Time and time again, I have seen the power and beauty of Twitter with regards to our iPhone, iPad, and iPod repair business that we conduct here at milliamp.com (you can follow us at @milliamp, btw). Rather than talk about how Twitter has become a powerful tool for us to engage with our customers in near-real time, I thought that I would just show you a recent exchange here:

And this gentleman was kind enough to leave us a nice review when it was all said and done, too!

one-million-views

The total amount of video views on our various YouTube accounts just surpassed the 1 million mark.

It’s a testament to how long we have been around, how many people are interested in what we do, and the massive effort we have put into the iPad, iPhone, and iPod repair business.

Sure, ‘Double Rainbow’ blows us away in this area, but give us time!

Have a great weekend, y’all.

Best regards,

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
Milliamp LTD

As the owner of an electronics repair business, I find myself faced with challenges that I never expected. Usually these are customer-related (like the time a customer threatened us because the first two shipping attempts we made to him in Dubai still had not arrived) or supplier-related (like the time a supplier replaced his defective parts with, well, more defective parts).

But my most recent unexpected challenge has been staff-based: despite weeks of speaking to my employees in a group setting and individually about making personal texts while on the job, it was still happening – and it frankly, it seemed to be getting worse. Now, I am all about personal responsibility and taking up concerns directly with an employee, but this particular issue was becoming a real detriment to the entire organization, and ultimately, it started to directly impact the level of service our customers expect.

Effective today, we implemented a ban of all cellular and wifi-enabled devices from being on your person or at your desk – they need to be tucked away in a locker or in an automobile until break time. The ban does not apply to managers so that we can conduct business and be reachable by employees’ friends or family in the event of an emergency.

Workers with tasks that permit it can still listen to music players to help them focus or get in the zone.

This tough decision was about productivity, customer service, and respect for our fellow co-workers, and nothing more.

Now, we are not un-realistic – there will of course be times where an employee has something important going on and may need their device at their side for a day, or perhaps they are working by alone, after-hours; all good reasons for an exception to the rule.

And who knows, perhaps one day we can bring ‘em back and see how it goes.

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
Milliamp LTD

One of the great new features of our millihub system is it’s ability to “auto-magically” generate emails to our customers as a device moves from each stage of the iPhone repair process. We have complete control over what apppears in the subject line and body of these emails, and pack them full of useful information (for example, the results of the tests we performed right after your iPod was removed from its’ packaging and received into our system).

Well, one of the most important parts of our job is to set customers’ expectations – to let you know exactly what is going on and what is likely to occur next. If we can do this effectively, we reduce phone calls, emails, and frustration from both parties.

millihub-breadcrumbs

One feature we plan on adding soon (um, Mark, um, hello?? [said like Dane Cook]) to our email notifications is actually something we noticed while purchasing a device from Apple a while back: provide a “breadcrumb trail” to show you where you have been and where you are heading next in the proces. In the case of our iPhone evaluation and iPod repair business, we can show you where you have been, where you are currently at, and where you are likely to head next.

We expect that something as simple as this will alleviate a tremendous amount of confusion and help set expectations, and that is undboutedly half the battle.

next-steps

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com

In my earlier post, you saw us picking up the first of many iPads from Apple for our popular iPod and iPhone repair business. I had the chance to use the iPad all weekend, and today, several of our “milliamperes” had a chance to play with it as well, as shown in this photograph taken around 8am today:

8am iPad Party

Well, we gently disassembled our iPad after hours today, and man this is not an “Anyone Can Fit It” project! The iPad, like the more recent iPod nanos and iPod touch devices, is very delicate inside and going to take a LOT of hands-on experience for us to get familiar with it and to learn all the little quirks of its’ design. But our technicians are good, very good, and I have no doubt that they will be zipping around the inside of an iPad as easy as if it were an iPod Video.

The iPad battery is a crazy little beast – looks nothing like we have ever seen before in an iPod or iPhone. Here we find two batteries tethered together and placed inside a plastic tray to keep them both in place:

ipad-battery-top-and-bottom

And here is a picture of the inside of our iPad backplate, a single sheet of metal and sturdy as hell:

ipad-backplate-exposed

Fortunately, the iPad LCD (the part that displays images) and the glass iPad Digitizer Screen (the part that you touch) are NOT fused together as we have seen in the first generation of the iPhone. The two parts DO come apart, but they have this sticky adhesive that secures the two pieces together, and presumably helps keep dust out:

ipad-repair-lcd-digi

We will keep posting our iPad service thoughts on this blog, so bookmark us and stay tuned for more, lots more.

