Here’s some feedback I got during the turbulent days after the release of Poker Copilot 2.
taxicabmetal, a blog commenter wrote:
I would like to reiterate that your customer service and dedication to your product is top notch.
Loyal customer Jon wrote:
I recommend your product to others based on your customer service being ridiculously good.
Nice words to hear, but I believe I don’t have a choice. Small software companies – and especially one-person companies – need to give great customer service.
As a university student in sunny Perth, Australia I got a dream part-time job in a computer shop. Maybe not a dream job for all, but for a geeky computer science student, this job rocked. When parents visited the shop to buy their little Tommy a computer game for his birthday, I was the go-to guy. Which meant I had to play all the latest computer games on our shelves to make sure I made the right recommendations. I also got computer equipment for myself at cost price. It was pretty darn cosy, this job.
One quiet weekday morning only the boss and I were in, and he needed to go out to either do some banking or visit his mistress. I believe one was an euphemism for the other. While he was gone, a potential customer from a large Australian building materials company rang. He wanted to buy an ink jet printer. In those days ink jet printers were new, nifty, and way expensive compared to today’s “the cost of an ink cartridge” models. Therefore he needed three quotes first and wanted a quote faxed to him.
I wrote the quote and sent him the fax. He called a week later, and bought the printer from us. A week later one of his colleagues also bought one from us. Then another did. And so on, for many months. Naturally they needed to buy overpriced ink cartridges from us too.
I asked the original customer why we got the sale. He told me that I was the only one who sent the requested fax. Being young and naive, I didn’t know the correct behaviour in our industry was to promise to send a quote and then not do it. I was innocent enough to think that agreeing to do something and then actually doing it was how things worked.
Eventually our competitors from those days, with their customer disregard, all went out of business. So did the company I worked for, which destroys the point of the story… Nevertheless, I believe strongly that listening to customers, often agreeing to do what they ask, then actually doing it is a killer strategy for winning loyal customers.
Which brings me to my present enterprise, Poker Copilot, a one-person software company. An advantage of extremely small companies is that we can leave big companies for dead when it comes to customer support. When customers have a problem, a complaint, or a suggestion, they don’t find themselves being ‘helped’ by an outsourced and inappropriately-named ‘customer service’ team. They find themselves communicating directly with the software designer, head developer, founder, and boss all at once.
A good winning business strategy is finding your advantages and working them as hard as you can. And when that advantage is that customers have a direct line to the person who actually does all the stuff, great customer support is key. This is a decision I made at the start.
Here’s my customer support strategy in concrete terms:
24 hour response time. Respond to all support e-mails with 24 hours (I sometimes fail on this count. But rarely.) And not merely a “we acknowledge your e-mail” type of response, but a real response that tries to address the problem.
Make it real easy to contact me. Customers have three ways of contacting me. They don’t have to click through a ton of web pages just to find a support e-mail address.
“It’s Not You, It’s Me.” Until proven otherwise, always assume at first that the problem lies with Poker Copilot and not the customer or with other software.
No matter what tone people write in, whether angry, insulting, demanding, respond how I would like to be treated myself.
Always err on the side of the customer.
Yes, it takes time. Usually an hour or so a day. No, it doesn’t scale. A growing company at some point can’t offer this level of support any more, and has to work other advantages.
And what does this customer support deliver? In means that when you have problems, such as releasing a new version of your software that was clearly brought out of beta too quickly (and I wish this was all hypothetical but it’s not), people will persevere, help you find the problems, give you a second and third chance, and still recommend you to others.
I’m aiming for a weekly release cycle. You may have noticed that I’ve been releasing new updates every Sunday.
What’s New this Week?
You can manually add or edit tournament info. Right-click on a tournament and select “Get Info”.
Basic support for Winamax, and other Ongame Network poker rooms. You can analyse hands, but there’s no HUD yet. From Poker Copilot’s menu bar, select Tools -> Detect Casinos, and your Winamax hand history will be detected. For other Ongame Network poker rooms, you’ll need to manually add the hand history folder using Poker Copilot’s Preferences.
