On separate note, today I started receiving autoresponders and notices in my email inbox from corporate friends who are notifying their contacts on how long they’ll be away for the holidays and when they’re coming back to work after spending all their angpow money. All this lack of email response made me realise – we’re living in a world that’s “connected” 24×7 now (unless, of course, your support team is climbing up Gunung Tahan), so why not provide better customer care? It’s not rocket science!

Let us dispel some customer service myths:

1. Customers won’t call you up for tech support at 5am – because they need to sleep too.

2. They won’t ask you complex questions during CNY – because they’re busy celebrating as well.

3. Customers don’t care about your operation times – they care about having their problems solved.

4. Companies often rely on machines to handle call-ins from customers asking for support. This is a horribly wrong approach. Why not solve the problem and that will eventually reduce your support work load.

5. The bigger the company, like Airasia, IKEA, TM… to name a few… the longer you’ll have to wait for a response. They get loads of calls, so they depend on machines. They should just find out why people are calling and solve the problems at hand so people won’t bother to call again in the future.

But enough of my rantings! We hope that you’ll enjoy your Chinese New Year! Like you, we’ll be enjoying our holidays with friends and family too, but we’ll also enjoy keeping our customer support available to you as usual. Happy holidays!

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To all our loyal customers, we wish you the heartiest of thanks, and we invite all of you to tell us why you’ve decided to stay with us all these years.

My reason to stay is…

This could be another X-File

“This could be another X-File,” said a customer jokingly, as we reviewed an email problem at his office. While most email problems can be solved online or through a phone call, sometimes, on-site reviews are a must. Yesterday, for example, we visited a customer who had a case of missing attachments.

Apparently, the problem only occurs in emails received from a particular sender, who sends out attachments to other email users using Outlook Express. To diagnose the problem, we ran a few tests with help from their technical team.

In this scenario, usually it is the recipient who’ll make the complaint, rather than the sender, because it’s the recipient who’ll notice the missing attachment. Some recipients choose to switch to Outlook, and then the problem goes away. But, we weren’t satisfied with that shortcut solution. No, we had to get to the root of the problem, and trace it back to the beginning.

After hours of reviewing and testing, we managed to determine that the issue originated in the Sender’s computer. We’ve thought up a solution and we’ll be working hand-in-hand with their technical team to make sure that the problem will be resolved completely.

This turned out to be… not another X-file :)

1. Reply to emails fast, usually on the same day
2. Keep emails short. We compose it in our minds before start typing
3. Use the best email tools
4. Never lose our emails even when disaster strikes
5. Use keyboard shortcuts
6. Use plain text email with small attachments at all times
7. Send download links instead of huge files over emails
8. Allow conversion view to keep messages in best order
9. Never mark an email as read until an action has been taken
8. Be thorough. First, we make sure that we don’t miss any questions, and second, we offer help and SOLVE the problem

We’d like to thank TG for inspiring and showing us how to develop these nifty email skills! While working with TG in the past, we noticed that he writes short and fast emails. He would shorten names to two characters, usually, and he would ask questions directly in the email when anything’s unclear, unlike many people who just ignore the email or reply much later, because apparently they need more time to think. TG solves problems with quick email exchanges and it’s very productive and effective!

Before I go, let me share with you what I think is an example of an email signature that’s bound to scare your customers away (or at least make them think twice about contacting you):

Too much information to digest in one go!

Malware warning sign by Google

One of the most common tell-tale signs that a website is under attack is the message below, or, it might just return you to a blank white page. Fortunately, there are a few things that you can do to get things to run smoothly again:

Checking for malware infection symptoms

1. Do a fresh WordPress upgrade. Don’t just overwrite.
2. Remove malicious codes (themes, plugins, .htaccess)
3. Remove cache and sitemaps
4. Check database for malicious codes (use phpmyadmin > Search)
5. Change database and FTP password
6. Perform housekeeping on WordPress and change password
7. Upgrade all plugins to the latest version
8. Submit malware review via Google Webmaster Tools

Other symptoms of a website being attacked by Malware:

1. Returning to a blank page
2. The alignment of the content on your page is off
3. Certain dynamic-pages of your website don’t work
4. Some of your plug-ins used in WordPress don’t work
5. Files shown on FTP client ends with the extension “.INFECTED”
6. A malware warning sign appears on the web browser
7. Unknown .htaccess files in directories

Malware removal tips

To manually deactivate all Plugins without WP admin access, clear the values in wp_options > active plugins

Your site will not be reviewed by Google immediately, and the warning sign may remain for a few hours despite having all malware removed

The warning sign will state the name of the malware. Use it as the keyword in your search for malicious codes.

Posted by Adrian

Other related articles:
Recovering from site compromise
Malware injection attack

Notes: For those who need the help to investigate your website, please use the Contact us form to inform us.

We conducted a post study based on the records and suspected that the email was not sent out by a third party sender, and therefore, our customer did not receive it. After further investigation, we notice that this may not be the case. Then, we turned to our server log file. We process hundreds of millions of emails daily, so it’s not easy to retrieve a log file.

We were finally able to trace the email and confirm that had been delivered to our customer. But then, where has the email gone? Other service providers may just stop here and blame the user for losing the email in the first place. Case closed, but not us. We traced the email once again and finally found that the customer had enabled a setting to remove any email detected as Spam.

So, basically, we discovered that the email from the sender arrived in our customer’s Spam box and that it had been removed and therefore not found by the user. Email retrieved. Case solved. A happy ending.

The 'Delete message from folder' setting in the email control panel

Why machine-generated email sucks?

Ever since we decided that no message should be sent out looking like a machine-generated email, we’ve gotten overwhelming response and found that our customers are more wiling to share their problems with us now.

We are proud that they have us in mind when they come across any questions related to the IT field. Since it’s all about sharing and caring, we’re more than happy to help. In fact, we find it a pleasure to be able to interact with our customers on a personal basis.

Examples of day to day questions that we’ve received include:

Should we respond to emails that claim we have to secure xxxx.cn name etc?

Is safe to press the “proceed” button when the screen says the SSL certificate is not signed properly?

How does one switch to OpenDNS?

What is the best practice in naming a corporate email address?

Thanks for the questions you guys, we hear you and we’re here for you. Keep them coming!

Well, what can I say? It looks like our beloved TM’s Streamyx has been having some issues lately. In most case, the following quick fix will help you out, before you feel to need to get terribly upset with your web hosting provider :)

1. Restart routers, modems, switch or anything tangling with your phone line or Internet connection.

First, restart all devices connecting to your Internet

2. Change to OpenDNS. TM’s DNS is overloaded and down very often. It doesn’t resolve domain names correctly, so if you hit http://www.gutteruncensored.com, you’re pointing to “nowhere.” Yes, chances are you’ll need to change your DNS to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

Switching to OpenDNS

A repair of fault of submarine cable linking Malaysia and International network is expecting to cause Internet downtime to Malaysia Internet users, until 2nd May.

Our technical team are ready with alternatives to help our email and web hosting customers. Talk to us if you need our help.

Cable laid beneath the sea to carry telecommunications between countries.

About submarine communications cable
The Internet’s undersea world

The live launch will feature a cleaner interface with a simpler, unified toolbar, easier controls for background images and company logos (in the admin CP) and lots more!

New webmail interface

View larger screenshot