorder at $49.99; Just one page, for the busy professional on the go! But since you’re reading my blog I am going to give it to you for free:

The other aspect hidden behind DRaaS is that it sets expectations right away. If we’re about to lose a customer because they didn’t know what they were getting into or they sold something we don’t make its probably better for both of us to pull out before we end up in a nightmare scenario of trying to do something custom (expensive) and both losing.

Jokes aside…

Looking at the statistics, it’s painfully obvious that most support requests are not just originated out of the clients ignorance but our own inability to communicate and set the expectations. The documentation sucks because the clients don’t read it and expect it in both encyclopedia that can be Googled and the short FAQ form that they will not comprehend because they have 101 level understanding of the underlying concepts which are supposed to be answered by the documentation originated by the dude that wrote the software and was translated into plain English by someone that drank too much in college. It’s a cycle of incompetence in which everyone loses money - we answer questions over and over again, client base is frustrated that it has to ask them to begin with, the end customer is getting billed for it all along and nobody gets to prosper because the system is broken by design.

I’m sure people would love using our software far more if they didn’t have to learn how to use it first.

Let’s hope DRaaS can fix that. I’ll give you an update a few months from now and let you know how it goes. If someone can think of a better name than DRaaS please post it in the comments.

Now off to monster.com to find someone with a sultry voice that men and women would want to listen to.

Looking for a job in IT? I need to fill six roles, quick, in the beautiful downtown Los Angeles, at 600 W 7th Street 90017. Two Sr. system admin gigs, four Jr. system admin gigs, all include absolutely zero (0) contact with the customers or end users. Role responsibilities include hardware and facilities management (networks, routers, switches, load balancers, SAN, bladecenters).

Requirements: college degree in IT field or military experience with IT certification. Relevant work experience in the enterprise / complex hardware field, these are not entry level or SMB jobs.

Email: vlad@ownwebnow.com

Today was a rough day, I am knees and elbows deep in fertilizer working on the rose garden that is Own Web Now and what it represents. This is pretty difficult for me to write so please take it with a grain of salt, in all sincerity, this is the first post that I hope nobody is offended by. In order for any rose to continue to grow and bloom, some big branches have to be cut down, blooms removed right after they are the most beautiful and soil planted, replanted and refurbished from time to time.

OWN, in the eyes of many of our customers, is Vlad(tm). Truth is, there are so many people, partners, vendors and organizations that make this possible. I had never envisioned going into a business as some dark overlord of IT with the Exchange superpowers, I always thought that OWN could and would grow into being an organization that benefits businesses, big and small, new and old, and that we worked on the organization that would serve the clients, not a company that would have to put up with things, deal with politics, cut deals and agreements just to make a buck. But fast forward a few years and here I sit on my throne, looking at the incoming CID LCD and wondering if I really want the hassle. Here is how I came to my answer:

Last weeks MVP summit was a huge eye opener because I had no big agenda, I had no hunger, I had really just wanted to enjoy the company of some of the smartest people in this business, buy a few drinks and meals and hopefully learn something new. What I learned is that the opportunity to serve is far bigger than the opportunity to try and change peoples perceptions and set ways.

What I mean by that is that I got to see what Microsoft thinks is the future, I got to see my peers across all markets, I got to see the value delivery that is provided across all segments of the business - IT, services, development, infrastructure, sysadmin. Clue: it’s all the same. In every sector, there are 10% of people who are hungry, dying to have you come in and solve their problem. Then there are 90% of the others, which cause problems for you. Who in their right mind wastes their time on the 90% of the problem cases just because they demand attention instead on nurturing the 10% and making sure that the 10% are the future of your company?

Friday Massacre

OWN was a company built on partnerships, but partnerships are a double edged sword. They are great when they work, they are awful when they have to be broken. Unfortunately, today I had to go through my list and break quite a few of them. For years I have tried to be a good guy and give people the benefit of the doubt, to work with people when they are being difficult, to go that extra mile even when I know I am losing an account. No, it does not make sense financially, but I wanted to know that people didn’t hate me and my company even if we had disappointed them to the point that they virtually had to look elsewhere. I put up with a lot - deadbeats, assholes, gurus, power users, knowitalls… because my reputation was on the line whenever the company reputation was on the line.

But at this point, in 2008, as I am about to go on a leave, this company is about a lot more than me. This company is about the people that work with it, some around the clock, to make sure we and our partners can take the clients businesses to the next level. I have to, ethically, balance the equation of pleasing the partners and creating an environment that is not stress-oriented and driven by the whims of difficult people.

The primary question is - is this fair to the customer, is it fair to the partner, is it fair to OWN employees and is it fair at all?

