I am wired for success. I strive to succeed. I fear failure. I study methodologies which feed success. I pay close attention to others who have succeeded. It is my personal belief that God, the Creator of all, has put within mankind a strong appetite for success. One of the lessons of success is that past successes help fuel future successes.

Don’t believe it? Try coaching a team of athletes who have never won. Nothing will energize them more than that first victory. All the practices, though important, all the peep talks, though inspiring, cannot provide the extreme level of energy that success pumps into the souls of the team members. Just ask my daughter Sara to tell you about the high school girls’ soccer team she helps coach.

As I return back to Greenville SC from Denver for about the 15th time, I am contemplating ways to expand The Worthwhile Company into the West. Making connections, learning of needs, seeking office space, searching for the right team, feeling out the business/technology climate, all these actions help me determine when the time is right to launch out into new markets. But for me, one of the most compelling reasons to expand comes from the encouragement of past success.

Each day I receive an email that summaries our income transactions for the day. I like these emails. It is sort of like getting up in the morning with a pulse, a daily reminder that the Lord of life has granted me the blessing (and associated responsibilities) of another glorious day of life! One of my joys is to use these emails to probe into the details of a customer we serve. It helps me learn how Worthwhile is serving them to make their calling more worthwhile. Today I ran across the following testimony from a customer of about two years. He said “Because of the inherent limits spoken language has with ultimately describing a sensation, I can really only express my experience with Worthwhile in barbaric sounds of elation. If considering Worthwhile, nothing in the world would give me more pleasure than to share these sounds with you.”

Wow! I can hardly express the joy and confidence that flooded my mind. What a privilege to serve a group of employees who are able to (and desire to) work together to serve customers with Internet technologies in a manner which generates this type of response! It empowers and energizes me to seize the opportunities of growth with great confidence that, by the grace of God, our past success will help generate future success!

Let’s go west Worthwhile!

We love it and we hate it. We can’t do without it and we wish we could sometimes. We are tantalized by it and at times tortured by it. What is it? Instant connectedness. The Internet facilitates it. The Web delivers it. Our dependency on it grows, at times like a lush rose bush, and at times like cancer!

My frustrating experience with Norwegian Cruise Lines online cruise registration has painfully reminded why every great website needs a Betty.

My wife and I signed up for our first cruise. We are looking forward to celebrating 30 years of married partnership and friendship by joining several friends along with the former president of our Alma Mater, BJU, for an Alaskan cruise on the Star Ship of the NCL. Part of the process involves an online registration at their website, where my frustrations began. I will spare you the ugly details and get right to my most worthwhile point.

The process assumed I knew things that I did not. For example my name. Now I know, you are thinking, man if you don’t remember your name then you probably need to avoid taking a cruise! You are thinking that because you are human, not computer. Humans are creative and flexible. Computers are fast and accurate. (good place to out in a reference to computational thinking)

What is my name, at least according to the NLC database? Why is that important? The registration process demanded that I start with my name, ship name I was cursing on (oops, lovely iPad/Apple OS auto fix of my mistypings, another blog topic), the date of our departure and finally, the most inhuman information of all – my registration number. The system wanted to make sure I wasn’t trying to hack in and take over the navigation of their cruise ships or something!

I tried every variation of my name I could think of – Dan, Daniel, Edgar (my full name is Edgar Daniels Wooster III, and when I refinance my house it takes about 10 minutes to acknowledge all the aliases I have). Finally in totally frustration I decided this website needed “the Betty function”. So I called Betty Fagge. She is the most awesome event organizer in the world. If I know she is behind setting up a trip, I want to go. I have traveled to China with her and my wife and I are looking forward to this Alaskan cruise, all because of her!

So Betty very calmly and patiently guides me thru the online registration process. It was a walk in the park, once we figured out my name, according to the NCL db, is “E Daniel”! You see, Betty is everything that a computer is not. She is creative, flexible and kind. This comes from being created in the image of One who is all these things and much more, but I digress into another great blog topic.

Now in this age of automation, can a business justify having enough Betty’s on the payroll so “frustrated idiots like me” can call in for a personal guide thru their online systems? Probably not. But yet never under estimate the return on investment value of great, human based, customer service that is only a phone call away ( wow, another worthwhile blog topic, guess my summer schedule is filling up fast). So what’s a business to do if they want software (defined as an automated solution to a problem) to interface between them and their customers? The sales answer in me says “you need Worthwhile” or you can do it yourself if you are ready to assemble a team with the follow skills and expertise.

1. Graphic designer – make things look great
2. Content designer – say the right things in the right way
3. Software designer – make it work right (correct, robust, useable, efficient, secure – just to name 5 of the 10 qualities of worthwhile software)
4. Database designer – make sure you are collecting and storing the data you and your customers will need
5. Production manager – to make sure all of the above are free to focus on their expertise and that everything comes together right
6. Network administrator – make sure the website is properly hosted (secure, efficient, available, expandable, scalable – you do expect your business to go I hope)
7. Search Engine expert – to make sure people find this great website
8. Interaction designer – to make sure the customer experience is worthwhile and enjoyable rather than worthless and frustrating. Hey, would someone please pass this blog to the folks at NCL please?

