Signing up for OSCON today, I was asked by the O’Reilly site to prove I was human. Of course, it required super-human effort to get it right.

It took me three tries, and all three captchas were as annoying as this one. This is the one I finally got right. That second character? That’s a seven.

Tip: if you have a case-sensitive captcha, don’t include characters that could be mis-interpreted in your image. The letters W U O P S K Z C V all look the same uppercase or lowercase, especially when distorted as captchas are. I could be the number one, a lowercase L, or a capital I. O might be a zero. Even the capital and lowercase J look fairly similar.

I’m at BarCamp Sacramento today. There’s a great crowd and BrickaBracka’s space is fantastic. About half the presentations are good barcamp presentations, but the other half are basically just 30 minute product pitches for local companies. Some interesting companies and products, to be sure, but sitting through product pitches is not what BarCamp is about. The entire event is in one big room, making the law of two feet pretty much impossible to follow.

I kicked things off this morning with a presentation on home coffee roasting, as you can see from the fantastic photo above by Jerad Hill.

My son came with me this morning before heading out to a friend’s birthday party. He says most of the presentations were over his head, but it was nice to get him started in the open community culture.

In northern California next weekend? Come join us at SacBarCamp April 25th and 26th in downtown Sacramento. SacBarCamp is an informal event where you will network, learn, and share with other Sacramento techies, helping to create a local community for our industry. The organizers are trying to emphasize the Sacramento region by getting as many local companies and individuals involved.

What’s BarCamp? It’s a conference where the participants are the speakers. Show up, sign up to give a session, and get going. There’s lots of networking, food, great conversations, and you’ll even learn a thing or two. For more information, see the BarCamp web site. I also described the first Sacramento BarCamp in a radio interview a few years ago.

Want to come? Register for free at the SacBarCamp site.

Congrats to my friend Brett Owens and his Sacramento area time tracking startup Chrometa for getting some press in an Inc magazine article about working with angel investors.

Keeping potential investors in the loop without asking for money has changed the dynamic of his relationship. Owens says investors have taken a much more active interest in his success; indeed, now they call him with business advice.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Here’s a great video from Axosoft introducing the concepts of Scrum. It’s a good itroduction for just about any audience, from developers to execs to project managers.

It’s important that all the concepts of scrum be implemented together, at least until you really understand it. Trying to pick and choose what to do leads to failure. Read We Tried Baseball and it Didn’t Work for a humorous look at modifying a methodology.

As if Toys R Us were not quickly fading from relevance already, they’re failing at the customer service game, too.

A relative bought a small gift for my son — something that I thought he wanted, but apparently something he already had. It had a Toys R Us sticker on the side, so on December 26 we headed over to the nearest Toys R Us to return it.

We were greeted with the following sign.

No Receipt
No Return
No Exchange
No Exception

Toys R Us are certainly within their rights to establish whatever return policy they’d like. Unless the item was misrepresented or defective, they don’t have to take returns at all. Most stores accept returns mainly because if they didn’t, they’d have no customers at all.

Consumer friendly return policies help stores attract customers. Nordstrom famously has a liberal return policy and once allowed a customer to return snow tires to the store — and Nordstrom doesn’t even sell tires.

When I worked at Macy’s as a teenager 20 years ago (wow, was it really that long ago?) we had a decent enough return policy. With a receipt, we’d take anything back for cash 30 days after purchase. Without a receipt or after 30 days, we’d give an exchange or store credit. We once took back an item that hadn’t been sold in the store for years. The couple of days following Christmas, we relaxed this policy even further, mailing checks to anyone without a receipt and giving cash refunds for items under a certain price.

The easier you make it for a customer to purchase from you, the more they’ll buy from you. Smoothing over customer objections and concerns will help them feel more comfortable buying from you.

Toys R Us has increased my concerns. What if I buy something from them and it turns out I don’t need it. Will they take it back? What happens if I misplace my receipt?

Toys R Us can do whatever they want with a return policy. They’re well within their rights to reject returns for any reason. But I also have choices where to shop. You can bet I’ll do all my shopping at a store with a friendlier return policy in the future.

I blogged and tweeted about issues with Comcast and Vonage. Comcast responded via twitter, tested my line, found a problem, and said they needed to get a tech out. When the tech called, he tried to sell me Comcast voice service instead.

So now you’re all caught up.

Frank Eliason (@comcastcares on Twitter) followed up on the issue and found the rep that called had a different story. You don’t say. My notes — typos and all — from all my calls with Comcast thus far are after the jump below.

Frank managed to get someone to call me back. It was the same guy who had called that morning and tried to get me to switch to Comcast Voice. This time, however, he was much more professional and simply arranged an appointment. A Comcast tech would be at my house this morning between 8am and 10am. Al the Comcast rep told me that they’d be calling in the morning to confirm and that I needed to answer the call or they wouldn’t come.

At 8:30, caller ID announced an incoming call from 866-Comcast. I answered on the second ring and was greeted with the click of the caller hanging up. At 10am I tweeted my disappointment.

Within minutes, I had a reply from @comcastbill offering to look into the problem. Nice, they’re monitoring Twitter for mentions of Comcast. An hour later, I’d still heard nothing from Comcast and left to run some errands. When I got back a little after 1pm, I sent a tweet to @comcastbill and asked what was going on.

Bill had earlier escalated to some managers, but this didn’t elicit any responses. So after my second inquiry, he emailed a Comcast VP. Within an hour, I had a call from the Comcast executive offices. They tracked down a tech and had someone at my house in under half an hour.

He’s outside right now installing a new cable. I still don’t know if the changes will solve my Vonage issues, but at least they’re working on it.

Tara recently pointed out how fantastic Twitter was at resolving a UPS problem. Through her Twitter network she was indirectly connected to a UPS VP and they completely solved her problem.

That’s sort of what happened here, too, and it’s great that Comcast has someone watching for these sorts of problems and working to resolve them. But it can’t scale. There’s no way that a couple of individuals at Comcast can possibly resolve every issue. And the fact that they had to escalate to a VP to get a problem resolved points to another scaling issue.

Not everyone knows a startup CEO that happens to have lunch with a UPS VP like Tara did. Not everyone is going to know that tweeting @comcastcares will connect them to Frank. These companies need to improve their regular communication channels and train, educate, and empower their customer service agents to resolve customer issues without having to get a VP involved.

All this service via social media is very cool. Forward thinking early adopters heading off problems using social media can only go so far if the execution on the ground is shoddy.

Incidentally, I wonder if @comcastcares and @comcastbill were hired by Comcast as social media customer service or if they simply showed some initiative and did it on their own?

Update The tech that came over left his cell phone number in case more problems arise. Syed from the executive office called back about an hour after the tech left to check and make sure he’d come by. Syed also left me his number in case I need it. And Frank (@comcastcares) tweeted to make sure I was being taken care of. Frank’s on vacation, but is following Twitter anyway.

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