In 2007, we solved the issue of unreliable SMB email with LiveArchive, nothing else on the market does quite the same thing with so little effort. In 2008, we aim to arm our partners up with the tools and skills they need to flourish. We look towards creating a scalable two-factor authentication offering that can be acquired and managed on demand, from one employee to thousands. We look to help the community of professionals around OWN so we can help serve more people where they are. We look to give advantages to the partners in the countries that have traditionally been overlooked.

So is it fair? Is it fair that the small group of people ruin everyone’s support experience because they crank out tickets instead of reading the documentation? Is it fair that partners cannot behave ethically, and cause us to restrict and limit the functionality of the product that could help those that need those features the most? Is it fair that partners can behave like dickheads and ruin the day of the individual that is trying to help them, so that the next person doesn’t get the spectacular support they deserve? Is it fair that my partners don’t get the kind of attention they deserve because it is being eaten up by people who are in trouble because they didn’t do their job and tried to pin it on us? Is it fair that we are spending time, money, resources and effort on dead ends instead of being open and welcoming and actually building instead of trying to find ways around stuff?

No, it’s not fair and it’s not fair to anyone involved which makes today a particularly tough day. It is hard to say goodbye to people that would rather stay and pain it through, even if we both know they would be happier elsewhere. So we’ve opened the door.

Not all business calls are easy, not all business transactions are fair. Thats life, thats entreprenurial spirit, that is the reality of any organization that looks to do better things for more people. If we have done that, and if I have to sacrifice some short term happiness to make sure we are posed to do that in the future, I will sleep very easy at night indeed.

I’d rather feed the hungry and empower the ambitious than beat myself down trying to change the minds of those marching towards their doom. In fact, that is our mission statement.

So today, I got rid of 20 service providers we used to work with, because we were no longer working together, we were working against one another. If you recall, this was the negative sentiment towards Microsoft that I took to Redmond as well. Truth is, these 20 partners accounted for majority of the support nightmares and demotivating events for my staff, and I would like to publicly thank Mark Crall from TechCare Team who took the time to help me come to this decision back in November when I first turned to him for advice, and for my homies in Karl Palachuk, Erick Simpson and Dave Sobel who always have my back and beat me up when I’m going in the wrong direction. Thank you guys.

On a brighter side, if you were looking for an asshole duel, today is a great day.

P.S. Life is too f’n short and Chris had it right when he talked about ego’s - some people really make themselves out to be 90% of the problem, even if they only represent 0.0001% of the solution. No great business gets built on trying to please that. Despite what opinion some of you may have of me, businesswise, I think we’d be a lot better off if I hired an evil sidekick that was just a complete ass. I’ve been too damn nice to far too many people and I apologize to my staff, my partners and our collective client base for having misprioritized our attention. I am trying to fix it.

After two years of pushing this stuff forward by myself (and a few thousand partners) the time has finally come to put the Own Web Now monster behind The Monkey and The Weasel and let it out of my direct control. What this basically means is that I’m in for a week of documenting, explaining and selling the idea of the entire OWN enterprise, everything we run and support, tying together with everything and everyone we work with.

What this means is more money, more time on development and yes, phone and full support for the Monkey. Unfortunately, it is going to take all my time as well as everyone you know and work with at OWN so expect the things to be a little slow at OWN this week. I will not be available on the phone, no blog, no IM and if you have a big issue that you email me about either use the portal or you’ll get a response in a week.

See you next Monday.

This is how I actually talk to my clients:

Vlad Mazek, Direct CEO Line

As you may remember from our last newsletter, we have put in a lot of effort into the communications, support and documentation of all Own Web Now Corp products. As we grow, and as we scale, it is important to get good documentation and to back it, 24/7 when problems come up. We now have more people working in our helpdesk at support.ownwebnow.com and during December we have both decreased the time to ticket response as well as the time to full case resolution. We have provided more options for support, far better documentation if you wish to do it on your own and our blogs for NOC, Help and Company have all had a number of posts to help you stay in touch, at all times.

However, as we grow and scale and you work with more and more new names, the personal rep that has been built up over the years of business doesn’t extend to the new people you see handling your issues. While I am proud to say that our support today is better than it ever has been before, and that our satisfaction ratings are at the all time highs, I too have seen some complaints from people that miss the old fashioned way of dealing with issues when they come up. We know everything that isn’t working 100% is urgent, we know you want a response right away and we know you want a quality response. Trouble ticket responses are dry, lacking any wit and body language that comes when you’re working with someone you know.

