There has been a lot of buzz in the news in the past week or so regarding a change in Daylight Saving Time. For the past twenty years, DST has started on the first Sunday of April, but as a provision of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, it will change to the second Sunday of March, which in 2007 is this Sunday, March 11.

For people in the tech community, this change is not as simple as turning a clock forward one hour. Since so many computer systems depend on time, the change means late hours for programmers like me so our users can sleep easy knowing that a computer glitch won’t make the users of their applications late for any appointments next week. Since over 15 million people across the globe depend on Plaxo to store and organize their address books and calendar data, we have spent the past couple weeks working to make our system configurations are in ship-shape and we will stay posted next week in the event that any DST-related problems arise.

Many people are reminded of Y2K craze that hit the nation a few years ago. Some of you may be delighted by the fact that you may have another chance to justify the bomb shelter you built 8 years ago, which by now has become merely a storage room for Beanie Babies, VCRs, Ricky Martin albums, and other items that have become obsolete since the dawning of the new millennium. For the rest of you, I think it is safe to say we do not have to worry about a nuclear holocaust so much as our microwave clocks being off by an hour on Sunday, along with all other appliances which have not been programmed to deal with the change.

You may be thinking "What else can I do to prepare for the new DST law?" Most home computers will be updated automatically to deal with the change. Windows users can visit this page which will walk you through a process to confirm your system’s DST integrity. Other than that, see that those you work with are aware of the change by confirming your appointments. So make sure to remind your friends, families, and coworkers that some of their electronic devices might be "misbehaving" and for the ones who don’t use Plaxo, remind them not to miss any appointments ;).

Update: Those of you who are using Outlook may have noticed that some of your recurring calendar events were off by an hour this morning. This has nothing to with Plaxo -- it's a known Outlook bug (they store hard-coded version of the DST rules upon event creation, so old recurring events will have the wrong DST rules). Microsoft has released a tool that finds and fixes these events. You can download it here.

--Glenn Dixon, HipCal Engineer

When we first started the customer support department at Plaxo, it was offered by a handful of engineers with very little (or zero!) experience in support. It was a good learning experience for all of us as we were able to get instant feedback from our members. It was also a time when we only had 10,000 members.

Fast forward several years and a few more members (just add 10 million) and things got a bit complicated. Though engineers still answer questions, we have a customer care team that handles the bulk of our support emails (this has been expanded to include voice and chat). So how does an organization get better? There are many sources of good information detailing ways to improve. The basics are common sense, simply following what you would expect yourself.

I'm not alone when I tell a story of calling some company's customer support that didn't know any of these common sense rules. The call spirals out of control, where the support agent becomes abrasive, defensive and less than enthusiastic about resolving the problem. And no matter the proof our conversation showed, assumed I had no understanding of technology. Being in the business, I should be a fairly easy call to handle.

In general, customer support has a bad rap. It also doesn't help that companies have 15 levels of paid support typically in your favorite colors: silver, gold, fuschia, titanium, plutonium, whatever. In the end, customer satisfaction dwindles while companies simply try to find ways to mask the weak points in their support offering. But we're not all bad. And as the head of Plaxo's customer care, I'm actively looking for ways to set a new standard in care.

I'm always curious what makes someone feel good about their support experience. In reading through discussion lists, forums and blogs, I came across one, 37 signals, that captures the summary of what any support agent hopes for in every email, chat or phone call they receive. As much as support agents are taught "treat your customers the way you would expect to be treated," this is a nice twist addressing the fact that many customers come into a tech support experience with a bias. They're already on the defense or attack because they assume they're about to be mistreated.

So in the sake of making the world a nice place, here are some tips from that blog, combined with tips I've added from our experience. Remember that communication is the important ingredient.

1. Treat each interaction as unique. It's not right to take your anger out on one particular tech support representative, even if you are really busy or have never received good support. In turn, tech support should always assume the customer has a basic understanding of the product or service. Let the customer lead you to whatever level of technical detail they're able to talk at.

