Everybody Helps

An Open Letter to CrossLoop from Sherrie Reits

"Dear CrossLoop,

I wanted to take the time to thank you for being there for me to help a customer today. I've used the service in the past for family/friend matters, but this is the first time I used the service for business reasons and I felt it necessary to provide you with a detailed testimonial.
 
Part of my job entails acting as a customer service representative to assist online traffic school customers with technical support. Today I was assisting a hearing impaired customer, who was having browser looping issues in our course. I was pretty sure I knew what the problem was, so I sent him an email with step by step instructions on how to change his browser settings.
 
The customer's secretary called to inform me that he had made the suggested changes, but was still experiencing the same problem. She was speaking to me via telephone and texting my questions to him via cell phone and vice versa. I felt bad that she had to play the middle man and asked if the customer had a username with Yahoo or Hotmail, so we could communicate more directly via IM, but he did not. We continued this third party communication with no real results until I remembered CrossLoop.
 
The customer agreed to download CrossLoop and allowed me to access his computer. I went straight to the browser settings, located the setting which was causing the looping issue and had him taken care of in a matter of about three seconds! I then pulled up MS Word on his screen for him and typed what I wanted to say to him. I explained the next steps and he was off and running and hasn't had another problem since!
 
I was so relieved to be able to get the problem fixed for the customer so he could complete the school by his deadline. I actually said to my co-workers "Thank God for CrossLoop".
 
CrossLoop is a valuable tool for businesses and customers as well. I'm glad I thought to use your service today. Thanks for being there and making the service so easy to use!
 
Sincerely,
 
Sherrie Reits
Executive Assistant
 
Ticketschool.com
http://www.drivertrainingassociates.com
http://www.ticketschool.com
http://www.driverlicenseschool.com
http://www.floridasfirsttrafficschool.com
http://www.easyadi.com
http://www.texasdrivesafe.com
http://www.virginiaticketschool.com
And more!"

and a letter from CrossLoop to Sherie:

Dear Sherie -

Thank you so much for sharing this with us. Its stories like these that make every moment of our effort wonderful and inspirational. We strive hard to make a difference in the world we live in every little way possible and to get that feedback is very very exciting.

Thank you for thinking of us.

We love you Sherie!!

Sincerely

Mrinal
Co-Founder and on behalf of your CrossLoop team
CrossLoop.com

Celebrating SysAdmin Day with Jim and 95 Year Old Grandma Billie

We are all about the people who fix and support computers for people all over the world due to the ubiquity and the growing complexity of technology in our every day lives.

So today on Sysadmin Day, as we wish all the people who help their friends and family, the employees at their companies, their customers like our expert Helpers and tolerate us with all the issues we raise, I would like to bring this excellent video case study of a family with:

- 95 year old very active internet users: Grandma Billie and Uncle Ferd and their
- Family sysadmins, Jim Billie (Grandma Billie's son) and Andy (uncle Ferd's grand son)

All of them are very active CrossLoop users who love us and Yes - we love them!

There is so much to get excited about here - some for me are:
- CrossLoop is literally grandma friendly
- CrossLoop is making a big difference in this family's life
- The internet is changing how we all live, communicate and build stronger relationships together independent of geography and its just the tip of the iceberg

 

Good Afternoon, Good Luck and Have a great weekend!

Crossloop for Teaching the Disabled

Needless to say, we celebrate all our users, their various use cases, their comments and feedback since the day we opened our doors. But then every once in a while we come across stories that get us extremely excited and inspired of the difference we are making in a little way and so here is Debbie, from UCanDoIt.

"UCanDoIT teaches disabled people computer and internet skills. We aim to combat social exclusion, promote independent living, enhance social, educational and employment opportunities and to increase pleasure and quality of life."

So without further adieu, here is Debbie:

Good Morning and Good Luck!

What does CrossLoop have to do with Opera?

You probably know by now that we like to be really close to our users - building relationships with each and everyone.....one at a time! Some of the things we do to bring that out is through:

• User stories that come in on a Global Map here (btw, to which we have added many new stories since I last created and blogged about it) or
• Third Party Reviews and blog posts here

Here is one that David, at the Opera Volunteers International, posted as a comment to my response on his blog post on CrossLoop . This one really caught my attention since it was a really unique industry for us, it was courageous on David's part and expresses his well-found faith in what we have built:

"I'm happy to report that in our recently-concluded conference in Denver, I dared to do a live demo of CrossLoop connecting to a computer on Long Island.

