The 37signals Report Card was launched a few months ago, and this month it brings good news across the board.

Our support team made customers happier faster than ever

With 22,000 emails and 7,000 tweets handled in June, the support team blazed a speedy path, with 93% of emails received during our extended business hours answered within an hour. The average email was replied to in just 6 minutes. Chase recently wrote about how we keep those response times down.
The support team also kept customers happy: 94% said they had a great experience in June.

Our applications got a little faster

A few months ago we decided to replace one of the core pieces of our infrastructure: the firewall and load balancer appliances that all of our applications pass through. As we’ve been working on expanding into a second datacenter, we had the opportunity to try out some new equipment that offers dramatic simplification and performance improvements, and we decided to pull the trigger on rolling them out everywhere.
In mid-May, we switched over to our new F5 BigIP appliances in our primary datacenter in Chicago, and customers started to see the performance benefits we’d seen in our testing. The exact impact varies depending on the application and where you are in the world, but most customers are seeing between a 5% to a 25% improvement in overall page load times (overall, we’re running at about a 12% improvement across all of our customers and applications in the six weeks since we rolled these out). This speedup is especially noticeable when downloading large files.
We’re working on a handful of other projects that we hope will bring further speed improvements to our applications in the coming months.

Basecamp got a load of new features

Basecamp continues to improve. Just this month, we saw:

  • A whole new approach to documents, including mobile support and visual tracking of changes.
  • A new and clean look to the emails that Basecamp sends out about your projects, todos, and events.
  • Improvements to the event history throughout Basecamp. There’s less noise and more useful information throughout comment threads, people pages, and the timeline.
  • A ton of bug fixes and upgrades. In all, we deployed Basecamp 207 different times this month.

We’ve got a ton of other great features lining up to launch in the next few months. Stay tuned for future announcements and keep an eye on our performance to see how we’re doing every month.