What happened to “Monday’s can be a challenge…”? that was at the beginning of this post title. You know Safari caches RSS feeds so now everyone who subscribes in Safari sees the previous title before the ‘revised’ title.

I think it looks worse to show that you changed your mind about including “Monday’s can be a challenge…” than just leaving it in there.

It wasn’t so bad to admit Monday’s can be a challenge. But now it looks worse because we can all see you’d rather hide that Monday’s can be a challenge.

How does that make anything worse? Whether or not they want to say that Mondays are a challenge isn’t the point. They’re acknowledging that their support team is doing a great job and that they’re making customers happy. That’s what’s really important.

@Peter – get in touch with your inner chill.

Haha I second David..

I wouldn’t call it “hiding” anything, I think it’s probably more of a “Let’s rephrase that to reflect what we mean.”

It’s already difficult, despite making links obvious at the bottom of emails, to get 100% response rate for this sort of interaction. If you look at Noah’s post regarding Smiley, he says that 30% is “quite high for a completely optional survey”.

That would mean that out of somewhere between 800 and 1000 support interactions, 250 consecutive customers took the time to indicate that they thought the process was ‘great!’ or ‘ok’. That’s 250 customers out of whatever requests piled up over the weekend, PLUS those that came in once the workweek started today—and yet, they still managed 250 customers in a row that weren’t unhappy enough to indicate otherwise.

It’s still Monday, though. They have the rest of the week to net a longer string of non-frown responses. :)

When are you guys going to offer Smiley as a service? I want!

Ratings can be very deceiving. Either your support team got better at solving customers’ problems, or it got better at getting people not to give them frowns.

I suppose every methodology has its flaws. Currently you’re crowdsourcing your customer service evaluation. There are some obvious drawbacks to this method, but it’s really cheap and may be accurate.

Peter just broke the story of the century! Busted 37signals!(sarcasm)

Jason gets the Cadillac Eldorado. Merissa, a set of steak knives. The rest of you, fired.

Just jokes – I wish I had support staff with customer ratings like that. Sure no, system of rating is perfect (what an epiphany!) but in the aggregate, it’s hard to hide systemic issues. Kudos to your team!

Now I want to make a frivolous request just to break that chain. Red is my favorite color!

Sorry for asking a stupid question (I’m not an IT person, so I guess I am allowed): How and where was the smiley picture created? It’s such a vivid way of knowing your customer’s overall feeling. I wonder is it an open-source thing that any website can incorporate? Thanks! -Jenny

Oh well. Shoot me for being a cynic.

It just looked that way in my RSS feed. I assumed the worst motive for not saying ‘Monday’s are a challenge’ but accept totally that you tweaked it not to hide it but to better describe/promote the subject of the article.

By not removing my comment on the post it’s absolutely clear you didn’t want to hide anything.

Kudos to 37signals. I would take back the accusation if I could – but then if I did would it ever have been cleared up the intention in removing “Monday’s are a challenge.”?

Or maybe it would never have been an issue.

Returning to my cave…

I don’t know about you, but is sounded like Peter had ….

::puts on glasse::

A case of the Mondays

YEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Could you implement a similar system for Answers?