So if things are ever getting out of hand, if you are just not happy with how your issue is being handled, if you have a recommendation that you think would help us, I am here for you. I want to hear from you. We have worked very hard to establish our reputation, to partner with you, to deliver these phenomenal products – and sometimes emails and support tickets can lead to a misunderstanding.

So please, give me an opportunity to make it right. Feel free to call me direct and leave a message if I am away from the desk, I will call you back within 24 hours: xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Things have been going well, very well at Own Web Now. I’ve blogged previously about some of the issues and complaints we’ve received and we’ve done our best to correct a lot of these items.

Still, we struggle with the perennial one man “I can fix anything by myself in 3 minutes” that just can’t comprehend how things work in larger organizations, that the purpose of helpdesk is to provide an answer as quickly as possible, that there are policies and procedures in place to handle things and keep the playing field leveled for everyone. When we ran our profiler to match the complaints to the system users, I believe something like 80% of the complaints came from the one man shops. It was also ridiculous to see that the same percentage of people accounted for over half of all the support cases. Anyhow, I have worked my ass off to make sure our support, documentation and communication are top notch.

I’m kind of the top of that food chain. The big Mayor McCheese if you will. If my clients are not liking the answers they get, if they don’t feel like they are treated with respect, if they aren’t getting the support that they want… well, now I’ve given them a direct line to me so we can handle things before they spiral out of control.

Personal service doesn’t have to fall to pieces just because the company has grown beyond the single person rendering that service.

2008 Will Be The Year of KPI

No, not a calendar featuring Karl Palachuk, though I’m sure now that I mentioned it, one will be in print tomorrow.

For 2008, my major area of focus will be improving the crappy key performance indicators we currently have in place for our service metrics. I literally have 10 numbers I look at (newest ticket, oldest ticket, tickets closed today, tickets opened today, number of tickets with multiple updates, urgent tickets covered by SLA, high tickets covered by SLA and something else) or basically not enough. So stepping it up, big time.

Are you ever surprised by how difficult it is to spend money, even when you want to give it away? In this “web 2.0” world that we’re in with friends and workers continents apart, I’m surprised how difficult it is to send someone something as simple as a gift card.

In my humble opinion, we (own) are copying the wrong company and we have a lot of companies many magnitudes larger than ours making the same mistake: too much bureocracy. We’re all copying the wrong people – remember the famed video where Microsoft Marketing team did a parody of iPod packaging and explained what it would look like if Microsoft designed it? Same concept. Glengerry quote: “People are waiting to give you their money! Are you going to take it? Are you man enough to take it?” – I wonder how many people we outright turn off from doing business with us just because there is no flashing buy now button.

So if you’re looking for a global gift, Amazon is your friend:

Thats all it takes, five fields to give a gift of a few DRM-free MP3’s to enjoy around the holidays… Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. You want to know what the Starbucks gift certificate purchasing process looks like:

That’s right, buy-a-gift-card in 852 simple click steps and more places to enter data than a home mortgage application. All you need is a minor in computer science with specialization area of UI design and an uncle that hunts next to you so you can hit the right options as they slide around at 500px/sec. Geeez. Worst giftcard site, ever! Check it out.

P.S. If you’re on my blogroll and have updated your blog twice over the last month look for an email from Gift Certificates Redeemable at Amazon.com [mailto:gc-orders@acigiftcards.amazon.com] in your Inbox or junk.

As another year comes to a close I can’t help but feel an immense sense of pride in all that we have been able to do with Own Web Now this year.

Some of it sucked. ExchangeDefender v3 overhaul which saw the most instability I have ever seen on a network (then again, I’ve never seen/worked on a network this large) and the v3.1 upgrade which helped us please our MSP partners and stay a step ahead of the threats. In May we had a rough time getting AhSay to scale with what we were trying to do, failed backups are never a pretty thing. Communication, communication, communication and billing, billing, billing - still the two outstanding nightmares that keep me up at night.

Most of it rocked. We opened new data centers. We launched the record four new product lines. We automated an ungodly amount of processes. We opened new offices. We started doing business in new countries. ExchangeDefender is bigger than ever and better than ever - in spite of the amount of junk mail quadrupling we have been able to lower the amount of SPAM our customers see by 48% in 2007. The Offsite Backup offerings let us take our network and data center operations to a new level - no longer dealing with tapes, no SANs or all-in-one bucket (SAN in the same rack as all the other systems) pitfalls, we have a true distributed storage platform so when you plug your server in you don’t need to worry about it. The rise of virtual services has been explosive, we now host more SBS than anyone on earth and at $99 a month we’re delivering customers the SBS experience that costs thousands of dollars to do in house - and we do it same day!

