Friday, May 30, 2008

Alternatives for Customers When Saving Files

Many times, customers may begin working on a document, but they fail to bring anything to save the document to. Their allotted time on the computer passes, but they cannot leave the computer because they are not done with their document and they have no means of saving it so that they can complete it some other time. How can we help these customers?

First, I would heavily suggest that each agency have a floppy disk that they can use as a conduit to move customer files from one place to another. The customer cannot obviously take that disk with them, but many options below require that you first save the file somewhere. And many public computers do not allow you to save to the My Documents on the computer; therefore, you have to save it to a floppy disk or flash drive first.

Now, the first question I would ask a customer is whether or not they have an email address. If they do, then you can save the file to your agency disk. Then the customer can log onto their email account and email themselves the attached file. We can then delete the file from the agency disk and a copy is available in the customer's email account. They can access it from any other computer that has internet access.

If they do not have an email address, Andy in History points out that you can use the same site I talked about earlier regarding sending faxes from a computer (http://drop.io). You can upload files to this site without an email address or without registering:

  • First, you save the file to your agency disk.
  • Go to drop.io.
  • Create a unique url (ex. drop.io/kevindixon)
  • Upload the file from the agency disk.
  • Create a password if you want.
  • Select an expiration time.
  • Customers can then access the files later by going to the url that they created in step 3.
Give it a shot. Thanks Andy!

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