Archive for January, 2010

Those who run a company that does business online, such as an ecommerce site, or even a company that simply wants to have a very strong web presence, need to know about what Perl Desk can offer. This is a high grade solution for small to moderate sized enterprises that provides plenty of ways for you to serve your customers better right through the website you already have. It is simple to integrate and once you download PerlDesk, you will see that it’s not intimidating and you certainly do not need any sort of Perl certification to be able to use it. Since the system is browser based, you will have a much easier time navigating through it and delivering great service to your site’s visitors.

Another strong point of PerlDesk is that you can actually provide a much higher level of customer support than email could ever accomplish for your site. The fact is, customers are not keen about having to send and receive emails when they need answers. By having your own help desk available, especially since you can offer interaction directly through a live chat, you greatly improve the level of customer satisfaction that those who choose your business are going to report. This is not only good for those customers, but word of mouth is one of the best forms of advertising possible.

When you combine that level of service with the fact that your staff can have a knowledge base to work from, create FAQs and help guides, plus access the entire system from anywhere in the world then you have a truly robust way to serve your clientele and keep them as happy as possible. No matter what sort of business you run, you’ve got to admit that this is a pretty grand array of features. That’s precisely why PerlDesk has nearly 10,000 companies worldwide running their scripts.

In an effort to streamline PerlDesk more effectively into the rest of your site, it is not a bad idea to consider altering it to a re-branded look that gives customers more confidence in your company name and its ability to deliver the best. The HTML templates that serve as the front end users see can be customized quite easily.

The easiest customization is modifying the template to display your company’s logo. All you need to do for this is upload your company’s logo somewhere. You can put it on your own site, or even use an image hosting site such as Photobucket or Flickr. Then you go into PerlDesk’s Settings area and where the option to specify your logo url is, you simply paste in the address of your company image. That’s all you’ve got to do to get your logo displaying on PerlDesk!

For those who want to completely re-work the PerlDesk templates, simply head to your PerlDesk installation on your server and find the /include/tpl/ folder. Inside this folder you will find another folder of templates, generally titled ‘v4′. You don’t need to edit several files in order to customize the template, just look for the DEFAULT.TMPL file and edit that. If you have CSS experience, then within the /images/v4/ folder you will see the userend.css file which you are free to edit, as well.

When editing these files, to ensure that you don’t mess up the formatting, be sure to use a text based editor such as Notepad2 instead of a WYSIWYG editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver because these can damage the coding.

That’s how you make PerlDesk look exactly how you want it to!

Popularity: 2% [?]

For a very long time, at least in the United States, there was a saying that “the customer is always right.” This lead many companies to focus on their customers with laser like intensity and basically prostrate themselves at the feet of those with whom they did business. If you complained, you could get a discount or even a free product or service. If you wanted to berate the customer service people then they were instructed to smile and nod in sympathy. If you spilled hot coffee on yourself, were shocked to discover that it hurt you and then sought out a lawyer, the company immediately placed warnings on their products and instructed their employees to verbally warn you of the coffee’s hotness.

If you have been paying attention, then you will notice that the climate in the service industry is starting to change because so many people took advantage of companies as customers during that era. They pushed the envelope so far and took things to such extremes that companies have begun to view customers with a certain amount of suspicion, distrust and even downright apathy or even a controlling attitude. In an effort to protect themselves from cash draining parasitic customers who are basically the mooch minority, companies have begun to change their tactics and this is affecting all sectors of the market, even the web hosting industry. Since digital entrepreneurs often love to get what they can for free, many web hosts have taken the attitude that the customer is generally wrong and what they have to say doesn’t matter. While this might be understandable on a certain level, it is definitely not a good way to do business.

When you find that your web host is unwilling to cooperate in offering the kind of service that you need and tries to control the size of your site or the traffic you are getting, then you seriously need to evaluate the system. If you aren’t trying to exploit the company for your own gain then you need to contact them and let them know that by controlling your efforts and trying to force you run your site the way they want to, they are risking losing your business. If they give you a “who cares?” type of response then you really need to seek out other alternatives. Web hosts are just that, hosts. They need to practice a level of hospitality that encourages webmasters to feel comfortable knowing they have the company’s support in their own online endeavors. Those who are trying to make a name for themselves on the web need the level of technical expertise a great host offers, but they don’t need to be pushed around by a service they are funding.

Think of it this way: would you permit the phone company to call you up and give you a schedule of when you can make calls so it won’t stress their networks? If not, then why would you accept the same type of approach from a web host? Would you allow the cable company to give you a list of TV shows they feel are ‘appropriate’ for your personal viewing? Of course not, so there is no reason you should be limited when you want to put up a website about any topic that is legal in your own country.

Don’t get pushed around by the people you pay to help you. It’s your money and that means you deserve to be respected for the contribution you make to the company’s finances.

Popularity: 2% [?]