2. Remember there’s a human on the other end. It doesn’t matter that you’ll never "meet" again. You're still talking with an actual person. Treat them with dignity and respect. It is simple human nature that the nicer you are, the nicer the response you're likely to get.

3. Be patient. Sending the same email ten times to ten different support channel emails will only slow things down. The support agent is forced to read each of your emails before responding. And for the agents, when you've asked the customer for a specific piece of information, don't lose your focus, or begin helping another customer when the customer is getting you what you need.

4. Provide useful, descriptive, relevant information. This can be tough since people don’t always know what’s relevant. If you are having trouble logging in, don’t just say "I can’t login. Any ideas?" Instead say "Whenever I try to login, the login screen just reloads without an error message. I know my username and password is correct. Any ideas? Thanks." That extra bit of information will help considerably and will reduce the number of back-and-forth emails between you and the support person.

5. But don't get overly detailed and wordy. If your email is too long (I’ve seen simple requests balloon into two printed pages), customer support has to sift through the entire thing to find what’s meaningful. This means more time spent figuring out exactly what’s wrong. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to help you. Be clear and concise.

6. Starting a conversation with a threat is not a good idea. "Do this immediately or else" or "If you don’t respond within 4 hours you’ll be hearing from my lawyer," are not uncommon first lines in the first email from people. I don’t know if folks assume you are out to get them or they’ve been burned before, but starting with a threat never helps. Given the choice to help two people, the customer service person is naturally going to help who appears easiest, first. Plus, back to point #2, people will do more for others who are kind to them than they will for someone sounding bitter and dismissive right from the start.

7. Screenshots, screenshots, screenshots. These are a support agent's best friend. If you have the ability to visually show your problem, it can be diagnosed quicker and, hopefully, resolved faster. Screenshots are a first step, but remote assistance (a support service we offer to our Premium users) almost guarantees resolution within minutes.

8. Escalate. If you feel that you're not getting the proper support, ask for a different agent to help you. Or ask for a supervisor or an escalation technician to assist in the matter. Every support agent should know that your time is valuable. And it's very important for you to know that their time is also valuable - their success is based on finding resolution to your problem quickly and efficiently without giving up any of the above customer support rules.

9. Provide feedback. Good support organizations ask their customers for feedback. Great organizations listen very carefully and carry out those suggestions, especially on feedbacks or surveys. It's an opportunity for you to let them know if and how they need to change. Take that quick 30 second survey. It only helps the organization, and the agent, become better the next time around.

Have any tales of good support experience or additional useful tips?

When we started Plaxo we were running on a handful of Linux boxes. In fact, I think we had as many development machines as we did production servers. The initial roll out was 2 database servers, running MySQL, each with a couple IDE drives in them of around 80gigs a piece. That was about 3 and a half years ago.

Once we started growing we moved into Dell servers with their external storage, that was ummm...interesting. Let's just say that Dell should stick to what they are good at, making desktops. So we moved on.

Now we've grown to over 200 servers, which includes over 25 DB pairs (primary/secondary for redundancy), each capable of storing between 600gig to 1TB. We're still running MySQL, on InnoDB, but not much else is the same. We've installed a SAN environment built around storage from Pillar Data Systems, and a whole slew of servers from Penguin Computing , which run very nice Opteron chips from AMD. I won't go into more specifics as to what we have in place, but will say that it takes 6 full data center racks to hold just the storage, and no we aren't being paid by Pillar or Penguin to say this. :-)

Here's a glimpse at a bit of the storage:

Yeah, we know it's not a huge environment, and there are certainly larger environments in most any data center, but we thought it'd be interesting for our customers to understand what it really takes to run this service. Maybe it'll entice a few of you to show your appreciation and become premium users, hint hint.

Some of you have been watching the OPS Blog, which we keep updated with any issues that the service is experiencing. It's not a perfect service, but we try darn hard to provide a fast, reliable and secure experience, and hope you can bear with us when we do have little issues.

Finally, we're hiring in the OPS department if any of you talented Operations Engineer/Unix Admin types are looking for a challenge! See ya next time.