Bankroll chart is split into “Bankroll” and “Detailed bankroll”
I need more hands to ensure Ongame support is sturdy, so please, please, please send your hand histories from Winamax and other Ongame rooms to ongame@pokercopilot.com.
What’s Fixed?
The % sign on the HUD was never supposed to be there and has been removed.
The next update of Poker Copilot lets you manually enter and edit tournament results. Right-clicking on a tournament pops up a menu:
Select “Get Info” and you can edit the tournament info.Seem familiar? This is modelled on iTunes. If you’ve ever manually edited song info in iTunes, then you are already familiar with the process.
This feature is useful for:
PokerStars players who want to add rebuy and add-on info
Full Tilt players affected by Full Tilt’s sometimes-not-writing-tournament-summaries bug
Winamax players (and other Ongame Network players) . As far as I can tell, Winamax doesn’t save tournament summaries to your computer, nor can you request them. If I’m wrong please let me know.
…might like this screenshot from next week’s Poker Copilot update:
The Winamax support in Poker Copilot is basic – I need more test hand history files to make this solid. Also, there’s no HUD support yet. But it’s a good start.
For other Ongame Network poker rooms, you’ll also benefit from this, although support for now is more informal.
If I upgrade to Snow Leopard, is it anticipated that I will have problems with copilot?
Snow Leopard, also known as Mac OS X 10.6, is the next version of Mac OS X. It will be released on Friday 28th August, 2009.
A couple of people are already using Poker Copilot with Snow Leopard (developer preview, I guess), and claim that everything works fine. I’ve pre-ordered my copy of Snow Leopard to check myself. If there are any problems they will be automatically highest priority and will be fixed within days of me getting my hands on Snow Leopard.
I’ve long been considering donating a percentage of Poker Copilot profits to a charity. At first I was leaning towads Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders. Of the various aid agencies I’ve encountered, it seems to me that MSF do possibly the most unqualified good.
However given that many Poker Copilot customers have a science/mathematics/engineering focus, I’ve decided to support a much smaller organisation called Engineers Without Borders Australia.
The effect of making software that had more and better features was dramatic compared with anything else we tried. All along, we had thought we had a marketing problem. In reality, what we had was a product problem. Once we focused on improving the software itself, our business finally found success.
Improved layout and information in the statistic popup windows. These are the windows you see when you double-click on a player, hand, stake level, or position.
HUD popup player info has an improved layout and information and two new stats.
Hand replayer now supports 4-max tables
Recent Hands summary now shows last 10,000 hands (instead of last 1,000)
Tournament Advanced Dashboard has new stat, “return on investment”
What’s Fixed?
Full Tilt tournament antes 10K or higher now correctly recognised
Here are some tips for using Poker Copilot to improve your game. These are useful for beginning players who haven’t yet developed a winning style:
Voluntarily put $ in pot represents how tight you are pre-flop – 10% to 20% is a good range for full-size tables
Post-flop aggression frequency is low if you call or fold too much, is high if you bet and raise often. Good players typically have this > 50%
Use the Hands summary to make sure you are not overplaying marginal hands like King-Jack unsuited. Make sure you are playing premium hands like AA, KK, QQ, and AK aggressively, but not so aggressively pre-flop that you scare off your opponents
Use the Stake Level summary to find the level where you win the most money. It’s also useful when going up levels to make sure you don’t go beyond your current skill level.
Use the Position summary to discover if you playing too much from the blinds and under the gun. The closer you are to the button, the more often you should “voluntarily put $ in pot. The further from the button, the less you should be playing.
Use the bankroll chart to see long-term trends in how much you win (or lose…)
When you find yourself out-smarted in a hand, double-click on hand in the RecentHands summary to watch a replay. Work out where you went wrong.
