My little cousin decided to dress up as Woody from Toy Story for Halloween this year. After finding the perfect version of that costume from the Disney Store, his mom had it shipped to the office since we didn’t know exactly what time it would arrive in the day. When it got here, the words “Love – Andy” was written in marker on the outside by someone from the Disney Store team.

If you haven’t seen Toy Story yet, first – go see it. It’s a great Pixar movie. After you’ve seen it, you’ll know that Andy is the kid from the movie and Woody is one of his toys.

It’s great to see when a team goes out of its way for the little things. It only took that person a few seconds to sign the box. Now I can’t wait to see how excited my cousin is to see that his costume was from Andy himself.

Don’t forget the little things that you can do with your customers to brighten their day. It might just be signing a name to you. It’ll be a whole new experience to them.

Greenling is the local and organic food delivery service I use in Austin, Texas. No company has ever impressed me more with their customer support.

They make every step easy: I can manage my orders online through their killer site, deliveries come right to my door, and everything is guaranteed. (My teammate Merissa uses Greenling too, and once live-chatted with a rep after receiving some apples that had gone soft—they apologized, refunded the charge on the spot and gave her 10 percent off her next order.) When I first became a customer, they checked in with me to make sure everything was going well. My delivery guy is always cheerful and asks whether there’s anything else they can do.

Greenling claims “We believe good relationships are the foundation for every successful service and we build them to last.” And they mean it! I’m housesitting for my friend Andy, and agreed to show his place to a couple potential tenants, Kristen and Jeff. They were really nice, and noticed my Greenling box in the kitchen—turned out Jeff works for Greenling, and we launched into a conversation about persimmons. A couple days later, I got this email:

Hi Emily!

Thanks for taking the time to show Kristen and I Andy’s home the other day! We really appreciate it and are excited about living there!

Since you are such an awesome Greenling customer I wanted to pass along a coupon for you to use as well. The next time you check out use this coupon and you will get 25% off of your next order from us :)

Hope those persimmons were awesome!

Take care, 

Jeff Waltrip, Smoothie Operator

How cool is that? He got my email address from Andy so he could send me a coupon—and it was a killer email, at that. Smoothie Operator for the win!

What’s the last support experience that rocked your world?

Officially, 37signals customer support is only available during standard U.S. business hours — 8 a.m.-5 p.m. CST (14:00-23:00 GMT). In reality, we’re usually open a little longer than that, because some of us are morning people (Merissa!) and some of us are night owls (Joan!). We’ll sometimes pop in on weekends too, especially when it’s busy. Still, that only amounts to about 60 hours of availability in a 168-hour week.

That’s been a bummer for folks in other parts of the world — nearly a fifth of our customers are in Europe, and at least 5 percent work from Asia and Australia. While it’s often easy to get back to our American customers in less than an hour, Europeans could be waiting more than six hours for a response, and our friends down under could wait a whole business day. When you’re unable to log in to your account, or somebody removed your admin permissions, or you can’t find that file you know you uploaded yesterday, well … that sucks!

It sucked even worse after we launched the new Basecamp and suddenly had hundreds more cases per day with the same tiny team of seven. Cases were piling up to 400, 500, 600 deep. It got so bad that a few times, we straight-up shut down intake, just so we could catch a breath. Not cool.

In June, it was taking us about 110 minutes to reply to emails during business hours, 279 minutes on average overall. Only 41% of customers were getting a reply within an hour when we were on the clock, and a dismal 29% received a response within an hour overall.

Ouch.

We had already decided to bring on some folks across the pond to better serve our customers in different time zones. We added the lovely and talented Monika (Netherlands) and Jim (UK) to the team (more on them soon!), and I’ve been working from Europe this summer as well — so lately, our day has been starting around 3 a.m. CST.

We’ve been experimenting with later shifts, too — Kristin, Ann, and Joan have been taking turns coming in around 11 a.m.-noon and leaving around 8-9 p.m. CST.

What this means is that, at least during the Monday-Friday workweek, we’ve gone from 8-12 hours of availability to about 18. So far, that’s making a world of difference.

