Someone asked why we haven't updated our homepage in 3 years (and the significance of that) and if I could speak to that. The comment got deleted before I could respond, so I'll just create a new thread.
It's partially covered in the article. The first year, we were still do consulting work, so we barely spent any time on Carbonmade. And then in the second year, we were working on a second product that never saw the light of day. And now in the third year, we're focused on Carbonmade exclusively and nearly ready to release the new version.
Here's what I learned from running a company for three years without any update to the product: Excellent customer service could be the most significant thing you can do. (Granted, you need a pretty solid product.) During the first year we were really bad with emails and responding to our customers around the Net. We practically ignored everyone and everything. We just didn't have the time. Then in year two, I began to take customer support very seriously. I'd respond to peoples emails within minutes (when I could) and within hours 90% of the time. You literally can take a look at our graphs and see a HUGE uptick in signups/paid sign ups/customer retention within a month of responding to emails.
I also went back through at least 6 months of old emails that we had simply archived away and responded to everyone explaining how sorry we were for not giving them good support and answering their questions. I wrote everyone individually and got a lot of "it's no problem, I'm happy that you're spending the time to do so now." It really impacted our brand a lot and we saw a lot of people begin to respond with emails like: "Wow, you guys responded faster than I've ever been responded to before. You're so great. Thanks so much for your service. I'm telling all my friends."
Also, around this time I chose to treat all customers equally no matter if they were paying or if they weren't. I figured -- and you'd think this was obvious -- that spending a few extra minutes to treat free customers well will make them more likely to upgrade and actually costs less (in time and money) than going out and finding new customers. This turned out to be very successful. I can point to hundreds of emails from free customers that upgraded after hearing back from a "real person who was kind and helpful".
Good customer service is king and really turned our product around.
"Excellent customer service could be the most significant thing you can do."
Amen. At Wikispaces we absolutely obsessed over fast, human responses to support questions early on -- and still do. People are regularly shocked to get a response at all, let alone from a person, let alone in the span of a few minutes. That email can be the difference between getting frustrated and leaving for good vs. being a long term site user.
Its actually a relative minimum of effort to respond very quickly - drastically reduces the number of outstanding issues to track. Ignoring tracking, it takes the same total effort to answer NOW as a week from now.
Now I wish my garage mechanic/doctor would operate this way.
Comments
Someone asked why we haven't updated our homepage in 3 years (and the significance of that) and if I could speak to that. The comment got deleted before I could respond, so I'll just create a new thread.
It's partially covered in the article. The first year, we were still do consulting work, so we barely spent any time on Carbonmade. And then in the second year, we were working on a second product that never saw the light of day. And now in the third year, we're focused on Carbonmade exclusively and nearly ready to release the new version.
Here's what I learned from running a company for three years without any update to the product: Excellent customer service could be the most significant thing you can do. (Granted, you need a pretty solid product.) During the first year we were really bad with emails and responding to our customers around the Net. We practically ignored everyone and everything. We just didn't have the time. Then in year two, I began to take customer support very seriously. I'd respond to peoples emails within minutes (when I could) and within hours 90% of the time. You literally can take a look at our graphs and see a HUGE uptick in signups/paid sign ups/customer retention within a month of responding to emails.
I also went back through at least 6 months of old emails that we had simply archived away and responded to everyone explaining how sorry we were for not giving them good support and answering their questions. I wrote everyone individually and got a lot of "it's no problem, I'm happy that you're spending the time to do so now." It really impacted our brand a lot and we saw a lot of people begin to respond with emails like: "Wow, you guys responded faster than I've ever been responded to before. You're so great. Thanks so much for your service. I'm telling all my friends."
Also, around this time I chose to treat all customers equally no matter if they were paying or if they weren't. I figured -- and you'd think this was obvious -- that spending a few extra minutes to treat free customers well will make them more likely to upgrade and actually costs less (in time and money) than going out and finding new customers. This turned out to be very successful. I can point to hundreds of emails from free customers that upgraded after hearing back from a "real person who was kind and helpful".
Good customer service is king and really turned our product around.
(Thanks for reading my rant.)
"Excellent customer service could be the most significant thing you can do."
Amen. At Wikispaces we absolutely obsessed over fast, human responses to support questions early on -- and still do. People are regularly shocked to get a response at all, let alone from a person, let alone in the span of a few minutes. That email can be the difference between getting frustrated and leaving for good vs. being a long term site user.
Its actually a relative minimum of effort to respond very quickly - drastically reduces the number of outstanding issues to track. Ignoring tracking, it takes the same total effort to answer NOW as a week from now. Now I wish my garage mechanic/doctor would operate this way.
Yeah. It's funny. As soon as you start doing it, it's really not that hard to keep up with.