This did not happen as an accident or without sacrifice. I have given up my Paris Hilton lifestyle of being at every conference and every event. We’ve cut a lot of webcast, podcast and digg.com shenanigans. Our marketing efforts are nearly non-existent. I had to take a break from Shockey Monkey and Thieving Weasel development. Public facing IM, inbound and outbound calls and lots of other interruptions and distractions had to go as well. More focused DC development activity and scalability planning nearly crushed additional NOC plans. All so we can get Own Web Now to where it is now.

It’s been a hard year. I think we mostly made the right decisions and my only regret is that we didn’t work harder.

So now we sit around and straighten out our billing, beef up our documentation… and brainstorm… How do we do better in 2008?

One of the new processes we adopted in the recent Own Web Now fixup that I documented here in a fairly public way is something that Microsoft has been doing for years: Monthly “we suck” festivals. Every month Marie McFadden pulls together an awesome newsletter highlighting the most frequently asked questions that the newsgroup engineers answer. Lucky for them, they have documentation. We suck there too.

But, we’re trying to improve so here is what we did: Every week we plow through the helpdesk and identify the questions that we get asked over and over again. Those questions end up in the OWN Documentation portal with the hope that people will eventually read it before asking us for support. (we’re dreamers, I know) However, the more important aspect to our success going forward will be consultative selling, anotherwords, explaining to you what you bought and hopefully selling you on using the given application in a more meaningful, secure, productive, effective manner.

Here is an example - lately we have been getting a lot of flak in the support portal over the ISPs blocking port 25 access. Obviously, since I answer the phone it’s my problem, not the ISP’s problem. After all, it works with Google! (f’n Google, everything always works with Google). Now, common sense dictates that if port 25 is blocked, you just hop on to the alternate port. Or you use SSL. Both of which we support, both of which are common sense - assuming someone actually bothered to inform you! (rewind to “we suck” comment)

Now here is the real kicker - that applies to everyone reading this email: “Ok, great, next.”; Folks tend to ignore stuff like this, rightfully so, it is not an immediate problem. But when it does become a big enough problem you will have 10,000 other things on your plate and lets face it, you’re likely not an expert at Windows Mail configuration. Even if you are, do you want to spend 30 minutes playing around with it and making sure it works, or would you rather scroll down a 5 page whitepaper and do it the way we suggest, test and know it works (or more importantly, the way we say you do it and if it breaks we’ll help you fix it). See the sales bit in all this yet?

Anyhow, here is the blog post. Our first micro-whitepaper is titled “Advanced Mail Server Settings Options for Shared Hosting Clients” and in the nutshell it explains how to securely configure your mail client to transmit and receive mail via SSL/TLS to and from Own Web Now mail servers as well as how to say goodbye to the ISP filtering port 25 access to remote networks.

Check it out: Advanced Mail Server Settings Options for Shared Hosting Clients

So yes, we still suck, but we’re really trying to improve and I hope little things like this keep on going toward making this a decent partnership because not only does it give you some time savings, it gives the next person you hire a complete footprint on how to work with us. No guessing.

Oh, and by the way…

It’s a mighty cold day in hell. Big thanks to Susan Bradley for taking the screenshots of Microsoft Entourage on her Macintosh. Susan taking Mac screenshots, Vlad writing documentation for Mac users… yep, we’re doomed.

As promised, this is the first public showcase of what we’ve been up to for the past two weeks and what we are doing to improve communications, relationships and documentation over at Own Web Now. I’m the CEO so you get to hear it directly from me, first. It is not quite as simple as a single blog post so I will take the rest of the week to explain the changes in detail because for every person you please you’re bound to piss off another. I am not necessarily concerned with wheter you like me, but at the very least I hope you understand where I am coming from and at that point its your call whether you become/quit/stay our partner.

The big picture: The goal at Own Web Now Corp, over the past year and over the coming months, is working to further the global network presence, both in terms of hardware and its partners. We will do this by making significant improvements to our systems, centralized management consoles and both partner and end user training.

In terms of infrastructure, we’re there. 14 data centers, full staff, products and services in R&D. We’re moving forward in a very big way. Three weeks ago a number of things became very apparent as huge problems, something we have moved very quickly to address and fix. Broken is broken, we picked up and glued back a lot of pieces.

So, here are the improvements, in a nutshell, I will break them down over the course of the week:

Communications: Corporate Blog: Corporate blog will be the main information site for the OWN business in terms of product announcements, major service items, opportunities, etc.

Communications: Network Operations: Network operations blog focused on the service aspect of Own Web Now: What we are doing, who we are doing it with, what the problem is, what the resolution is, etc. Your day-to-day OWN operational problems.

