Everybody Helps

Expert of the month:

Eric Schuermann invites us Backstage at Rockstar Computer:

Eric Schuermann is the owner of Rockstar Computers, a computer sales & support company where he has worked full-time the previous 3 years. Rockstar Computers serves hundreds of customers in the southern California area, as well as countless remote customers other places in the world. Rockstar Computers primarily get customers through walk-ins to the store looking for virus removal and for protecting their systems as well as customers coming from the CrossLoop channel.

Rockstar Computers contributes to the community by collaborating with a local college program UEI (united education institute) where selected interns serves his business valuable help in exchange for real work experience, thereby gaining the vocational experience the interns need in order to graduate.

Rockstar Computer has CrossLoop installed and running on every computer in their store, including on a big TV screen and on their cash register computer. Eric and his Tech Supporters try to answer as many requests from CrossLoop users as they can when they have available time.

Rockstar Computer promotes its business through their website, through CrossLoop, via their blog, they also have a presence in social media on Twitter, Facebook and You Tube. 

Part of Rockstar Computers unique service is to create an easy way for customers to get in touch when they need technical support. Their clever way of doing this is to install a desktop icon on every machine they touch.

“CrossLoop has made it really easy for customers to contact us. On every machine we build or repair we create a shortcut to Rockstar Computer’s profile on CrossLoop. This ensures that our customer has a super easy way to get in contact with us if they need help in the future” states Eric. “The customer will only have to visit our online CrossLoop profile and select ‘Share Screen’ and we will take care of the rest, we don’t even have to install an application. This way CrossLoop leaves a very little footprint taking no space on the customer’s machine, yet still ensuring a trusted highway to Tech Support”.

Get in touch with Eric via his CrossLoop profile 

Eric is an Expert in: Anti-Virus, Spyware, Malware, Scareware

Expert of the Month:

Meet Eryk – a Silicon Valley computer security Expert who uses the CrossLoop Product Center to grow his business and his bottom line.

Eryk Voelker, a certified IT Technician (MCP), owns and operates Home Network Security, http://www.hnsecurity.com. Eric promotes his business through CrossLoop, his website and blog, as well as with a presence on Facebook and LinkedIn.

“As a security professional based  in Silicon Valley, I know how important it is for CrossLoop to be completely secure both for me the customers I work with. And the VNC client is very convenient…a quick, user-friendly download and setup, and you’re good to go. CrossLoop guarantees a secure session, and sharing control of a user’s computer gives my customer complete assurance that they’re totally safe and protected.”

Eryk is also an enthusiastic early adopter of the CrossLoop Product Center, which allows him to recommend the best products for his clients and to help them get those products installed and running quickly. He also likes the revenue opportunities the Product Center represents for him. “The Product Center lets me be a one-stop-shop. I make money on products I already recommended, and don’t need to tie up a lot of cash in inventory prior to the sale!”

Eryk prides himself on the number of repeat customers he has – those who have been pleased with the services he provides and the products they’ve purchased through him. “CrossLoop gives my customers a way to give me feedback that I can use to improve the services I offer and validate the quality of my work.”

See Eryk’s CrossLoop Profile here.

 

CrossLoop Summer Tour

This summer I'm taking CrossLoop on the road.

During the months I've been with CrossLoop I've been fortunate to talk with many of our Experts and users. I've learnt a whole lot from you and I know many of you are in California. Every single one of you has such expertise within so many different fields that you blow my mind away. You're awesome and I would love to meet you!

People who have received help from CrossLoop Helpers are more than welcome to request a visit as well.

Wanna be featured in our blog this summer as I hit the road? Send me an email at monica@crossloop.com. Tell me where you're located and how you use CrossLoop and perhaps you get a visit and a special mention on our blog.

Starting off from the Bay Area we'll head down south towards San Diego on highway 5, making a visit to Las Vegas, then cruising along the golden coast back to San Francisco.  Later on the tour goes North via Yosemite towards the Mount Shasta area. 

If you think we're missing out on a great spot - let us know :-)

 

 

Winners of the AVG contest

The top notch Experts who won our AVG contest are:

Erik Schuermann Ponoma, CA, USA

 

Eryk Voelker Santa Clara, CA, USA

 

   

Jan Pettersson in Umea, Sweeden

 

Nick Lockard in Portland OR, USA

 

Chris Harrison Mountain, MO, USA

 

They will all receive an iPad 2 for their great effort in the contest. Thanks to everyone that participated.

You can read their stories here on the blog in the coming weeks.

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