Hi Everyone,

More posts coming soon, so I’m gonna make this one short.

If you’ve been watching the requests as customers submit them, you will see in some cases customers will submit a work for a specific writer. In most cases, these requests are pretty straightforward in their titles, things like, ‘Request for R.N.’ or ‘Request for Rob’ or ‘Requests for Writer R.N,’ etc. We call these ‘Exclusive Requests.’

Is this the best way for customers to submit an exclusive request? Maybe not, but asking the customer to learn exactly how we wish for them to submit a request is like asking them to clean their money before paying us. Training them is most wisely done after the fact.

The point of this post, however, is to ask (code for ‘insist’) that all writers honor exclusive requests by NOT submitting letters in response that compete with the requested writer. Golden Rule, kinda thing here. In some cases these writers have spent considerable time discussing the customer’s letter via chat or email and it isn’t fair to have that work wiped out by someone who didn’t make the same effort.

If you see an exclusive request that you feel is interesting enough for you to compose a letter in hopes that it will be purchased in the future, feel free to write one and submit it under the ‘Not from Request’ option. It won’t be tied to the request and I will gladly make it live.

Ok…as always, let me know if you have any questions.

Sincerely, Rob

Hello Writers,

I’m writing to give an update on Chat. As some of you may have noticed, we have temporarily removed it from the site. Here’s why…

Writers repeatedly brought to our attention the problems the scrolling feature experiences. We initially thought we could fix it quickly so we left chat up while we worked on it. The problem proved to be more difficult than an easy-fix.

We think we’ve found the solution to it. It appears that the issue lies with the size of pictures that have been uploaded. While some pics were uploaded small enough to allow for very smooth scrolling, others were uploaded with extremely high resolution and slow the system down as the scrolling feature attempts to render the higher resolution picture. Eventually, we will create a feature to limit the size of pics that can be uploaded. In the meantime, we’re manually fixing the pics manually.

A second problem we’re experiencing with Chat is the amount of load it is putting on our server. This is a problem that is really only solved by adding more server power. We’re in the hunt for that now.

One feature we added to help out the server is limiting the writers who appear in Chat. Some of you online earlier today may have seen us testing the feature where only those writers who are online appear in the large chat window. Writers who are offline do not appear. In the short term, this solution fixes both the scrolling problem and the server load problem. However, as more writers login the scroll is enabled and the server load grows.

The final thing we’re working on is the addition of your pic on your letter purchase pages. (To get to one of your letter purchase pages, go to the customer homepage, click a category where you know you have a letter, find one of your letter titles in the list and click it. The following page is your letter purchase page.) Look for the area of the page inside the brown box that reads, ‘Sign me up for E-tips on the best strategy for writing these kinds of letters.’ This box is being replaced with your pic. If you are online the ‘Ask this Writer’ text appears…if you are offline, ‘Email the Writer’ text appears and is linked to the messageboard.

One writer who did have some hits from customers in chat explained that customers seemed to be looking for advice. Her strategy is to continue giving advice to encourage the customers to return. Our bigger strategy and the point of giving you direct access to the customers is to figure out how to turn the chat conversation from providing advice to selling your letters.

Hang in there. We’re just getting started.

~Rob

Chat is live and working! Check it out on the customer homepage: LetterRep.com

Want to be part of the testers? Upload a pic!

For this early stage of chat we limited the testers to those who had at least 10 letters and who had uploaded a pic. Unfortunately, this criteria prevented lots of prolific writers, some with hundreds of letters but no picture uploaded, from being testers.

We need you!!!

Upload your pic today so we can add you to the test group.

Let me know when you have so I can add you to the group. (admin[at]letterrep.com)

See you soon!

Hello Dear Writers,

We are close…we are very close. The developer tells me we may be able to go live with chat Friday. It looks good and it works very well.