Yesterday at 11 a.m., for example, the median time to a first reply during business hours was 24 minutes and 73% of cases were being answered within an hour. (You can always see how quickly we’re getting to things on our “Happiness Report” page.)

In the three and a half weeks before we started European hours and late shifts, our median weekday response time was six hours. Since we spread the hours out (in addition to some awesome deploys and feature improvements, too!), median weekday response time has fallen dramatically, to around 55 minutes. We’ve been reaching “Inbox Zero” at the end of the day — something that hasn’t really happened since we launched Basecamp on March 6. No more 100+ case backlogs to work through and prioritize first thing in the morning, because we’re constantly working through the queue.

Is this perfect? Heck no. We know that commerce is 24-7, and 55 minutes can feel like an eternity when stuff isn’t working. We know people rely on our apps to do their jobs, and when something goes wrong, it can create big problems. We take that super-seriously. We’d like to move toward around-the-clock support, where everyone is getting a reply within an hour. Ideally, no one would wait more than a few minutes to hear back from us.

That’s the direction we’re heading in — this is just a step toward it. But it’s been a major step, and we’ll all breathing a little easier and sleeping a little more soundly!

Thanks to Noah for his help with the numbers here.

When we were building the new Basecamp, we wanted the foundation to be built on clean, modern underpinnings to take advantage of all the new wonderful features of HTML5. That meant we have to drop support for older browsers, like IE8, that have little or poor support for the HTML5 technology we are using to make Basecamp awesome for everyone.

But, have no fear! We realize that a lot of people are stuck with IE8 (sometimes even IE7 or, yikes, 6), so we made sure that Chrome Frame works with Basecamp. Chrome Frame is available for IE 6-9 on Windows machines and can usually be installed without admin access.

If you’re stuck with an older version of Explorer, check out Chrome Frame and get yourself a Basecamp account.

We’re seven members strong now and we’re able to add a lot of things our customers have been seeking. The bigger team also lets each of us work on support projects other than answering emails lightning fast. Since our sysops, developers and designers have been rightly bragging about the great things they’re doing, I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell you about what our amazing team has been doing to improve customer happiness.

Basecamp 101
The mere whisper of the word ‘webinar’ used to make my blood run cold. The library and academic worlds (my old stomping grounds) are lousy with them. I found them to be time sinks where people who didn’t have a full grasp of a topic held their attendees virtually hostage as we endured technical difficulties and dry Powerpoint presentations. My bias came with me when I got to 37signals, so I was surprised to see the number of customers who really wanted a webinar.

After a bit of research in the Fall, Merissa and Chase started a “Basecamp 101” online class that now runs almost every week. I have to say, it’s really terrific. If other webinars had butts, Chase and Merissa’s would be kicking them. Their class is fun and it gives space for potential customers to ask questions of Merissa, Chase and Michael at the end.

It’s exciting tell our customers that we can offer them a demonstration of setting up a project before they even sign up for Basecamp. If you want to check it out sometime, the next one is always listed on our Help page.

Help Videos
There’s plenty of research demonstrating different learning styles, and the support team can definitely attest to the fact that not everyone learns best by reading help documentation. We have some pretty great help pages, but sometimes words and screenshots can’t do justice to some of the features and functions of Basecamp or Highrise. Chase made it his mission to create some really great screencasts for many of our frequently asked questions. You can see the ones he’s created for Basecamp and Highrise. They’ve been a great asset for the support team and have helped our customers in a big way.

Live Chat
Through the Summer and Fall of 2011, we ran live help chat (thanks to our pals at Olark) on highrisehq.com to assist potential customers who had a few questions before signing up for a plan. The whole support team spent a few hours on live chat each day and we noticed that a lot of current customers were using the service to get help. We decided to give it a shot in Basecamp accounts as a premium support feature. If you’re an admin on a Max Basecamp plan or any Suite, you’ll see this friendly little box at the bottom of your Basecamp dashboard:


Of course, we did endure some “Who the heck is this?”s and “Are you a robot?”s the first few weeks, but we’re almost two months into offering the feature and it’s been a great experience. The team can answer questions faster and it’s a true pleasure to interact with our customers in a new way.

