Tiner’s Take on Customer Service Through Controls

“Our rooms talk to us,” says Scott Tiner, Assistant Director for Classroom Technologies at Bates College. In his recent InfoCOMM webinar titled Leveraging Existing Technologies to Create Exceptional Customer Service Tiner mapped out the importance of tapping the usage-tracking capabilities of the technologies we already have in place in order to maximize not just customer service, but also to contribute valuable data to institutional planning.

This is important stuff. Networked control systems can do much more than just dim the lights and raise the volume, all current systems provide hooks to a database in which every button-push and device-selection is recorded and time-stamped. Furthermore, graphic touch panels offer the added benefit of serving as real-time trouble-shooting tools that can minimize session interruptions and empower users to “fix the glitch” before it turns into everyone’s problem.

Hardware Store Homilies: The Three-Eighths Riddle

I love my father. He is a lifelong salesman of the highest order from whom I have learned many valuable life-lessons. For example, unlike many in his trade he would never be so foolish as to approach a customer and ask, “can I help you?” Unfit to be called salesmen, those guys, according to Pop, were nothing more than clerks.

Note that Pop used the term, clerk, as a derision — an epithet reserved for the lowest of the low masquerading as someone who almost cares.

Long before there were consultants, Pop believed that true-blue salesmanship had less to do with “closing” the deal and more to do with providing a consultation, that is, contributing to the greater good by getting to the bottom of what the customer (his client) really needed, not necessarily what they said they wanted.

Return to the RS-232 Issue: Extron Chimes In

A recent survey on AV-1 questioned technology manager’s experiences with RS-232 control of their projectors. The results revealed widespread, intermittent RS-232 problems especially with serial-controlled projectors.

90% of survey respondents indicated that at least once a month their projectors have “locked up” and stopped responding to RS-232 commands. Ill-timed, random malfunctions of this sort can result in event interruptions and loss of end user confidence in presentation systems and support services.

Translation: This is a serious issue that must be resolved.

Survey Results: Projector Freeze

Have you ever asked a question to which you were certain that you already knew the answer? On this week’s survey, we thought we had done just that. Expecting to hear that one particular brand of projector, when coupled with one particular control system manufacturer would cause periodic problems with RS-232, we relished the “reveal” moment when we could proclaim, “It was Colonel Mustard in the parlor with a knife!” Sadly, we hadn’t a clue.