Believe it or not, a common opening line in support emails is "no one will probably read this, but..." This sentiment is magnified for companies that offer the unusual combination of free service and tech support. Combine this with previous bad experiences with online customer support and the opening line isn’t too surprising.

We consistently beat our target 24-hour response time on standard email support channels and we boast a round-the-clock VIP support channel that's resolving most of our Premium member's issues within a few hours. But we understand that a single email may not have all of the information needed to diagnose a user's problem. Several emails may be sent back and forth before the nature of the issue can be fully understood. Before you know it, 3 days have passed and the member is ready to throw their computer out the window.

We recently decided to offer chat support to cut the wait time and provide immediate support. It wasn’t as simple as adding an icon to our Support page. We needed a tool that was highly reliable (no dropped chats), very low chat latency (it doesn't take 10 seconds before the other person receives what you just typed) and easy to use for the user. But there were many things to also consider besides the obvious. We had to decide on cost, administration, security, back-end requirements, front-end requirements, protocol support, scalability, user convenience, operator convenience, monitoring, real-time statistics and analysis, multi-chat ability, images and so on. And it's a bigger challenge with many providers offering closely the same features.

We also had to hand select from our customer care team that fit this style of support. When answering support emails, you have time on your side - time to research the problem, time to consult with engineers and time to compose a neatly written response. With chat support, everything happens on the spot. It's important to have an answer within seconds, type complete sentences quickly and accurately, and staying away from using IM shortcuts. IMHO, IM shortcuts personally confuse me, LOL. But one of our most unanticipated challenges was training our Live Chat team how to gently let down our customers who ask them out on dates. Who knew that would be one of the most often asked questions?

We’ve found that an overwhelming 98% of those who use Live Chat are satisfied with their support simply because the resolution time is within minutes instead of hours. But is chat for everyone? Probably not. Personally, I prefer shooting out an email and waiting for an answer to read at my convenience. But it's good to offer a different kind of support channel for someone who may need an answer right now than right later.

We had a minor glitch in our servers which is affecting some users when they try to login to Plaxo Online. Our customers said it wasn't so much a problem that the service was down, the problem was more that there wasn't a channel where we could communicate service-level issues with them.

So rather than pretend it's not happening (as some services are prone to do ;) ), we listened to our customers and created the Plaxo OPS blog. If you're a Plaxo user and want to keep up-to-date on what's going on with our service, just subscribe to that blog or check it every once in a while. We think this is a win-win situation, let us know what you think.

I love reading about people who have discovered Plaxo's Backup/Restore feature. Here are a few that I recently came across:

From the desk of the Privacy Officer....

With over 5M Plaxo members, we�ve seen tremendous growth and acceptance of Plaxo over the past few years. But we also acknowledge there are administrators who do not feel Plaxo is appropriate for their userbase and some have taken steps to block messages sent by Plaxo members through our service. We respect an organization�s right to determine what is most appropriate for their users.

We�d like to inform these administrators, effective 03/16/05, Plaxo has changed it�s network service provider to Internap to handle all outbound mail messages sent by Plaxo members through our service.

Internap Network Services Corporation (AMEX: IIP), provides high-performance connectivity to more than 1,800 customers worldwide including Nasdaq, Travelocity.com, and TicketMaster. We�ve actually been using Internap for some time now to provide network connectivity for the Plaxo web-site and Plaxo Online (my.plaxo.com), but with this move Internap will now be providing network connectivity for the entire Plaxo service.

All outbound mail traffic now comes from the new IP addresses of: 66.151.128.12 (mx.plaxo.com) and 66.151.150.148 (mx01.plaxo.com). If you are a network administrator, and have determined that the use of Plaxo is inappropriate within your organization, you may need to update your block list with the addresses above. However, before you do so, we would certainly welcome the opportunity to speak with you and address any concerns that you might have.

People might be wondering why we might blog something like this. Our business is based upon trust, and we feel operating in an open and transparent fashion is the best way to earn and maintain that trust.

