Release Flash: Improved interaction and more information in Company Profiles, new and improved contact form

You gotta love automated multiple choice menus. You know, the phone call to a company that starts with “Welcome to Giganitron Corporation. Please select from the following options. If you know your party’s extension, please enter it now.”

Even after the ineluctable experience of being stuck in the computer loop (”I’m sorry; I didn’t understand your answer. Using your touchtone phone…”), the truth remains: automated menus save time because they quickly connect you to the right person. At XING, we too know the truth of the maxim: the quicker we can find out what you want (to know), the faster we can respond appropriately.

Another step towards faster response times in Customer Service is improving our Help section, which we’re in the process of doing right now. A two-tiered system now allows for a better categorization of your request, meaning your support ticket will now arrive in the right set of hands even faster. And – it can now be processed even quicker.

More companies

When we introduced Company Profiles and our feedback tool UserVoice, we also promised to listen to your feedback, and implement it on demand more than ever before. We’re listening, and we’ve started to add the features and changes that are important to you. One of these is the possibility to register very small companies in our profile database. Because Company Profiles are not automatically created for small companies (two or more employees), we’re offering the option to create them on demand: click on the “My Company” page, and there you’ll have the option of adding your company, small though it may be. Presto!

Some things to keep in mind:

• Our company database will check to make sure that  at least two members have entered the same company, spelled the same way, into their profiles.
• For technical reasons, it can take up to 24 hours to create a profile.
• Average age and other data included with larger Company Profiles has been eliminated for small companies, as this would not yield usable results.

Furthermore, Company Pages now offer more information than before, and more opportunities for Premium Members to learn more, more quickly: when you move the cursor near a member photo, you now have the option of contacting this person, writing a message, or bookmarking the person, directly from the Company Profile page. Naturally, this new addition does not affect privacy settings: if you wish not to be contacted by non-contacts, nothing will change.

If you click on the personal profile of a member from a Company Page, the “Members who recently visited my profile” Powersearch page will now indicate this. Finally, we’ve perfected the statistic algorithms a bit.