Milliamp BBB Reviews (and Renews) Membership

Milliamp just renewed its’ membership with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) for the third year in a row, but does so with mixed emotions. We have been in business for five years now, and we joined the BBB because we believe having the BBB logo on our website helps gives customers peace of mind knowing that they are doing business with a legitimate company.

But most people do not realize that, while the BBB does a cursory overview of a business before it ranks them, the BBB does not actually perform a physical inspection of a company, or perform any true due diligence to determine if a company is trustworthy or not.

In fact, lots of people believe the BBB is some kind of US-government-sanctioned entity that interviews businesses, speaks with hundreds of their customers, performs a credit check, and then meticulously ranks each business. Few (if any) people really know that the BBB uses an algorithm, or perhaps better defined, a grading scale, when it comes to judging where a business ranks on its’ A to F chart.

Last time I checked (and I rarely check), Milliamp LTD had an A ranking with the BBB:

milliamp.com BBB

That’s great, I guess, but the method derived to get to that grade is quite mysterious. Just like you cannot really give a person a credit rating if they don’t have or use credit cards so you can see if they pay off their charges in a timely manner, the BBB has difficulty ranking a company if there are no complaints, wait, I mean submissions.

I did a bit of research into this for this post during my recent vacation (yeah, I know, lame), and I learned that your BBB grade is also based on others in your industry: if you have a few rotten apples as competitors, and their grades with the BBB suck, and you have decent responses to your complaints, your grade will likely go up. It’s not quite as simplistic as that, there are several criteria, including how long you have been in business compared to your peers, but you get the point.

See, in order to get a grade with the BBB, it actually helps if people submit a complaint with the BBB, and then you end up resolving the issue with the customer in a timely manner. If you resolve the issue to the customers’ satisfaction, there’s a good likelihood that your grade will move in a positive direction. Bumble your response with the customer, or let’s say you don’t get a notification that you even have a complaint with the BBB and it goes unresolved, and your grade will drift to the negative (in addition to getting an email from the BBB, they actually call now, too, which is a nice touch and helps reduce the chance of not knowing that there is an outstanding issue that needs to be addressed).

There is something else that most people do not realize: to display the Milliamp BBB logo on your site and Milliamp BBB stickers on your door, you need to pony up for your membership. We just paid $500 to be able to use the BBB seal on our site and shop for another year. Still worth it, I suppose, largely because of the conclusion most people draw about your business when a company is a member of the Better Business Bureau, but as time goes on, I find myself continuously evaluating the need for such bluster.

It is also argued that businesses that have paid to be a member of the Better Business Bureau actually get a grade weight in their favor, giving them a leg up over other businesses in their vertical that are not members of the organization.

There is even a grass-roots movement to “out” the BBB – these guys at bbbroundup.com have an undeniable distaste for the Better Business Bureau, and it seems their mantra is to help get the word out that a ranking from the BBB is not a real indication of the trustworthiness of a business. Companies that have A+ ratings can still rip you off, and companies with F grades can provide superior service.

I suppose having the BBB is better than nothing for consumers, but it needs to be viewed by shoppers as just one factor to consider when deciding to do business with a company, and not the be-all end-all decision point for shoppers.

This is one of the reasons why I like to post my personal contact information on our website – if I have a customer that is upset, or someone that is on the fence about doing business with my company and needs some re-assurance, I want them to call me so we can figure it out.

Unbeknownst to most people, submitting a complaint to the BBB might just boost the companies’ ranking that you are attempting to negatively influence.

One thing that frustrates me about the BBB is that there is no way for a customer to submit a compliment about a business on their website – it is for submitting a complaint or nothing.

The only way that I am aware to get a complement on the BBB site from a customer is to first have them submit a complaint, and then resolve it to their satisfaction, and hope that the customer details your response and confirms that the matter has been resolved.

Another thing I do not like about the current grading scale is that the BBB has no idea of how many total customers a business has. Knowing this number, and then viewing the number of complaints submitted, would greatly help this organization gain some credibility with its’ ranking equation. But one must quickly see that the BBB would have to rely on the business itself for these numbers, and that could easily be abused, so I can see why they have opted to exclude such a measurement.

