Checklists for Product Developers and Web Designers

What is the Power of 250?

The most memorable two events of a persons life are their wedding day and their funeral. Statistics show that the average amount of people that attend these events are 250.

This leads me to believe that the sphere of influence that surrounds all of us is an accumulation of 250 people that we come in contact with or retain some relationship with.

Why is this important?

It is human nature, when you have a bad experience, to tell as many people about it as possible. If a store clerk treated you badly, or the web hosting company, that you thought you would have 4 life, had dropped your web site for a week without so much as an apology, or you had to wait on the phone for an hour to get through to customer service, or a promised refund was never fulfilled , you will tell as many people, within your sphere of influence, as possible. Heck, it just makes you feel better to share it with somebody. We all do it.

When we have a good experience we may tell a few close friends, but this experience is never shared with as many people as the bad experience.

Being a northern gentleman, I am not going to share with you the worst customer service experience of my life - even though I really want to.

Rather, I want to share with you three positive experiences.

1. Kelly Ford, developer of XMod, had personally Skyped me to help out on a project I was working on. I know he had just returned from sabbatical and his own work load was high. But, he took an hour to help me and I want to share that with you.

2. Tony Valenti, CEO of PowerDNN.com, had personally, by phone, assisted me through the weekend setting up a dedicated server for three of our web sites and throughout the next week continued to assist me in the transfer of several of our clients to hosting accounts at PowerDNN. His support team was stellar. I want to share that with you.

3. Tony, aka FatGeorge, had spent many hours helping me work though the video section of Business Directory 5.0. I know he was busy and he certainly did not have the time available but he still helped. I truly appreciated it and I want to share that with you.

The point to all of this:

When dealing with your clients, always keep in mind the power of 250. It may well be that your good deeds may fall on the ears of a few, but your bad deeds...