A Mogul To Be

How a company should treat their customers

December 19th, 2006 by Robert

Whether said company is a couple of entrepreneurs or a large corporation, service should always be a priority. Having recently read Ben’s interview with Vernon from TheGoodBlogs I joined up and registered my three blogs and set up the widget on each blog. Piece of cake.

Not long after that I sent an email to them with a small suggestion on customization. Normally when I send such an email I don’t expect to get a reply or at best get a canned response. Not this time, Vernon sent me a reply saying that they were working on several improvements and that they appreciated the comments. Very nice and I appreciated their personal response.

Fast forward a couple weeks and I noticed something while looking through my stats on their site. Not a big deal but I thought they should be aware of it so I sent another email detailing what I saw. Again I got a quick response from Vernon saying they had fixed one of the two things I mentioned and the other they were looking into. A few hours later I got another email from Vernon saying they had fixed the other issue and mentioned an improvement they also made to their overall offering. I was duly impressed.

As a software developer myself I can appreciate the work they are doing and I also understand that sometimes seemingly simple things to a user can be a real nightmare to fix. Now the items I pointed out may not have been that big of deal, and I surely didn’t try to make them as such, but the fact that they quickly fixed the minor issues and took the time to let me know when I’m sure they are working on adding cool new features says a lot to me as a user. They could easily have said “Thank you, we’ll have that fixed in our next release” and that would have been fine with me. No, they fixed it immediately and told me immediately and that deserves credit.

The argument could be made that because they are a small company they can make those quick and personal responses, but I beg to differ. Being small and building the software that they are makes it harder to do such things. I’m sure they don’t have a dedicated support staff and I am guessing that at this point there are just the few developers working. Those who do not write software find it difficult to understand the mental focus and energy it can take to create good software, people just see us sitting at a computer all day and not doing much. Now take that energy and apply it to something that you are passionate about (as I’m sure TheGoodBlogs are) and you spend even more time and energy on it. It is quite easy to get too focused on what you are doing and forget or put off what your customers are telling you. TheGoodBlogs didn’t make that mistake.

I’m not easily impressed, but I do give credit where credit is due and TheGoodBlogs deserves it for demonstrating how a company should treat their customers.

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