Documentation: ExchangeDefender Web Site: Our flagship products first update in over two years and two major releases. It brings the long demanded “trial signups”, documentation, feature descriptions to explain benefits of the service to customers, etc. Most importantly (and in highest demand) this site makes it easy to get started with us.

Documentation: OWN Documentation Center: New wiki that we will be brining most frequently asked questions to. Nearly all of our products behave just as you would imagine and as the documentation indicates – but whenever there is something left to the interpretation we will throw it up on the wiki.

Business: Updated Partner Guide: For close to a year we did not have an updated Partner Sales guide, which resulted to a lot of people asking for a resend, current information, etc. Now the most up to date partner guide will always be available online, on demand, in our support portal under Services.

Business: Price List: Also embedded under our partner portal under Services is the Pricing List that you can use when putting together quotes. These are the latest, most up to date prices on our key products.

Almost last, but definitely not the least:

Business: SUICIDAL?: Public feedback: Every now and then you’ve got something to say but you don’t want to say it out loud and have it associated with your own name. While your best friends will always level with you and give it to you exactly how it is, most people are not comfortable with that level of intimidation. So, we have a public feedback link. I am not posting the public side of it here (will be emailed to you in the newsletter) but you can see the public results of the feedback here. Any submissions to the public site are reflected on the private support portal side in realtime, we do not block anything, even if you’re filthy. We have a 72 hour response time guarantee on every piece of feedback left, so hopefully it will give us better insight for the problems as they happen as they affect you, not six months down the road when its too late. The feedback is totally anonymous, we do not even collect the IP address, just subject, feedback and product category. We stole this from NewEgg.

Finally,

Newsletter – Emailed, every month, every third or so. I will be mailing the first issue this week.

So as you can tell, we’ve been busy.

Let me repeat – OWN is not a bunch of bored hobbyists who got tired of the VAR game and decided to branch out into services, we have a decade of infrastructure knowhow, the funding, flexibility and one of the largest partner networks in the world. So yeah, you can bet that I will personally do whatever it takes to make our partners better, our clients more informed, listen to that feedback and make you better off. There are thousands of people making a living off of what we do, have done for a decade and will do so for decades to come. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and will do it bigger, better and uncut….

This, however, is just the first step. Look at the above, and watch it grow.

P.S. More details on all this over the coming week.

I’m getting too old for this shit; strings of allnighters don’t mix well with cross country flights… anyhow, feeling much better about things after the all nighter and whats going on. Flew to Dallas yesterday, back in Orlando in the new office now. Here is the oneliner that kind of made my week:

“Taking time off future tasks to address current problems? Yeah, I remember when Microsoft did that in 2001, thank god their software hasn’t been plagued by security issues since then!”

Smartasses. But the point is valid, whether I like it or not, this is the high tech field and it waits for noone, forgives no mistakes. To be honest, I think I may have overblown the severity of this without cause because I tend to take people at their word – after all, they are my partners, why would they mislead me if we share a common interest? Well, here is what numbers revealed – thousands of partners making a ton of money off virtually all of our products. Over 80% of those have not opened a single ticket! Of the 20% of the partners that did, roughly 100 partners and/or clients have caused over 50% of the support cases.

Now…. either we suck horribly, horribly bad for those 100 companies while 14,000+ are OK, or we allowed some people that really do not qualify to offer our products without knowing how to support/troubleshoot them. That was my first question. Then I got to see the breakdown per criteria – the number of tickets opened where it was clear that the user did 0 troubleshooting and was just handing the bucket off to the vendor “just checking if its you” (me) – 60%. We’re not talking about companies that had legitimate issues, that even opened tickets on daily basis or for the same thing over and over again – I’m talking about guys who at any time had 8 outstanding tickets asking the same questions that were answered in the manual but they didn’t read it because, and I quote: “I wanted your answer to these questions before I waste my time reading through a bunch of text.”; Mind you that this includes the legitimate support requests, service issues, problems, orders, etc.

So either we suck or some of our partners don’t deserve to be in our partner program. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle and I will take the responsibility for it because I am the one that allowed everyone with a decent web site into the partner program. I will admit and take responsibility for the issues with the billing, with the service quality and for poorly qualifying and training my partners. Thats my bad, and we will fix it. This is also where it gets ugly – there is rampant abuse of the system as it is right now and that will have to adjust as well.

I am very optimistic about this and I promise you this will not take long. The mockups that were presented last night will all be live by the 1st and I will give you a preview of them tonight. If you get a chance to take a look through them and give me a quick thumbs up or thumbs down I would really appreciate it. We will fix these issues, and we will fix them fast.

BillG.