Blog for January 29th, 2008

Every now and then we're left in the precarious position of having to return a defective part to the manufacturer. Several months ago, we had two Linksys routers go bad and, of course, we had immediately replaced them for our customers, but when we got the broken ones back we left them on our shelf for awhile, and today seemed like a good day to call up Linksys and see if we could get warranty replacements for them. Gotta say, given how long we sat on them, the folks at Linksys were really good about it. We worked with their technicians to verify that they were, in fact, dead (most of their support steps were things we'd already tried when our customers were having problems with them, but they did have one neat trick we hadn't tried, apparently you can partially test a router's functionality by plugging one end of the cable into the router's uplink port and the other end into one of the router's other ports, a sort of literal feedback loop, if you will. Naturally in this case the router was really dead so that didn't do anything for it) and then they assigned a case number (almost like their version of a death certificate) to pass on to their RMA department in order to check on the warranty status.

Therein was the only negative part of the experience, really, because the hold time for the RMA department was rather extensive - good thing we can put their hold music on our speaker phone and attend to our other duties while we wait! - but once we got to a representative, it was a very painless process. He took my case number, read over the log of what the tech and I went over, and gave me a phone number to fax our receipts to. Once that was done, we just put 'em in a box and out they went.

Of course, our process with our customers is a little easier, we don't have to make them find receipts because we keep records of everything we sell and to whom, so once we verify that something's broken, we just replace it ASAP. Happily, our stuff tends to work great, so it doesn't happen all that often - if it did we'd probably have a pile of like 20 or 30 different parts rusting on our shelves waiting for us to get around to calling our manufacturers, because we'd rather focus on making our customers happy than on dealing with paperwork. :)

Had an interesting experience with Salon Iris today. At first it appeared as if the customer's program was freezing up after certain transactions, but inevitably, when we logged into her system, we'd discover that everything was fine and working. So we decided to "catch the problem in the act", so to speak - we left the connection to her computer open for hours, waiting patiently like duck hunters for the problem to rear it's ugly head again. Finally, after three hours, we got a glimpse of the issue, and spent a good half hour reviewing the video to see where it was going wrong. What we discovered was that nothing was "wrong", per se - Salon Iris was dutifully bringing up a window at the end of the transaction to show our customer that the transaction was complete and what to give back for change, but because she had another program running (Internet Explorer), Salon Iris was accidentally giving that program the center stage instead of it's change window. The customer was then going back to Salon Iris and discovering that she couldn't do anything - which was because Salon Iris was waiting for that change window to be closed first.

We explained to the customer what was going on, and many giggles were had all around, and we also reported the issue to Salon Iris, who said that their programmers would make sure that future releases wouldn't accidentally hide the change window like that. We've always been happy with the superb product they make, but their best asset as a company is their willingness to listen to us about how their program is performing in the field and work with us to make it better so that our customers always have the best experience possible. Thank you, Salon Iris!

Blog for January 28th, 2008

Hello everyone. :) In addition to our normal duties, the tech support team here at Assured Computing Technologies has started to make some training videos for the various Point of Sale solutions that we offer. Right now we're still in the rough draft stages, outlining what tasks each video will cover and where the line between the basics and the more "advanced" functions of our programs is; eventually, we want to make sure that there's a video for everything every piece of software is capable of.

We're starting with Aldelo, which is our most popular product for restaurants, pizza places and other food service establishments because it has the most features for customization of individual items. For example, it has built in functionality for ordering a hamburger with "extra cheese, no onions, light mustard and bacon with onion rings instead of fries for the side", as opposed to our other software solutions, which focus more on a static database. After we've gone through at least the basics of setting up Aldelo, we'll probably move on to Cash Register Express and work our way through the basics of all our packages before moving on to the advanced features each program has to offer.

You can get a look at our efforts on our YouTube page.

As for our regular duties, today we unloaded and configured a new IBM SurePOS 300 for a customer in California. This is his second system with us, so we loaded the point of sale solution unconfigured because once it gets into the field, we'll call the customer and log in remotely in order to make sure it syncs up with the database on his existing system. The system is currently going through it's 24 hour burn-in test and, assuming everything checks out, we'll probably be able to ship it out tomorrow.

Opening Entry

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An eternally basic hello for you. :) My name's Jerry, I'm a technician at Assured Computing Technologies, and I'm starting this blog to let anyone who's interested know what our Tech department's up to these days. So stay tuned!