I know a few (disrespected and respected) companies in our repair field that simply want no part of the BBB – they would rather let their BBB rankings fall where they may, and hope customers never head to the Better Business Bureau website, or they hope that the consumer is enlightened and understands the subjective nature of the BBB ranking, the flaws of which were mentioned here. By taking this path, they also avoid having to pay the aforementioned annual fee to be a part of the BBB.org.

In conclusion, I urge customers searching to know more about Milliamp LTD to read the hundreds of customer testimonials (which include actual order numbers to help prove their authenticity) that are on our website, or give us a call or email with your questions or help with a particular concern that you have, and then evaluate our response. And please do not forget that you always have my ear, too.

What do you think about the BBB? Have you found the BBB to be useful in any way?

Best regards,

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
Milliamp LTD

We are continuously looking for ways to improve things here at Milliamp, like our infamous laser pointers, and recently focused our attention to the telephone greeting that people first hear when they call in to us.

We get a lot of phone calls each day – a LOT (just ask Marian).

Therefore, we wanted to make our greeting simplier and to the point, and help people get to the correct department quickly and painlessly. We also added a quick shout-out in our greeting to the iPad repairs that we will be offering very soon to the masses.

Curious and don’t want to call in to hear it? Take a listen here:

New iPhone Repair Greeting

Speaking of iPad repair shout-outs, we also recently updated the signature line on our emails, to help spread the word that we have yet another Apple device to add to our list of devices that we can repair here at Milliamp.

iPad Repairs Signature Line

Have a great Friday, safe weekend, and let us know when you are ready to get your iPod or iPhone fixed!!

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com

The Apple rumour mill is swirling again, hard-core, this time, about the possbility of a new 4th Generation iPhone, or iPhone 4G.

To give you a brief historical tour of the iPhone, the very first iPhone that came out in June 2007 has been confusingly dubbed the 2G iPhone, because the iPhone that was released after it was called the iPhone 3G (since it could run on the EDGE and the 3G cellular network). The next iteration of the iPhone after the iPhone 3G was the iPhone 3GS, where the ‘S’ suffix was tacked onto the end (presumably to reflect the faster processing ‘speed’ inside the device).

Since this would be the fourth version, or generation, of the Apple iPhone, and because the phone may use (or be capable of using) the 4G cellular network, people are currently referring to it as the iPhone 4G. Perhaps that name will stick, and Apple will release the next iPhone as the iPhone 4G. But I am not totallly convinced that this will be the official Apple name for the new iPhone – expecially now that a few pictures have surfaced of a digitizer/LCD that is a smidge taller than the previous iPhone 3G/S digitizers, courtesy of iResQ:

Could the New iPhone Sport Video Capture Functionality?

The photographs, which I believe are real and have not been doctored in any way, show a small, oblong opening right above the earpiece. Some believe this could be a proximity sensor, and some have gone so far as to imagine that it is a video camera that would allow for video chatting. The surface of this strange component has interestingly been described as “reflective”.

Is it possible that this material would allow for a special video camera behind it to see though this barrier and capture images, in the same manner as a two-way mirror? And why is the material “reflective”? Well, that would make a great surface to gaze into to ensure that your mug was in view if you were video-chatting with someone, wouldn’t it?! Of course, this is all wild theory right now – very few people know for sure what Apple’s new iPhone will look like, and what features it will support, and no one is officially talking about it on the record now.

Some have suggested that this port is a proximity sensor only (the part inside every iPhone that dims and locks out your screen as you hold it up to your face), but perhaps it can do that, plus more?

To take this a step further, IF the new iPhone DOES have video capture and chatting capabilities, I think it is possible that the new iPhone could be dubbed the iPhone Video (maybe you will have heard it here first).