Several years ago, the company responsible for the (in my opinion, ugly) design of LetterRep said that the site needed a personality…someone with whom customers could connect upon arriving. Back then I paid a model and a photographer and posted the pics of someone, not a writer, all over the site.

The model is now gone and the writers are LetterRep’s personalities. It’s a much better fit. Chat has been designed around you, the writers, with an emphasis on giving you better opportunities to connect with and assist customers. There isn’t just one goal - there are lots of them: 1)More sales; 2)Opportunities to collect more information; 3)More satisifed customers by leading them to letters better suited to their needs; 4)Building rapport with customers so they will return to you for more letters in the future. There are probably other goals and good reasons for them.

Now, a really nice Chat app has been loaded. If you have ever used Facebook and Facebook chat then you will be no stanger to ours. It’s virtually the same…we’re just going to use it differently. Here’s how it works:

1)Customers arriving at the customer-side of LetterRep will see something like this:

A few things to know about this page are the writers are going to be arranged by # of Letters, Availability (online or offline), and eventually Rating.

The ‘First|Scroll left|Scroll right|Last’ will be links allowing the customer to scroll the row of writers without reloading the page.

Also, the ‘[#] letters’ above the pic but below the names will soon be linked to a page showing just that writer’s letters.

Next, the ‘Rating.’ This is completely subjective at the moment. As far as I’m concerned, all of you guys deserve 5 stars, so I gave you 5 stars. I, however, am a biased party, so we are determining a fair way for customers to assign a rating to writers. A cumulative score by customers, somehow rating letter quality, quality of the assistance experience, etc., will someday replace my biased scores.

The pics, for the time-being, will be linked to chat for that writer. Soon, we will link the pics to the upcoming writer mini-sites.

‘**Online**/**Offline**/Ask this Expert’: This small piece of LetterRep is driven by a technology called AJAX. As I will explain below, writers can turn-off their availability so they can do things like upload letters. When availability is turned off, the writer appears offline. If a writer is truly signed out, he/she also appears offline. If, however, a writer is online and fully available the ‘**Online** Ask this Expert’ text appears below the picture. AJAX also assists us in dynamically reorganizing the writers by those who are online coming first in the list and those who are offline appearing further to the right.

When the customer clicks the writer pic or the ‘Ask this Expert’ link, the chat window below appears:

Before moving on, please notice that the ‘Ask an Expert’ link remains, even after chat is initiated. We are working on changing this so that ‘Ask an Expert’ changes to ‘Currently Chatting’ automatically. At the time being, writers can click the settings icon (it’s the small flower-like icon in the bottom right of the image) and change their availability as explained above. More on that later.

In the image, the customer has just written ‘I need a letter of recommendation for dental school.’ The writer responded and from the writer’s side the writer is conducting a search for any letters he/she may have to suit the customer’s need. (Currently, search from the writer’s accounts only searches the writer’s own letters. This will likely expand to all letters on the site once we work out a referral program between writers.) A Search block now appears on the writer-side homepage and on each writers’ ‘My Live Works’ page. Here’s the search result from this writer’s account for ‘dental school’:

You will notice below the search result the text ‘Link to join’ and a link. The writer highlights this text, copies and pastes it into the chat window. After entering, the link is sent via chat to the customer and appears like this on the customer page:

In some browsers, like mine, the link does not appear underlined, but the link can be clicked by the customer to be taken to the letter purchase page. At the moment we are working on the page to be loaded behind the chat window rather than opening in a new window or tab.

As mentioned above, a writer can set his availability as it appears to customers. To do so, writers must click the small flower-like icon and choose their setting:

(At the moment, The ‘My Status’ and ‘Disable sound notifications’ appear. We will remove these distractions soon.) Clicking Available changes the customer-side availability of the writer to ‘**ONLINE**. Clicking Busy change the availability on the customer-side to ‘Currently Chatting,’ and clicking Invisible changes availability to ‘**OFFLINE**.’

Let me know what questions you have at this point.

**STAY TUNED FOR PART II**

~Rob