ziizoo blog

Hey, we are in the Chicago Tribune! Ziizoo garnered a mention in today’s Chicago Tribune Local edition for Romeoville. Here’s a link to the story.

Hard to believe you’re already back, and with summer still upon us, we’ll be forced to watch these golden days dwindle away through the window of a classroom……Never forget summer, a wise young lady once told me. Sorry to end the party kids, but Math and Science have been hitting the weight room and drinking protein shakes, all in preparation to kick the living ________ out of you, like, this week. You’re starting to sweat just thinking about it, or maybe it’s still 104F where you live, oh well, either way ziizoo is your 6’6″ 245 pound friend who knows Kung Fu, Krav Maga, Russian Sambo and Jiu-Jitsu and hates watching you suffer. Ziizoo is the Feydor of online tutoring. Fast, fearsome, effective and cheap.

Turn ziizoo.com loose on Calculus, Chemistry, Algebra 2, Physics, Spanish, Statistics…..you name it. Ziizoo can beat it. Want an undefeated semester? Get ziizoo.com!

Here’s a pretty cool addition to our marketing stable, the ziizoo username and password card.

Forgot your username or password? Just pull out your credit card sized, constructed of durable plastic, little reminder in your wallet or purse, and presto! No more filling out some dumb form to get your password sent to you via email which requires that you remember your username, which you forgot, or ends up in your Spam folder and you can’t find it, or you can’t read the freaking re-captcha verification word, or it makes you reset everything after you finally GET the email, none of which you don’t want to do…..basically we are saving you time and pain, provided you don’t lose it.

Looks like we saved the day, folks. The Google Mini is alive and kicking in its new home, safe and sound. So search is up and running again. Have fun!

Sorry folks, looks like search is going to be down until later tonight or tomorrow. We had to move a server and restart it in a new location; and no you aren’t crazy, it has not been working properly for the past 48 hours or so, but the team caught on and is working non-stop to get it back up and running.

Stand by……

With the recent deployment of the new session interface tool (v2.0), there is an expected incidence of disruption and transitional dissonance because those last few platform bugs need to be fixed and only mass-scale testing can identify them.  If these are a given, the main issue at hand is how to best handle initiation requests that don’t work the first time, or how to handle a session that fails early on or midway.   Hence, the need to identify and establish best practices for Ziizoo CRM (customer relationship management).  I don’t know all the right answers, but I believe this forum can help us tutors pool our insights and develop a strategy and a way of doing things that make sense.

For a startup venture like Ziizoo, CRM is at the very crux of business survival because the cost of catching the attention of a prospective customer can be astronomical.  You’re not only wrestling attention from “the powers that be” but also trying to evince some flair among the clutter of online advertising.  So once you grab someone’s attention, you’re already in the phase in which you’ve got only a modicum of time to demonstrate what you do AND that you do it well.  From the customer’s (student’s) point of view, they want to be confident that they can easily access a tutor who is effective in answering their questions.  This requires the harmony of two things: (1) a stable, smooth connection with the tutor, and (2) a dedicated and capable tutor committed to their craft.  Ziizoo’s business model is designed to select for the cream-of-the-crop tutors, but when the connection fails, the tutor needs to mitigate the situation as best as they can, because those customer don’t just potentially belong to Ziizoo; they potentially belong to you as well!  And it is this idea of “ownership” that should motivate you to salvage and manage a “crisis” when they do occur.

What would I do?  First thing is to follow up on the student immediately.  Usually, when you first get the session request, you can see the student’s name, so keep that in mind.  A simple site search on the name should access their profile, but it’s a bit harder if the search comes up empty.  If you’re lucky enough to have had some connection, then you should easily have a link on your account “dashboard” tab which records all successful connections.  If not, I’d let the site founder Robert Einspruch know (can search his profile) or his brother Alex who is on the site most every day, and give them a message.

Hey kiddos. Looks like you survived another year of highschool exams, you graduated and are heading into college life, or perhaps you are getting used to junior high and it’s almost over. What do all these things have in common? You gotta keep studying no matter what, and you gotta get help when YOU need it, not when a tutor has time. Ziizoo can help 24 hours a day. So, for most of you, tests and exams are on hold until at least late August, but summer school has just ramped up for lots of you guys. Remember, if you need help we are here ALL SUMMER LONG, 24 hours a day.

Stop by, we’ll be here.

I want to poll our online tutors but I don’t know how to post a poll (yet) well here’s the gist of it. It appears as if MOST of you tutors are logged on via remote login through GTalk; quite a few every evening, but we at ziizoo miss a lot of alerts, and there’s scads of students looking for tutors and these students end up going without help. In future versions of ziizoo, should we allow tutors to use our IM alerts (with the ziizoo admin in your buddy list) but show status as “Busy”? Should ziizoo tutors have a “Busy” button rather than just “Away or Available”? Should we here at ziizoo build that into our system? I am a proponent of this feature, and I am a proponent of adding more tutors to make our “market” more liquid.

What do you guys, our tutors, think?

Well the economy and public opinion has caught up with the bankers and consultants, and last to go are the law school kids it seems. I attended law school and was bitter afterwards, to say the least. It was an incredibly stressful time for me and my classmates, most of us boasting 3.9+ GPAs and averaging an insanely stratospheric 165 on our law entrance exams. We were the cream of the crop historically at my law school, beating all classes previous by a wide margin according to our scores. Using the LSAT exam we all suffered as a predictor, most everyone in our class should have waltzed though law school and into white shoe jobs at tony downtown firms all over the country. Ummm, not so much. I knew hiring began to severely degrade starting in 2006, with most of the subsequent classes rendered jobless after graduation, but it gets worse….. I read this article today in Above The Law, and was literally flummoxed how desperate the situation is now.

Read it. Great grades can get your far, but how far?

Looks like exams are coming, happening now, or are over for most of you highschoolers. Schools these days have really different schedules, I have come to find out by working in the online education space. Some schools follow the standard old two semesters and you’re done model. Other schools follow a trimester schedule. Some schools have classes that last the whole year and some classes that last just a semester. It gets con-fusing for a guy who was last in grad school five years ago and for fifteen years before grad school, nada! As I interface with all the schools for ziizoo as my job, I’m often surprised by the school schedules.

What are your schools’ exam schedules like?