My New Office in Starbucks
July 23rd, 2008
What’s next? I asked myself after we switch to 4 day work week last week.
My Glande Latte reminds me something. It’s possible to move an office to Starbucks? Occupying a corner with glass partition, from walk-in customer. This fixed and dedicated location with private LAN/WIFI - sounds like a reality show :)
“Starbucks in Malaysia is jointly owned by Starbucks Coffee International and Berjaya Group Berhad. The first Starbucks retail store in Malaysia was opened in KL Plaza since 1998. Today, we have 109 stores through out Malaysia.”
If this is possible, what would be the values of story to Starbucks and that company?
You may want to take a look at our related postsWhy 4 Days?
July 12th, 2008
I was skeptical at first especially after we sent an email informing all our existing customers about decision we have made last week.
When asked why? This is definitely not another be-the-first kind of Malaysia Boleh campaign. It’s also not the Meatball Sundae like what Seth’s said in this book.
The change just happened. I can remember this suggestion was raised last year. We find no solid answers to how are we going to handle calls coming in on Friday, how our team members are able to check their email when they are not in the office, how to access the file servers without a VPN - We are not ready!
Again, change is pain but we are not afraid of it. Yet, to take every measure to make sure all our customers & team members will be benefited from this process.
You may want to take a look at our related postsWhat’s the cost of an online business?
March 13th, 2008
It is important to understand what are the fixed cost associated with an online business. The following are an example of cost breakdown for an small-medium scale online business for your reference,
Setting up
Hardware, backup, setting up servers (RM20k)
Trademarks and copyright (RM10k)
System development (RM800k)
Monthly operation
Co-location, email hosting, domain name (RM2k)
Customer support, 24×7 (RM10k)
System maintenance (RM5k)
SSL certificate (RM50)
Monthly marketing budget
Online & offline campaigns (RM5k)
2007 Year in Review
February 5th, 2008
It was whole-year-round action-packed, but 2007 proved to be another successful and productive year for the 1.com.my team. The WDA project conceived in early 2007 proved to be an important step in bringing together the many talents around Malaysia. With every member in the team focused on bringing their best performance to the stage, we felt that we are getting closer to achieving our next goal!
The hard work and effort put in by the team is clearly evident through the significant growth rate of our online business and also from the positive feedbacks of our customers. Other than the advancement of our skill set, we are also seeing ourselves improving in terms of our ability to deliver customer’s expectations.
The recent acquisition of Kumomo.com, with its donation to build two schools in Cambodia meant a lot to everyone.
2008 will see another action-packed year as we shall accelerate the pace of change, with even better focus and efficiency!
You may want to take a look at our related postsTruly first come first serve system must be discriminative!
January 26th, 2008
Over the counter, banks use queue ticket system to manage their crowd.
However, as with human nature, not all counters can solve each customer’s request in the same time duration.
Incorrect form entries, forgetting a company stamp, signature mismatch, and all other kinds of human-prone errors are bound to happen! This is where the queue system cannot easily filter out, making it half as efficient as it should have been.
To fix this little margin of “humanity-error”, we have implemented an “approval-based system”.
It’s quite simple really. The approval process kicks in the moment the first customer start queueing. The duty of the approval team will filter out the customers with problems and direct those who are error-free straight to the counter. Those with errors will be directed to the error-fixing team, where a dedicated trouble-shooting team will attend to them personally.
It’s not to be seen as a system to penalize customers with errors, but rather, it’s to reward well-prepared customers who gets their documents right and speed up the process for them.
In the end, both the erroneous customer and the error-free customer will be happy.
You may want to take a look at our related postsImportance of Keeping Your Renewal Records
January 8th, 2008
Who say running an online business is easy and everything seems to be auto-pilot - one just need to get the site running and start collecting money.
Email - Reliable, Manageable (forwarding, Spam Control), uptime. How marketing experience shares between your teams, solving customer support email while using it as an opportunity to train new support staff and at the same time to reduce operation issues…
Servers - Dedicated server, higher bandwidth, importance of understing every details of the platform including what is running in the Cron job, who is deleting the overflow log file, blocking the firewall, making sure the current datetime is correct and sync to the hardware clock, etc.
Domain name - Reminder to renew your domain name? Or, end up as the recent incident that caused the Advertlets.com domain to expire?
You may want to take a look at our related postsToilet bowl must clean, but email can go down?
December 14th, 2007
I have talked to many businesses when they are having problems with their email. When asked how much they are paying for their email hosting service, unsurprisingly ranging from RM200 to less than a thousand annually. They were promised with unlimited users package, so-called 100% uptime, etc. Fact is, they have all kinds of problem from email lost, SPAM to poor technical support!
Various DNS Tools unveil the problem of their poorly setup email service, bit all it sounds too technical to them! Yet, it is obviously too attractive of the package they have signed up.
Here is how a simple math says all,
Said Company A with 50 staff, subscribe to email hosting service by paying RM1,000 yearly
Let’s drill down to a single month,
It would be RM83 a month for 50 staff, or RM1.67 for every staff in a month.
Hmm, am I hear it wrong? RM1.67?
My office cleaning service costs me RM120 a month!
My last McDonald’s meal cost me RM10…
Understand that the above email hosting company may be looking at volumes, but maintaining a reliable email hosting infrastructure can not be cheap too! I have yet to use the RM200/year email hostingpackage (Look at The Star In-Tech if you plan to subscribe one) in my sample…
You may want to take a look at our related postsEngland or United Kingdom?
December 11th, 2007
“there is no choice for England in the Country Dropdown list” said our customer.
It is a balance between development cost and conversion rate. We can use an interactive map, than a drop down to solve this problem, eventually reduce our operation cost, or less one support email for today. But, before changes are made, we justify its cost to make this change to the values of conversion increasement we can get!
The answer, we maintain the dropdown - email to the customer to choose United Kingdom instead. Afterall, this is the one and only request we have received since day one.
The best localization is to listen to your customers and make changes!
You may want to take a look at our related postsWhat’s system design to do with marketing?
November 20th, 2007
Behind an online business, backend system works silently, handle operation issues, customer support, making your online experience a most wonderful one. They are a part of the business!
Spending more time in your operation means you have less time for your marketing.
It is one of the reason why we are never happy about our supporting system. Apparently, we revamp our system very often (Yes, complete revamp). New interface are tested before actual coding. Our programmers are tested in every revamp to make the interface even better.
Instead of presenting few dropdowns for different search options, we have included arrow button to click for various search options. Don’t ask me why the arrow is before the text field, why not after? Funny enough, such important details is never being discussed in the Request for Proposal documents or quotations. Clients tend to just want a system done, rather than getting it done the right way!
Thanks to Weikiat, our best reduce-operation-increase-marketing engineer!
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