Marcus' Macro Scheduler Blog

Remember the good old days of corner shops? Long before we went to enormous super markets. The days before aisles and aisles of products that we just help ourself to? Back then you’d walk into a store and the shop keeper, who was probably the owner, would be stood behind a counter and he’d greet you with a polite “Good morning? Anything I can help you with?”. Those were the days.

Things are a little different today aren’t they. In some ways. In others not so much.

Quite likely the majority of on-line stores and websites are run by small businesses. The owner of the business sat at a desk dealing with email enquiries and so forth. Why shouldn’t that person offer to help one of his website visitors? Just like the good old days.

We do exactly that. We run a live chat system on our web site. It has the ability to offer a proactive chat window to people who have spent some time on the page. This allows us to offer them a hand.

The majority of people we’ve spoken to absolutely LOVE this.  They love getting the proactive help, before they have to ask for it. It usually gets people what they need really fast. And we enjoy chatting to people. Overall it’s a win for everyone.

But a large minority of people appear to be very suspicious.

Notice the “Yes, I’m a human – try me!” statement in the window above.  I added this because people would often say something like “You’re a bot!”.

I’m not convinced it helps.  Some people either say “Ha ha, you’re not human!”, followed more often than not by something rude, or they’ll take the challenge and give us a Turing test, ask us a mathematical question or something.  This can be amusing some times but when you have lots of people to help it can also be a bit of a time sink.

Yesterday while Dorian was on live chat someone asked if he was an employee of the company. He said “Yes, can I help you?” and the response was “I don’t believe you”. Yet on our about page you’ll see his bio. Sigh.

I find this all quite sad, but I suppose it is a reflection of the world we live in today. Perhaps it is due to sneaky pop-ups and pop-unders which were often used to generate traffic or get you to sign up to something. Google has largely put paid to most of that now though. And anyway, I would have thought that a pretty clean looking window like the one above which appears INSIDE our web site and offers help would look far more legit than those sorts of things.  Or maybe it’s just because we sell automation software, so they think we’ve written a macro to talk to them!

You do get some funny things. The other day someone in Australia used the live chat window to ask me for a crack! I couldn’t believe it. I asked if him if he really though the founder of the business would give him a crack for Macro Scheduler. He then told me he thought it was a bot and was very embarrassed. Embarrassed? He wants a crack.  He appears happy to download something obtained using a stolen credit card (no one actually *cracks* software any more – it’s easier to buy stolen credit card numbers apparently – but that’s another rant) but feels uncomfortable asking the person who was defrauded. And I’m not sure what he thought a bot would tell him anyway.

It’s frustrating that a handful of people are so suspicious when all you want to do is help.  The way I see it we’re just doing what the old store keepers used to do.

What I don’t get is why people who think it’s a bot bother to write anything at all and don’t just ignore it or close it.  Wait, I get it – perhaps they WANT to talk to a robot! Maybe we should offer them a choice – “Do you want to talk to a human or a robot?”.  After all they are probably at our site because they are looking for a Macro Recorder! 🙂

Anyway most people love it. We love it. We’ll continue doing our old-school shop keeper routine. It’s all part of the service!

In forum post “Is it a Macro Recorder, is it an Automation Tool, or ….” Antonius asks how we can make Macro Scheduler more popular.  This is not the first time I’ve been asked this.

The easiest and quickest way to help is to Share.  At the top right of every page of the website are some “Social Sharing” buttons.  

Click on your favourite social networking site (e.g. Facebook, Twitter or Google+) to share www.mjtnet.com with your followers.  Click the +Share link to get a list of other places you can share to.

Or you can use this link here:

Clearly we’d LOVE it if you shared. All businesses, especially small ones, need new customers. But apart from that we want to build the user community for the benefit of everyone. More users means more forum peers, more product ideas and an even better Macro Scheduler. So, go on, get sharing 🙂

Thanks.

When you tell people about Macro Scheduler how do you describe it?  Do you call it an automation tool, a macro recorder, a script language, a data entry tool, an interface builder, a trained monkey, or something else altogether?

I’d be interested to know.

To me Macro Recorder suggests only a tiny part of its capabilities, but it’s a useful and popular term.

An automation tool sounds more encompassing but “automation” can mean different things to different people.

IBM and SAP use “automation” to refer to the interconnected nature of their Enterprise solutions, connecting data across the entire organisation. But to me – and Macro Scheduler – automation is something more robotic: automation of a more specific set of human activities.

This kind of automation requires a tool box containing many tools, one of which might be the macro recorder.

Does it matter? Not if you’re using it and benefiting from it, no, probably not.  But in getting the word out, explaining what it is to people and from a marketing point of view, it’s more tricky.

And that’s why I’m interested to know how you describe it.  I’ve started a poll over in the forums.  Please answer the poll or add a comment.

Thanks!