As Zach mentioned in his previous post, we rotate customer development every day among our team members. This gives us plenty of “face time” with real customers, handling questions and issues over email, Twitter, Skype, and most of all chat. With so many avenues to get in touch with customers, I love it when we can strip out all the extra tools. Specialized CRM software? Issue tracking software? It just did not work for us – our customers are small and really want simple, personal communication. Gmail already works great for tracking customer issues and keeping in touch with business contacts. We share a single support inbox, and use labels to help keep it organized. Plus the search functionality is great.
I think the same goes for chat. Why would you want to log in to a specialized chat application to talk to customers? I already have an instant messenger for that (Adium, if you’re curious). There are plenty of customer-oriented chat options out there with proprietary Windows clients, or Flash-based dashboards. They might provide some interesting information, but adding extra tools to my workflow just slows things down.
All the information I need – which customers are online, what part of the world they are from, the page they are browsing…all of this information just appears in my buddy list (via Olark, of course):
So every day I’m working with customers, I happily log in to our Gmail inbox and Adium instant messenger – just like I would anyway. No changes to the “natural” flow of things.
If your startup or small business tools could use some simplifying, you could start by redirecting support email into Gmail…and while you’re at it, give Olark a shot too. You will find yourself much more accessible and personable when your tools fit your workflow.
What kind of other tools do you use to keep things simple? Any suggestions for other tools we can throw out?
