David Berube’s OLD Blog

I’m a big hockey fan. I’ve played my entire life, from youth up to juniors and in the NCAA. I want to share a video with you that doesn’t have much hockey in it, but a whole lot of fighting. I love this video, and this is a game I wish I was at.

Reason I’m mentioning hockey now is because the NHL draft was the other day and it got me pumped up for the 08-09 season.

This is my first actual usage of my Sprint mobile broadband card and I’m loving the new ability I have. I’m writing this post sitting on a regional jet on the tarmac of TF Green Airport… And the flight attendant just asked me to turn my laptop off.

Is it just me or is GMail letting a lot more spam through their filters as of late?

Over the past week I’ve received more spam than the past year alone. It’s starting to get a bit annoying…

I’ve been using 37signal’s Ta-Da List now for a little bit and I find it very helpful to keep track of what I need to get done every day at work.

Before using Ta-Da List I’d just wing my day, now, first thing in the morning I review my daily list and begin working. If I forgot or just didn’t create the list the night before I’ll do that first thing in the morning. As the day progresses I find myself adding things to the list, before I was using Ta-Da List I would put these things off and eventually forget about them.

It’s been a huge help in keeping me productive and on course with what I need to do. This is also the only 37signals product I use.

About a month ago I created a new support system for MoFuse. Before this new support system all support requests were handled via email. Now, with the new system, support requests are sent, received and replied to right from the user’s MoFuse dashboard.

I made the system for my own well being. Since I handle 98% of all support requests I wanted a system that didn’t let me lose things. If I let a support request email go two days without responding, it was lost in my email clutter, forgotten about and then there was an angry user. I didn’t want that anymore, so I spent a few days making MoFuse messaging.

When a user sent a support request in through the old system, I’d send a reply email with the answer and I usually never heard back from the user. Now with MoFuse messaging users are replying to my replies and I’m sort of developing this one-on-one relationships with some users. Almost every support request I reply to gets a reply back from the user, whereas before I only got a reply back if my answer wasn’t satisfactory enough for their needs.

So now I’ve had a chance to develop a somewhat personal relationship (as much as it can be through support requests) with a few hundred users, and they’re almost unanimously happy with the level of support they get which makes them happy, and me happy.

Little changes sometimes have a great affect. Building those relationships with people who had a problem with our service, and then getting into a conversation with them about their problem and how I’m able to help solve there problem goes a long way. Some of them write blogposts about it, others just give you a big ole’ thank you. Both of which make your day.

I want MoFuse customer support to be as good as Apple’s. They are a leader in making their customers happy and every company, small or large, should model themselves after them. After all, without customers or users, you have nothing.