Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

Recently I had the same experience twice in the same day. A customer whose computer we had fixed calling and then stumbling, halfway embarassed, through some minor question or other. They then both ended with something like, “I’m sorry to call with something so minor!”

I want to make something perfectly clear: customer once means customer for life. I want to answer your questions, if I can do it in two or three minutes over the phone, so much the better! Feel free to call us to ask anything that is on your mind, whether advice about buying a new computer, or a quick querry about some detail of your current user experience. As long as you have a question, you need an answer, and we’re happy to provide it.
So please, don’t hestitate to call, we like to hear from you!
-Zac

Today I want to tell you all a cautionary tale that I heard yesterday from one of our callers. Yesterday our caller, we’ll call him Tim, contacted us and said he needed serious help. Tim originally had a slow computer and a slow laptop that he needed sped up. He decided to keep things cheap by hiring somebody from craigslist. This random craigslist person came over, did “something” to Tim’s computer, took the laptop and said that he would need to work on it at home. He took $60, told Tim to reboot his computer, and left.

After Tim finished rebooting his computer he realized something terrible had happened. All of his music, pictures, icons, programs, emails, etc, had vanished completely. He called the technician and got no answer. He received no call back. A day later the number he had had been disconnected. The craigslist computer repair guy stole Tim’s laptop and told his desktop to do a full reformat, which deletes all personal files and information.

We have been called in to see if anything can be salvaged on Tim’s desktop and if any of his files can be recovered. We will see how that goes, but in the meantime one thing is clear: Tim lost a lot more money than if he had called a certified, licensed company in the first place. To speed up his two computers would’ve cost him around $210 with us; now, he has lost a laptop (value of $250, it was old), he is out $60 he paid the fake technician, and he still has to pay us probably for about 3 hours of time to recover his files.

So remember, when you select any kind of contractor, pick by quality, not price. Find somebody licensed with a good reputation. Usually the cheapest option works out exactly as badly as one might expect.

Thanks everybody,

-Zac

We are considering adding another technician to the family here and, as resumes are on my mind, I thought I would spend a few minutes talking about what it takes to become a Happy Hamster Technician. We take hiring extremely seriously and we interview and weed very aggressively. When we hire, applications come in by the score because we offer the absolute best work environment for computer repair contractors in the city. First, we pay better, much better, than anybody else. Our contractors make upwards of 20% more than they would elsewhere. Second, our zero-upsell policy makes people here a lot more comfortable in their work. Our technicians do their jobs as best they can, without regard to profit. Third, our extremely flexible customer service policy makes it easy to do your job here. Our technicians have broad authority to give discounts, offer free upgrades, or to do whatever else is necessary to satisfy the customer without checking in with the home office. Basically, I trust the people I hire to do the job as well I would, and I give them the freedom to do so. For these and a host of other reasons, people want to work here.

Unfortunately, though, that creates a lot of work for me! A recent job posting for a Portland technician brought in north of a hundred resumes, so I would like to talk about how we get from one hundred to one (or sometimes zero).

The first premise I keep in mind is that we do not ever need to hire somebody. Recently I sought a technician to cover the Beaverton area. None of the applicants who applied were a good fit, so we decided to make due with current resources for the moment. Knowing that we can choose to hire or not gives me the flexibility to not have to think, “Well, maybe this one is good enough…”

From here the actual selection process begins. First, I ask a few open ended computer repair questions in the application form and instruct applicants to send answers along with their resume. A surprisingly large number of people, something like 50%, either ignore or choose not to answer these questions. They are all instantly deleted. From the remaining 50%, I evaluate the quality of their answers in two ways: technically and grammatically. Often people will fail on the technical side of thing, betraying with their vagueness or short answers that they don’t know enough to work here. Sometimes people will fail on a grammatical level, and I mean serious failure: a total lack of punctuation or abysmal spelling. (I’m not docking people for just missing a period.) This process weeds out another 40% or so, leaving us with about 10% of candidates who might have a shot.

After the resume weed out comes my least favorite part of the job: phone screens. I hate phone screens because they take up so much time. Inevitably a few candidates will fail before we even speak. Always one or two individual choose to have extraordinarily juvenile answering machine messages (swearing on the outgoing message, or something silly like, “I’m too cool to answer your call right now so leave a message”), which betray a lack of forethought that makes me think that person is not well suited to a job that requires so much close detail work.

Many of the rest are eliminated based on the call. This job requires the customer to put a huge amount of trust in the technicians, so a technician must be able to quickly and easily form a connection with a customer on the phone that says “I’m competent, I hear you, and I can and will help you.” Often people fail at this from the word go. Many phone screens, whether the applicant knows it or not, end at the first “hello.” A wobbly/hung over/weak/uninspired greeting can be the end of a chance to work here.  For those who sound good at hello, I chit chat for a few minutes and ask a few very broad, no-right-answer technical questions. With these questions I look not just for the correct answer but for the thought process the applicant uses to arrive at that answer. Few people pass this test. For those few the hardest part still remains: the interview.