This world of connectedness can open up great doors of opportunity for your business or ministry, but to do it right, to provide worthwhile interactions with your customers, requires a growing body of knowledge and skills. This is one of the many things that thrills my heart to have the privilege of working with the great team of bit-building experts assembled together at The Worthwhile Company!

We all have our stories of frustration which come from trying to get something done working with a giant organization – the government and AT&T are the among the largest. Recently I had an adventure in communication challenges and obstacles with the communication giant AT&T which I just have to “get off my chest”. My hope is that I can share some insights into the communication challenges faced as our company grows in order to avoid frustrating our great customers like AT&T frustrated me. I’m fairly confident (or at least willing to give the benefit of the doubt) that no single person that I interfaced with the past 2 months at AT&T intentionally tried to frustrate me. But I think the challenges come when “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing” which seems so often the case in giant companies. Here’s my story.

We wanted to purchase AT&T’s new UVerse service for our office. It would take us from a T1 line (1.45 Mbps) to an 18 Mbps line, and would cost a fraction the cost of the T1 line. It seemed like one of those “too good to be true” things, but knowing the direction of communication technologies costs over the past 30 years was not too unbelievable. So I had our network administrator begin the process of ordering this new service. After about a month of him getting the run around, first being told we couldn’t get it then being told no problem, then being totally ignored as he got passed off from one sales rep to the next, I decided it was time for the “boss man to get involved”. Nothing against youth, but some business problems are best solved by someone with all the bumps and bruises of exerience.

Rather than bore you with the day to day details of my journey, I’ve decided to simply outline the hightlights. Here we go.

• discovered why Jared was getting the run around; our main phone line is an AT&T line, one of the requirements for UVerse, but we pay for it through a third party so AT&T’s system refused to process our order request; of course it would have been nice if the human being on the other end of the phone would have told us this, but then I’d have nothing to be blogging about
• no problem I thought, I’ll just order a new phone line directly from AT&T; so I did, and after a few bumps and bruises it was installed; hurdle #1 cleared!
• now I place an order for UVerse to be provisioned on this new line; they take the order; nothing happens; after making a few calls, one of which I was actually transferred 5 times, I hung up in total frustration! among other things I was being told the same thing Jared had been told at one point, oh, UVerse is not available at your location!
• there is an old saying “its not what you know but who you know that counts”, so I decided to call a friend of mine, David Baxtor, who works here in Greenville for AT&T; David and I are members at Hampton Park Baptist Church were we happily serve the Lord together; David is very knowledgeable of AT&T and likes to see customers’ needs being met
• David makes some calls and finally gets someone to call me back; we are back on track; UVerse is available and can be installed; but over the course of the next 2 weeks, nothing happens, other than phone calls, voice mall, being moved from person to person within AT&T (honestly, I think I ended up speaking to at least 20 different employees over the 2 months)
• I finally got a very knowledgeable account rep from Columbia who called me, at David’s urging, and we started upraveling the problem(s)
• I felt in very competient hands when she transferred me to a UVerse salesperson and said “now here is Mr Wooster’s phone number in case the call is disconnected”; I did most of this process over my AT&T iPhone and have to admit that my call was dropped at least 2 or 3 times; well sure enough, about 3 minutes into the call, we got disconnected; interesting to note that I still had 5 full bars at the time! I waited patiently for 10 minutes, a very very difficult thing for me, and no call back. Finally I called Nickie back in Columbia, she was appauled that the UVerse person didn’t call me back
• Once Nickie found out all I wanted use the Internet portion of UVerse (not TV), she said “Oh, I can place that order for you” so she did. I should note here that later that evening, about 10PM, I got a phone call from the UVerse salesrep I can been disconnected from. She said here lines was ringing all day long and this was the first break she had in which to call me back! I would not want her job.
• I asked Nickie, which phone line are you placing this order for? She gave me the number of our main line, the one which we learned AT&T will not put UVerse on. So I gave her the correct number. Then I asked “and to what address will you deliver this service?” She paused and said “that’s weird, the computer shows your address as 303″. I said “303 what?” Just 303 she said. So I gave her the correct address, otherwise we would have gone round and round another 2 weeks wondering why no one showed up to intall!
• I’m happy to report that I spoke with Jason, an AT&T Uverse technician who just arrived at the right address to install our UVerse service!!!

Lessons

• communication is the key to all successful relationships
• the bigger the vendor, the more time you will have to spend managing that relationship
• making assumptions (like which phone number and which address) is usually where the problems creep in
• persistence is priceless is you want to get AT&T UVerse run to your business!

I hope Worthwhile will always be sensitive to our customer relationships and will do all we can to avoid making it difficult for folks to do business with us! As our company continues to grow, as we have been the past 6 years, I think once we hit about 50 employees, it will be time to start another company!!