Apple has used the word ‘Video’ before in its’ iPod product line: the 5th Generation iPod Video was the first iPod to be able to play movies, television shows, commercials, and so on, hence the name. And if an iPhone was released that had the ability to capture full-motion video and allow for real-time video chats is such a smooth and non-obtrusive manner as the location and appearance that this suspicious, reflective port suggests, it is likely that the word ‘Video’ (or perhaps just a letter ‘V’ [iPhone 3GV, anyone?!]) will be tied with the new name.

So what do you think? Does Apple plan on offering a video capturing feature with their new iPhone? Will the new iPhone be called an iPhone 4G? Will companies like ours start promoting ‘iPhone Video Repair‘? Only time will tell, my iPhone-loving friends!

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com

For those that know me, I have a bit of a domain name addiction. I think it reached its’ peak of insanity when I purchased the domain blake-is-the-new-sanjaya.com (true story) a few years back when Sanjaya was voted off ‘American Idol’ and hack Blake was deemed the next in line Howard Sterns’ goal to inspire enough people to vote a talentless dweeb to the top spot.

I’ve struggled to hold my personal obsession with URL’s back, but I think we got a bit lucky when, back in April 2009, we registered the iPad repair domain names ipad-repair.com and ipadrepair.com. Since we are going to be hard-core in the iPad repair business, having domain names that say what we do will be most helpful to Milliamp LTD:

Two New iPad Repair Domain Names

For now, these two sites aren’t doing a whole heck of a lot for us, but they will eventually become a great resource for our future customers seeking iPad repairs and parts.

Now, who has any suggestions for helping us monitize our leet-inspired domain names for Twitter?

Have a great evening,

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com

P.S. We had two GOLD iPhone backplate winners this week – one worker here at Milliamp LTD and one iPhone fanatic from Alaska. More details on this coming soon!

You and everyone you know probably has a Facebook profile, and because of that fact, you can keep tabs on everything that is going on within your own little online community. When you couple that with the fact that you can jump onto Facebook from your iPhone app, you can check to see what your sister, friend, or boyfriend is doing any time of day or night when you aren’t with them. It seems that Facebook is taking its status to a new level because it is prompting all of its users to make their shared content public to the world and all search engines.

This is supposed to be something that will help users to protect their privacy, and you can now change your settings to become visible to everyone in the world. This actually seems to be something that is not regarding privacy or protection of users, but it is to help Facebook increase traffic and their visibility to gain more users. You are recommended to keep private information, including your e-mail address, limited to people who are your friends, but Facebook is encouraging users to make all of their status messages completely public to the world. The choice is up to you…

Holmes Saves the Day

There is a show that just recently came across my radar called ‘Holmes on Homes’ on HGTV. It’s a Canadian-based show, but don’t let the “aBOAT’s” turn you off. The guy comes into people’s homes that were recently renovated or encountered some kind of event like a burst water pipe, and then tears into the walls and ceilings to see where the breakdowns occurred.

The thing that impresses me most aBOAT the show is the expertise Holmes and his cohorts bring to each job. You can tell they are extremely experienced workers, and know how to fix the problems they eventually uncover.

Holmes spends most of his time shaking his head at how messed up these homes are, but has a good management style; you can tell that the crew respects him. You really get the sense that Holmes wants to keep fixing things in the house, but has to reign the perfectionist inside of him back, in order to get the main issues fixed.

If I had one request to make the show more interesting, I would love to see a “confrontation” component: Holmes wagging his finger in the faces of the poor blokes who “fixed” these houses in the first place.

In a way, it kind of reminds me of work: we see a lot of iPod touch and iPhones that either a customer attempted to repair by themselves, or had a local company try to repair, and it gets messed up worse than when they started (These newer iPods and iPhones are tricky little buggers – if in doubt, send it to us, please!).

Check it out next time you are looking for a cool show to watch!

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner

This blog is dedicated to Cat.  She is one of our finest customer service representatives.  She’s always willing to tackle the toughest phone call or email.  She’ll even go out of her way to track down a customer’s device just to get the most up to date status on it.  Not only does she have excellent customer service skills, she has been a great help in shipping, which is the department I oversee.  On her first day, she had pretty much accomplished all the shipping tasks and offered great ideas for improvement.  I’m sure with a little training, she could become a technician, if she hasn’t already!  So long, farewell, good luck with your move and come back to see us and/or work for us again!