Our interview takes place in three parts. First, again, is the hello. Some applicants fail before they walk in the door. People who arrive late to the interview, even by just 5-10 minutes, have almost no shot; I don’t trust you to be on time to my clients if you can’t be on time to your own interview. Others fail for how they’ve chosen to dress: torn baggy jeans and a hoodie or, in one very strange case, the remains of a tuxedo the candidate had clearly slept in the night before. After getting through the door, candidates spend about half an hour with Zia as she acts the part of a confused customer, drawing explanations out of the applicant. Here we test to see how well people can explain technical concepts in non-technical language. Again, more candidates are lost. Technical knowledge has no value here without the ability to explain it in plain English. Finally, if candidates pass Zia’s questions, I come and do the technical interview. I ask hard questions, some factual, some scenario based, to see both what somebody knows and how they think. Only after passing this final interview do we consider extending an offer to an applicant.

Only five people of the hundreds who have applied have made it through this entire process, and I’m proud to say that they represent the absolute best the city has to offer. We have built our reputation on both the quality of our knowledge and our ability to relate to our customers. The work it takes to select the elite few to do that job is time consuming but entirely worth it for the result. I couldn’t be any happier with the crew we’ve assembled here.

Thanks everybody,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

I want to talk today about one of my favorite utilities – Taskbar Shuffle.  For those of you, like me, who have really gotten used to using tabs a lot in Firefox and Internet Explorer, this tool will really help save you some sanity.

As you already know (or will now know!) you can move around the order of tabs in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Simply click and drag any tab, and you can place tabs in whatever order you like. For example, for me, the first three tabs are always business e-mail, personal e-mail, and online business spreadsheet. I also frequently like to move “things I want to read later” to the far right of my tab list, and move “things I need to work on right now” farther left to help keep stuff organized.

However, enjoyment of this feature led me to realize how annoying it is that I can’t move programs around on the task bar (the blue bar at the bottom of your screen that lists the programs you currently have open). Enter – Taskbar Shuffle! ( http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm ). A tiny, simple, totally free program that gives you the freedom to move your taskbar items around as you would like. Now, the same helpful functionality that keeps my tabs organized can apply to my programs! For me, for instance, Firefox is always my first program, then a blank notepad document (so I can jot down notes throughout the day) and then a folder that is open to my company paperwork (invoices and such like). By keeping things in a consistant order, I can quickly and easily use ALT + TAB to shift around, and I know exactly how many clicks it will take to get where I want to go.

So, give it a shot today! If you’re like me, and like everything to be in its place, taskbar shuffle really helps achieve that goal.

Thanks everybody,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

Sorry things have been a bit quite here this last week. We just completed a company record week, we fielded 73 phone calls last week. To give you some perspective, when we started this company last September, it took us 2 full months to reach that call total. I promise to get back to all those of you who need getting back to to as we dig out from under this snowstorm of computer repairs.

And, for those of you who might be thinking about hiring us on, have no fears. We are still offering the same great same day service, our guys are just offering it more hours every day!

Thanks folks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody,

I want to tell you all two stories today that illustrate the difference between true, Happy Hamster Customer Service and what a lot of other companies try to pass off as customer service.

Recently a customer called in a panic. It was about 6 PM Monday, he had a flight to catch on Tuesday morning and his laptop DC jack suddenly stopped charging. On Monday we fielded 23 calls and all of my technicians were at wits end covering the jobs from that day. We had no time to do the job but I knew that we had to take it. Few of the other on-site companies in Portland are even open that late, fewer still have the ability to do CD jacks and I doubted that the other person I could think of would have any availability, either.

So what did we do? We scrambled. Techs were reassigned, jobs were shuffled in time and space, a few customers were swapped around between techs and we found a hole to send somebody out to take care of the guy. No extra charges, standard $70/hr. We got the job done and he got to catch his flight with his computer. Without question, the hassle outweighed the 1 hour we billed the customer. The number of required phone calls to create the hole took far more time than it was worth from a financial standpoint, but I knew that if we didn’t get this job done, it wouldn’t get done. The man needed his computer, so we did it.

Today, on the other hand, I had an experience with one of our suppliers that showed how their customer service intentions stopped at the balance sheet. We occasionally send laptops out for hardware repairs that we don’t have the tools to fix in house. This outside repair center does good work for us at a reasonable price but today they screwed up. Today we were supposed to get back two laptops from them, yet only one came in the mail. I called the manager to ask him where our other computer was and he told me it never shipped. They admitted fault but refused to offer anything other than free ground shipping, because, he said, overnight air was simply too expensive. So what did we do? Well, besides firing off a serious e-mail and putting them on notice about the incident, we had them overnight UPS the computer on our own account. It is expensive, no doubt about that, and we at Happy Hamster Computers will take a loss overall on the job. I don’t care about that, though, because customer service isn’t something you only offer when it’s cheap. Customer service is an ethic that goes above and beyond the monetary cost; it is taking seriously the trust people put in you when they give you their computer and then doing your absolute best for them. The short sightedness of this particular supplier shows that they really just care about the money, not the customer.

I’m proud of what we’ve built here and the buzz we have generated in the community over the quality of our services. We’re going to do right by each and every customer, regardless of how the dollars and cents add up at the end of the day.

Thanks everybody!

-Zac