Faster Common Requests
Resident support whiz kid Ann is not just great at helping us answer support questions, she’s also quite handy with the console as well. Every day we see some common requests that involve some On Call programmer work and Ann’s been taking on a lot of the common tasks that we used to send to the programming team, including things like:

• Un-sticking Highrise exports/imports
• Finding out who deleted/moved something or changed permissions in an app (known in the support team as an “Ooooh, girl, who…” question )
• Creating file archives

It’s been a huge load off our On Call team and it helps us take care of our customers much faster than they expect.

These are all things we’ve been able to add to support in the past five months, and Basecamp Next isn’t even out yet. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited to see what the rest of 2012 holds.

The great thing about keeping score is that you can track your progress. We started asking customers who contacted support what they thought about the interaction in 2010. We were thrilled to end that year with just seven out of a hundred being unhappy with the service (and 84% being happy, 9% being OK).

But I’m really proud to announce that we’ve dramatically raised our game in 2011. We’ve gotten the frown ratio down to just three out of a hundred (90% being happy, 7% being OK). That’s less than half of what it was just the year before!

(If you look at just the last six months of 2011, it went even better still: 92% happy, 5% OK, 3% frowns).

Part of this is hiring a bigger team so the average number of emails each person has to answer is less. We’ve gone from needing each person to answer about 80 emails per day to just around 40 (again, on average—there were and are significant swings at times). That of course means that we can spend more time on each response and making more customers happier is the result.

Gains have also come from analyzing the data. Finding out what made people unhappy and trying to do better. We also now follow up with more frowns and try hard to “flip ‘em” by doing what we can to make a bad experience great.

I’m so proud of our support team for what they’ve accomplished this year. Thank you Ann, Chase, Emily, Joan, Kristin, Merissa, and Michael.

Kristin is the latest addition to our stellar customer support team. She joins Michael, Merissa, Ann, and Jason R. in making our customers happy everyday. Kristin works out of our Chicago office. Welcome Kristin, it’s great to have you on the team.

Since we launched a public window on Smiley a few weeks ago, over 20,000 people have visited it to see how we’re doing against our goal of making customers happy, not just satisfied.

I recently took a look at responses to Smiley since we started using it last fall. The whole point of exposing Smiley publicly was to encourage transparency, and I’d like to continue that by sharing the same results I shared with everyone here. I’ll give the results first; for those of you interested in the “how”, I’ll share details at the end.

What we’re learning from Smiley

About 30% of people who write to support end up rating our response. We’re very happy with 30% – that’s quite high for a completely optional survey.

Across all of those responses, our report card looks like this:

In my mind, the key metric is really the portion that said their interaction was great. If someone said it was just ok or if they said not so good, those both indicate something we could be doing differently.

I dug a little deeper to understand how happiness varies:

• More people rated their interaction as “great” in 2011 than 2010 (87% vs 83%). This has been climbing over the last two months as well.
  
• People whose tickets are fully resolved within a day of submitting them are more likely to be happy than those that took longer (87% vs. 81%; in the last six months, we’ve resolved 84% of our tickets within a day of submission, including weekends).
• Happiness is pretty consistent across products – ranging from a low of 83% saying great to a high of 86%
• Happiness doesn’t vary much by the specific plan someone is on. Elite Suite customers are just as happy as customers using a free version.

Aside from rating the experience great, ok, or not so good, we allow people to leave open ended comments. 59% of people have ended up leaving comments so far. I decided to take a look at what people are saying:

The average comment is 12 words. The most common words people used in their responses were: quick, thanks, answer, fast, friendly, problem, question, reply, time, great, clear, helpful, issue, support, service, prompt, good, solution, feature, solved, and timely.

I also took a special look at the written comments of people who weren’t happy with their support interaction. More of these people wrote comments (63%) and their comments were twice as long as average. Their comments connect well with what we suspected – people appreciate getting clear answers right away, and when we aren’t able to make someone happy, it’s often because of a feature request that we aren’t able to commit to immediately.

We’re happy to see happiness increasing over time, and have a bunch of ideas in the works to keep boosting this. I hope you keep watching with us at the 37signals Customer Support Happiness Report.

If you’re curious how I did this analysis, read on…