J-ROD

I recently stumbled upon an app that allows you to track a package, or multiple packages, from UPS, USPS, FedEx, & DHL.  Unfortunately, if your iPhone or iPod Touch is already in our shop being repaired, you’ll have to stick with that paperweight of a laptop or PC and track your package the old fashion way.   It’s called Package Tracker Lite.  This app is simple and free!  Just select the carrier and enter the tracking info and you can keep tabs on your package from your iPhone or iPod Touch.  It will also keep a list of the recent tracking info you have entered, so you won’t have to keep retyping it all the time.  I have tried all carriers except for DHL to keep tabs on packages and so far I’m pretty impressed.  Just type “package tracker lite” in the search field of your app store on your iPhone or iPod Touch to get this convenient app.

Tracker Lite by Ethan Productions

I give this app 5 out of 5.

J-ROD

I’ve seen a version of this product before as a tripod for a digital camera, but it wasn’t Gorilla and it wasn’t as flexible.  This seems a lot better and it’s not just for an iPod or iPhone.  On my last vacation, I was on a flight that lasted almost 3 hours and holding my iPhone up got tiresome real quick.  Eventually, I rigged it up to the seat in front of me using the In-Flight Magazine, the fold down tray, and a napkin.  It could even stay up during class-four turbulence.  It would have been nice to have a Gorilla for that flight.

This week’s App Pik by Jared is: Traffic Info

It has some good and bad reviews, but it has come in handy for me most of the time.  When I’m stuck in traffic that shouldn’t exist on a normal day, I turn to this free app to see what’s going on.  Most of the time, it will bring up all the traffic reports/incidents and how long until it will be before it is removed from the scene.  I say it works most of the time because I think the incidents have to be reported and from there it’s updated to the app.  I use it so I can determine if I need to take an alternate route or not and use it as proof to my boss when I’m late for work!  I give this app 5 out of 5.

J-ROD

I was dropping off all the online orders and outbound device returns at the local post office and noticed a wad of cash on the ground on my way out.  I made a quick move and picked it up and walked out.  For a split second, ok…a few seconds, I contemplated on just taking it and leaving.  My good conscience told me to count it and go back inside to inquire if someone could claim it.  It turns out it was $60 of a wad!  So, I went back inside and got every one’s attention in line and asked if they lost a wad of cash.  The majority shook their heads no and of course someone trying to be clever asked, “how much”, but I was prepared.  I said, ” Nice try pal.”  No takers were going to claim this jackpot of mine until an old lady noticed a young man walking through the door and stated, “He just came back in from outside. Why don’t you ask him if it belongs to him?”  So, I asked and he was a little caught off guard because the whole post office line was eyeing him down.  He quickly checked his pocket and said, ” Yeah, I’m missing like $60.”  Either he’s a good guesser or it really was his.  I gave him back the whole wad of cash and as I walked out I could hear the old lady say, “Oh, well…isn’t that nice of him.”  Kind of made me feel good aboot myself.  When I got back to Milliamp, I told one of my co-workers and she cursed me out.  She would have kept it and run off to never look back.  I said, “I’m a nice guy.”  But deep down, I really wanted to take off with that money.  That would’ve been the second largest amount of cash I’ve found.  The most I have ever found was $86 at the airport in the parking lot.  Kind of hard to ask around for its owner there.  Sucka!

This week’s App Pik by Jared is Flixter.

This app is free and it has a wide variety of features.  I’ll just name the important ones.  You can get all the theaters in your city and arrage them in your favorites to access them quicker.  You can look up showtimes in most cities.  You can rate movies.  You can watch trailers and search for them, even if there 20 years old.  Find out when a movies is coming out as well as a release date for DVD’s.  I totally recomend this app if you are a frequent movie goer.  I give this app a 5 out of 5.

J-ROD