As we all know, live internet-based demos are akin to presentation suicide. But I didn't fall on the sword that day. I was both host and client, and each time, CrossLoop worked flawlessly in front of the audience. Wow!

Volunteers of every stripe work on shoestring budgets, so a free tool is very welcome. The concept of real-time collaboration is still quite new, but I know that every time I do a CrossLoop session, it never fails to impress.

Our board is spread out all over the country, so I know that both its simplicity and versatility will raise our intra-board communications to a new level.

Shortly before your post, I concluded yet another successful CrossLoop session with a board member in Colorado.

We all belong to different groups, so the multiplication potential is tremendous. I will surely assist the board in this program and look forward to the new features you're introducing."

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

The Jonathan Livingston Seagulls of CrossLoop

This weekend I just finished reading the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and it hit me that most of you, our users, are very similar to Jonathan described in Part III of the book.

Many of you are teaching or helping your family - freeing them from the very same technology that should be empowering them. You are helping - parents, grand parents, in-laws, senior citizens and distant relatives, customers - and many of them live in far off places.

Here are some of the stories that express that analogy better than me:
 
Mike: During my Christmas visit, I installed Crossloop on both my mother’s and my father-in-law’s PCs.  The day after I returned home to Alabama my father-in-law called me to say that he’d lost his “folder view” in Outlook Express.  Crossloop made it possible for me to not only fix the problem, but to also show him how to “show and hide” the OE “folder view”.  Even if the student is aged 75+, I can still “teach a man to fish” instead of just “giving him a fish” using Crossloop.

Benson John: This is a fabulous piece of software that you've developed. I am an Indian student currently in Melbourne, Australia & this tool helps me immensely to troubleshoot PC problems for my folks back home in India.

Henk (paraphrased to make it short): I am a helper in a Computerclub for senior citizens in the city of Amstelveen (www.ascc.nl ) in the Netherlands. Our club has over 400 members (!!) of whom many are not very good on the computer and we are running a helpsystem visiting them at home. It is simple to manage and to explain the program to other. Thanks to CrossLoop we are able to assist less computer-experienced seniors. Once a month we have a clubmeeting (with about 80 members) explaining working with the computer. I demonstrated the working of CrossLoop. I worked on another computer communicating through Skype. It worked excellent and all members were very enthusiastic. Together with Skype we have an excellent possibillity for computerhelp.

I have more such inspiring stories that I will share over time but I did want to recognize all the Jonathans out there - it means and says a lot in this busy and tired world! May be it is time to categorize then as "Jonathan Stories" rather than "User Stories"

Good Evening and Good Luck

PS: I strongly recommend this book. It is quick enough to read and work at a startup :)

CrossLoop User Stories

We are getting many of these now and I feel if I were to just post a few of them daily, I have content for a few months now!

Drake left a comment yesterday on an earlier post here on his story and here are some more:

Ryan says "Fantastic! I've attempted talking my 80 year old grandpa through installing VNC and configuring his firewall a couple of times now, to no avail. I was looking for software like CrossLoop - and did find some similar ones, but they had excessive fees attached. I'm stoked to have found you (via Digg). Thanks for helping the community"

Mike at Carputers says " The day after Christmas, while visiting my family in  Virginia, I got a call  from a non-techie friend at home in Alabama. I had previously set a wireless network up for this friend using MAC address filtering. She had given her son a new wireless-equipped notebook for Christmas, and needed me to add that notebook to her router’s MAC filter so that her son could access the internet.  Thanks to Crossloop, I was able to do this in a matter of minutes from four states and six hundred-plus road miles away."

Giovanni van Heydoorn, who lives in Holland, is a Web designer. He has design company called Curasign and helps people online by fixing their problems. He says "I have tried many programs to do this and  sometimes the  frustration gets verry high......till i found CrossLoop. With CrossLoop I can help my customers in a easy way and fast. CrossLoop save me now a lot of free times to spend with my wife and kids."

He has shown us a lot of love by getting us right on his homepage - thanks Giovanni!

If you have a story, email a paragraph with your website (optional) to me at mrinald@crossloop.com

Good Afternoon and Good Luck

Your Feedback, Our Inspiration

We have been getting a lot of really cool and exciting emails from a lot of users and I thought it would be appropriate to share and thank you. We know you are busy so this means a lot. None of you see this but you are making a big difference.