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com

P.S. Look for more amazing iPad surprises from milliamp.com coming your way!

The video cameras that we have here at our iPhone repair shop been very useful for us, and I can’t stop gushing about them. They have been a great investment.

During Receiving

We have been using our cameras to capture the unboxing of iPods and iPhones as we receive them in, which has proven useful time and time again, especially if we ever encounter the dreaded “but-it-was-working-when-I-sent-it-to-you” phone calls we sometimes get from our customers. And since the detail on our receiving cameras is not as sharp as we would like, we will oftentimes highlight defects with a laser pointer to help illustrate where exactly we are noticing something out of the ordinary.

Inbound Receiving Camera

Related to inbound devices, here is a short video we had to pull up showing the United States Postal Service delivering a package to our office. The only problem was, there should have been TWO packages delivering at this time, not one. Score another win for the cams!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhacGkETCxk[/youtube]

During Shipping

It finally dawned on us that being able to capture the condition of the repaired devices right before we ship them back to our customers is equally, if not more, important than capturing them on the inbound. So we added a camera that captures our final stage of quality control (the part where we demonstrate that everything is working), our cleaning the device to remove any smudges, and the boxing up of the working device to illustrate the care we use when shipping anything back to our customers.

Quality Control Testing Outbound Camera

Funny Stuff

Occassionally, we happen to catch an employee falling off a chair or tripping or doing a zany dance. Or in this case, watch Chris do his best to stand on our ball of shipping labels in between fielding phone calls and emails from customers.

Spontaneity Camera Views

We continue to find ways to use video in our iPhone repair business, and not just the video that our security cameras capture. We also take videos of pages on our website, such as our terribly exciting Terms of Service, to help prove to our customers when they were established.

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com

I had the honor of being asked by my second grade daughter if I would be interested in giving a brief Career Day presentation at Monroe May Elementary School in San Antonio, Texas. Since running Milliamp LTD is something I am 110 percent committed to, and talking about my business is one of my favorite topics, not to mention those puppy-dog eyes my daughter made when she asked me, I just could not say no.

Career Day at Monroe May - At the Whiteboard

I gave four 20-minute presentations in all that day, and I started each one off by writing the word ‘Entrepreneur’ on the whiteboard, and then giving a high-level overview of how I started my iPod repair business. At each presentation, I pretended to drop my iPhone and shatter the screen (it was actually a shattered, water-damaged one we had laying around the shop) as a way to get the kids’ attention – I think that shocked the teachers in the room as well!

The presentation seemed to go very well, and I received some very nice letters from some of the kids later that week – here is a sample (I will post the others in our break room):

Career Day Letter

One of the main messages that I wanted to convey, in addition to how fun being your own boss can be, is that is takes a lot of hard work and discipline. At the end of the presentation, I handed out these cool little water-damage indicator stickers that have an ‘m’ for milliamp on them to all the kids. They start out white and turn pinkish-red when they get wet, and the kids stuck them all over their sleeves, shoes, and hands for later experimentation (a few even licked them, but I take no responsibility for that!).

Anthony Magnabosco, Entrepreneur
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!

It takes a lot of effort to develop a great brand and reputation for your iPod repair business. Sometimes, it takes years. But we try to do lots of things to help get the milliamp.com name in front of people who suddenly need Apple iPod repairs and Apple iPhone repairs. We tweet, our pages show up when someone “bings” or “googles’ us, and we get a lot of referrals from the AT&T shops and Apple stores.

One other way we plan to help promote our business is to include a removable sticker or pad with our milliamp.com logo on the back of every iPod and iPhone we repair. The idea here is that people with iPods and iPhones know other people with iPods and iPhones, and we can use their assistance in getting our name out there.

We are still beta testing the designs and materials and sizes, but we have it narrowed down to either a vinyl sticker that can get removed easily and a small patch that magically adheres to the surface of an iPod or iPhone with a front face that is perfect for cleaning the smudges from the front of the device. I particularly like the latter since design since its’ functionality (cleaning the screen) should give it longer life and thus, help promote the brand for a longer period of time.

Little Sticker Could Make Big Impact

What other clever ways can we use to promote the milliamp.com brand name? Shoot me an email to owner@milliamp.com or give me a telephone call and let’s discuss!

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com

Partners Page at One and Growing

Partner Page

Right now, we just have one out there, the good folks at iPodReboot.com, but many more to be added soon!

Thanks!

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com