Open communications is another way we look to build trust and we'd like to invite you to share your thoughts and comments with us. Does your domain block Plaxo Update Requests or do you know of another domain that does? How do you feel Plaxo can improve? Voice your comments to our public User Forum or feel free to contact me directly.

'til next time.

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com

Many legitimate questions have been raised around the issue of ownership of contact information vs. the privacy rights of the individuals to whom the contact information pertains.

My name is Stacy Martin and I am the Privacy Officer here at Plaxo. I am responsible for Privacy, Security and Trust issues related to the usage of our service. I'd like to publicly state Plaxo's position on this issue. I welcome others to comment and offer suggestions with the hope of providing a productive and useful open discussion on this subject.

OVERVIEW:

As part of downloading Plaxo Contacts and joining the Plaxo Network, you will likely provide us with your own personal contact information as well as the contact information for others stored within your address book. All of this information is collectively referred to as "Your Information".

Our privacy policy, which is a binding contract between Plaxo and you, states that Your Information is treated as your property and we do not share this information with anyone else, unless required by law enforcement. As a member, the Privacy Policy protects your ownership rights to your information by allowing you the right to access and correct, update, and/or delete your information at any time.

WHO OWNS MY CONTACT INFORMATION?:

We have received many questions about the rights of individuals whose personal contact information is being kept within a member's address book and is therefore managed by the Plaxo Service. Do these individuals have the right to have information about them removed from the address books of Plaxo members?

THE PLAXO POSITION:

According to US law, the information in a person�s address book is the property of the owner of the address book and not the property of the individuals about whom the information pertains. The Plaxo Privacy Policy explicitly prohibits us from removing an individual�s contact information from a member�s address book without the member�s consent.

We believe this is the proper and responsible manner in which to operate. On a simplistic level, the same principles hold true when you give someone your business card; you can not decide that you "own" the printed information on that card and be able to demand the card back at a later time.

Some people disagree with the US's (and Plaxo's) stance on this issue. They believe that a person should inherently have control over any information about themselves, regardless of who currently maintains it. Clearly it can't be both ways, which is why this issue has remained so contentious.

However, and this is important, if any user -- member or non-member -- requests to have their information removed from the address book of a Plaxo member, as a courtesy we offer to contact that member and ask them to voluntarily remove the user's data as well as discontinue further communications with the user through Plaxo. Most users have no incentive to share or otherwise compromise the information of their friends and colleagues. In every case that I've been involved with so far, the Plaxo member has been more than happy to comply with the user's request.

However, Plaxo takes reports of abuse very seriously. If we find that a member's actions violate our terms of service, we will investigate and possibly terminate the member�s account. If you suspect any abuse, please contact us at abuse@plaxo.com.

It�s worth pointing out that the issue of ownership is not unique to Plaxo. Even if you only looked at services that provide online address book functionality such as Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc, you would still have tens, if not hundreds of active services dealing with the same ownership vs. privacy issues. And just as much as a user can not go to AOL and demand they remove all references to the user's email address from AOL members' address books, Plaxo is unable to do the same with Plaxo member's address books.

THE PRIVACY POLICY:

Finally, I'd like to conclude with a few comments regarding the Plaxo Privacy Policy. The Plaxo Privacy Policy is a public statement of our fair information practices and it is designed to be self-regulating. In other words, it allows people to evaluate our actions against our words and determine for themselves if we are a trustworthy organization.

We've further enhanced the credibility of our privacy policy by certifying it with one of the most trusted 3rd party privacy seal organizations, TRUSTe. As a licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy Seal Program, we have agreed to adhere to specific privacy and security practices.

Moreover, the Plaxo Privacy Policy is a legal document that falls under the basic consumer protection statute enforced by Section 5 of the FTC Act. This statute provides that "unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce are declared unlawful." In other words, if we don't do what we say we do, we may be subject to prosecution and fine.

I welcome you to continue the discussion by contacting me at privacy@plaxo.com or adding your comments to our Plaxo Community Forum.

Thank you,

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer