Hello everyone,

I hope all are well.

Thanks to everyone who posted a pic. There’s still time to upload one if you haven’t already.

I’ve been working with the developer on Chat. He is several days away from finishing the coding. Afterwards we’ll spend a few days configuring and testing before it’s fielded. Bear with us.

Closer to completion…the survey results are in. I’m providing these to you as a precursor to Chat for you to begin gathering an understanding of the general customer mindset. The value is when Chat is finally available you’ll have some idea of why a customer arrives at LetterRep.com and the difficulties they encounter so you can assist and steer them toward the purchase of your letters that suit their needs…or to the service of YOU writing a letter for them.

Here are the overall visitor results:

The key choice of interest above is ‘Ask an expert.’ ‘Browse’ and ‘Learn about products’ are almost the same and, as you can see, make up roughly 60% of all visits. ‘Ask an expert’ was chosen as a survey choice because it was felt, based on voicemails, answering messages and customer service emails that customers definitely come to the site looking for assistance. That’s why we’re adding Chat.

Customers are basically in search of free stuff - no question about it. Other sites that employ Chat have gone as far as requiring customers to input their credit card info before allowing access to the assistant just so the assistants can call a stop to the pressure for answers by requiring payment before any further assistance is given and the customer is that much closer to completing the sale. (I’d like to hear your thoughts on this…I’ve opted not to include it in this version of chat, but I’ll consider adding it if a large enough group feels it would screen the freebie-seekers from the true customers.)

Chat will allow us, the writers, to perform our normal work online and then, as customers click the ‘Ask an expert’ link appearing below our pics, interact with them - answering questions to assist, as much to help as to demonstrate to the customer that we, the chatting writers, have the product or service they need.

The goal for Chatting will be for writers to take the 60% of browsing-customers who click Chat and the 30% of assistance-seekers who click Chat, ask and answer questions about the customer’s needs, build trust and rapport, and lead them to the writer’s own letters or to a page to hire you exclusively to compose a letter for them. (We’re creating a writer’s side page to help you quickly find your letters and provide letter purchase-page links to the customer. You’ll also have a link to paste to the customer in chat to have them hire you exclusively to write a letter.)

Here’s the next bit of interesting data from the survey - The comments customers made when answering the open-ended questions: (Bear in mind that I removed some ‘fluff’ from the survey that didn’t make a difference in the results: Entries, such as, ‘asdfjkl;‘ ‘I wanted free stuff,’ ‘I don’t like surveys,’ etc.)

Question 1: What do you value most about the [company] website?

Question 2: Please tell us why you were not able to fully complete the purpose of your visit today?

In the first list above, with a few exceptions, the value customers assigned to LetterRep was the ability to work with a professional.

The second list is almost a unanimous annoucement from customers that they are/were unable to find the letters they need.

Chat can fix both of these. Here’s how…

Writers who take the time to professionally and courteously work with customers will satisfy the professional requirement from List 1. Building trust will be key! Learning the protocol of how to interact and finally sense when a customer is ready to buy will take a little time, but be patient and keep trying.

As you start to become successful, let us know. We’ll use your methods to build a general protocol for all writers…and, since you can only answer one customer at a time, it won’t be taking away from you.

As for the second list, I find it a little hard to believe…for goodness sake there over 9000 letters on LetterRep. Either not know how to search or not wanting to search is more likely the problem. Nonetheless, in the interest of improving our own sales, we’ll gladly conduct the search for them. That, however, may require help from the site, and, please trust that I’m all ears if you have a suggestion to make it better. First, the development team is creating an ‘Assist a customer’ page (those of you who were around for our earlier attempt at Chat will remember that link). During your chat sessions with customers, writers will be able to click the ‘Assist a customer’ link in their writers accounts. Within the accounts, writers will be able to search their own letters. I made this bold because it is only stage one of Chat. In time we will add the ability for writers to search all letters on the site and earn money through referrals. As for now, it will just be your letters that you can search. Searches will be based on the information you collect during your chat session with the customer. While determining the customer’s needs, you will be able to search on the ‘Assist a customer’ page and have results displayed and accompanied by links. We’re still working on the process, but you’ll either be able to copy-and-paste the link or click on it to have it pasted into the Chat window to be sent to the customer. When the customer clicks the link, they will be referred to the payment page. An additional link on the page will refer customers to a page for hiring you exclusively. This is just the stuff we thought of. As you conduct your chats, please, please, please let me know what would make it better and easier!!!

Chat will look a lot like Facebook’s chat, for anyone who’s used it. Please take a look at the survey comments above, and if you have any questions, please let me know.

Rob
admin[at]letterrep.com

Dear Writers,

It doesn’t take us long to begin changing things after we finish making updates. So, at this moment we are making plans for our newest upcoming development.

The new development is a step toward something we’ve been pursuing for a long time - Chat (or Instant Messaging as it’s known by some) between writers and customers. Last year we tried adding chat, but the technology available at the time and the general public’s level of comfort in using it was very low. Since then, chat has become much more prevalent in places like, for example, Facebook. In fact, thanks to Facebook we now have lots of new chat apps to choose from and they do not require downloading a client app, as we found this time last year was the standard and a major obstacle in its adoption.

To keep this post short, we plan to offer chat to our customers in test mode. By ‘test mode’ we mean, that while any visiting customer will have the ability to chat with writers, only a few writers (numbering under 50) will be chosen to interact with customers. Here’s why…

1) We need to figure out the primary purpose of customers chatting with writers…is it for answers to writing questions? Is it to be led to specific letters? Or, is it to request the writers to write for them?

2) What must we provide writers to make answering questions easier? An easily searchable FAQ section? An easy way for writers to search their own letters to provide customers something that will work for the customer’s situation? A link for the writer to provide the customer for the customer to hire the writer exclusively?

3) What protocol can we design for all writers to interact with customers and lead them to the purchase of letters or prepaid requests?

4) What safeguards can we put in place to prevent writers from using LetterRep as a lead-generation center and taking the customers away?

There are probably more things we need to be watching for, but we just don’t know to ask those questions yet.

Here’s the general layout. Check out this image:

(If you see your pic here and you’d prefer for it not to be, please don’t panic. This was simply the mock-up used to show the developer what we had in mind.)

We are, however, in desperate need for writers to upload pics to their profiles so that we can begin the process of choosing which writers will be selected as testers.

Why would you want to be a tester?
We have been conducting a survey on LetterRep recently, maybe you’ve seen it on the customer side. While the #1 answer to the question ‘Why have you visited today?’ was ‘To browse,’ that answer only stands at 41%. 37% (as of this post) have wanted to ‘Ask an expert’ - YOU! Here’s part of the results page:

Marketing research and customer studies indicate that this 37% wants a letter immediately or wants someone to write one for them.  Besides discovering answers to our questions above, we are providing the group of writers chosen for testing the ability to interact with customers and lead those customers to their own letters.

Testing should turn out to be very profitable to the closed group of testers, if they handle it properly.

We have very few pics of writers at the moment and we know this is a basic requirement for a tester. If you are interested (and we hope you are), please visit the writers side of your account and upload an image of yourself.

We hope to see you soon.

~Rob

Dear Writers,

Hi everyone. I hope all is well.

In case you didn’t notice, LetterRep got hacked yesterday. It wasn’t malicious but it was very deliberate. Just hours before the Googlebot crawled our site, a malware site from China entered through some older code we ported from the previous release to post a script that would embed cookies on visitor machines redirecting them to third party sites selling cialis, viagra, etc. As soon as Google crawled LetterRep, Google posted warnings, like ‘This site is not safe’ or ‘This site may be harmful to your machine.’ Needless to say, our traffic dropped down to nothing.

I made a call to the developer and we got the offending code removed and updated the older site code so it’s no longer vulnerable. Google re-crawled us early this morning and things seem to be back to normal.

In any event, you may want to delete the cookies on your computer in case the cookie re-directing you to the malware site was inadvertently installed.

Sorry for the trouble.

Next…PayPal.

PayPal started playing its games again with suddenly, WITHOUT WARNING, changing the fees for writers. What’s strange is that some writers were affected while others were not.

With the help of one writer (J.P. - many thanks), we found that if we choose the ‘Personal’ tab rather than the ‘Purchase’ tab when sending payments, the fee is reversed…so that LetterRep pays the fee and not the writer. Sweet deal, right? Hold on. LetterRep’s fee for this is $0.05 per transaction. Not that much, but after several payments, it starts to add up.

Here’s the solution…yes, LetterRep pays $10.00 to writers for each letter sold, however, PayPal wants their slice; so…these are the options: 1) You as the writer are paid $10.00 from LetterRep through the ‘Purchase’ tab where PayPal charges you 2.9% plus $0.30 for each transaction (more for overseas transfers), or 2) you are paid $9.95 from LetterRep through PayPal’s ‘Personal’ tab where PayPal charges LetterRep $0.05 cents for a total of $10.00. Okay…we’ve voted for you…the latter.

Who hates PayPal? We do, too. The problem is, no other payment processor on the Web reaches as many countries as it does. LetterRep has writers in the U.K., New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the U.S., Philippines, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, South Africa and lots of other places. Many of these countries, South Africa, for example, still do not accept PayPal. LetterRep has lots more people who want to write, but don’t because their countries don’t accept PayPal and they don’t want to work for free and the Snailmail and Western Union options cost so much to send to many countries that the earnings are outweighed by the fees. Those options are so bad they’ve been removed from LetterRep’s writer registration altogether.

We would really like to find a new payment processor…or, at the very least, a method of payment that is accepted by all countries…maybe, $10 e-gift cards to Amazon or something like that.

Send us your suggestions.

I owe you more posts about the new changes to the site. I promise to get those out to you soon.

Finally, on Wednesday I presented LetterRep to a venture capitalist. I’ll keep you posted as things develop. Wish us luck!

~Rob