Here are some of the best quotes that have made us pump our arms in joy:

Fred says: "I want to give you guys a big thanks for your software! Over the years I've become the tech support person for my family and friends. This has lead to many frustrating hours on the phone or trips at all hours to fix their PCs. Your software makes my life so much easier. It's easy to install and easy to use."

Darrel says: "I Love the program! It was extreemly easy to set up and use! I would hate to see it get bogged down with lots of extra stuff, but a file transfer would be very useful. I will look on your website for a place to donate!"

Megan says: "Thank you so much! I just used CrossLoop to help my father with a computer problem. He lives 250 miles away and is extremely visually impaired. He is technically savvy and does a lot with adaptive technology (screen readers and magnifiers). Every once in a while he has a technical issue that he can't sort out by himself. I had him install CrossLoops and while the software didn't "read" in his screen reader (JAWS), the type was large and there was enough contrast for him to see the code and the Connect button. I was able to solve his problem quickly without spending hours on the phone! Now he's going to put CrossLoops on my Mother's computer. (Oh no, what have I gotten myself into??!!) Thank you for creating a wonderful, easy to use program!"

Shanti says: "This is f***** GENIOUS!!! evil genious"

You can just imagine our engineers thumping their chest with joy, giving the Tarzan cry and swinging around in the office from computer-to-computer.

We have many more of these so I will share them over time. If you want more disclosure about you, your website and what you do, just let me know.

Good Afternoon and Good Luck

CrossLoop empowers Crystal Coast to support a Non-Profit

Anthony Muhaluk, President of Crystal Coast Technologies, has a really nice story to share with all of you about how he leveraged CrossLoop so here it is under our "User Stories" category.

Crystal Coast Technologies is a web design firm that always works on helping out non-profits.  A little over a year ago, they created a website for a local non-profit Carteret County Partnership for Children  and have provided computer tech support to them free of charge since then.  The non-profit has been very appreciative (and so are we!) and it gives Anthony's team a lot of personal pleasure to be able to support them.

 

The two offices are about 30 minutes away and they try to troubleshoot remotely as much as possible.  Until CrossLoop, they were troubleshooting their computers remotely using Microsoft Screen sharing program.  However, that often was less than desirable.

 

Recently when they had an email problem, both the teams got on Skype and had Carteret County Partnership for Children download CrossLoop all by themselves. They started a session and fixed their problem in a matter of minutes. Carteret County Partnership for Children loved the ease of use, that they were able to install it by themselves and of course, that it was free - something very valuable for a non-profit and those supporting one! Anthony loved the fact that he did not have to drive (or send one of his employees) 30 minutes to fix that problem! 

According to Anthony: "It makes helping our non-profit clients easier on us since we don't usually charge them for this type of thing."

A classic "CrossLoop in the Trenches" story!

We love these stories that empower people doing good. If you. like us, have been inspired by this and have one that you want to share, please email me at mrinald@crossloop.com.

Good Night and Good Luck!

Hatmkr.com - a CrossLoop story

This category is one of our personal favorite one since  we see the difference we are making that makes every moment working on CrossLoop very exciting.

We hope to bring you more posts under this category of "User Stories" - if you have one that you wish to share, email us at info@crossloop.com. We have a small framework of questions that weaves the story well for all to read and learn.

hatmkr.com is a reseller of PC software, anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-adware, firewall as well as PC "tuneup" software apart from installation of home and office networks. They also have an on line web store selling new and refurbished cell phones from all the major wireless carriers.

They use CrossLoop to support their existing customers as well as assisting new customers if they need help installing software. On being asked our favorite question Why CrossLoop?, they answered that it "installs very easily and is even easier to use." Life is easier for a small business like them now with CrossLoop because to "see what a customer is doing is always better than having them try to explain what they are doing!"

We are hoping that these stories help us create awareness and passion amongst more users and any help to do that is always welcome!

Are you using CrossLoop to "teach how to fish"?

One value (quote) that the CrossLoop team really lives by is the following:

""Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day; Teach him how to fish and you will feed him for Life."

We see a significant number of our users driving CrossLoop to help their friends and family, customers etc and empower them to use the PC and the Internet to its highest potential.

If you have stories that you wish to share on how you helped someone learn how to share photos better or trained them on a particular software or application, let us know and we will get it up here for others to get inspired! If not a blog post, email it to us - we love it and it is very inspirational for a small team like us to know that we are making a difference!