That’s a really great reply!

When people cancel on their own, we send them to this page - https://basecamp.com/cancel. When people write to us to cancel it, I reply with basically your response from above. One tweak I’d make is to say your app’s name rather than “product and service to meet your needs”. That feels like corporate talk to me.

Proactive definitely helps if you can get a good feel for where your tickets will be at a few months out.

For us, we’ve got a team of 10 handling about 10,000 cases a month. We’re scattered throughout time zones so some of us see less tickets than others. On average, I handle between 60-80 tickets a day.

I think this is one of those that’s a judgement call that each company has to make. At 2500 tickets a month, that’s about 83 a day. If each of your six people are working tickets, that’s an average of 14/person/day. From the numbers standpoint, it feels like you’re okay. That said, that’s pulling just from those numbers. If only have your team is…[Read more]

@saouderkirk Fantastic post!

For me, I like taking ownership of tickets because I become familiar with that person and what’s going on. When the customer replies, I’m able to send them an email right away rather than reading back through the history to figure out what’s going on.

With the DMV example, imagine each new DMV employee having to…[Read more]

@hoonpark - Here’s what my most recent version in my signature looks like:

Please Note: It’s 11:42AM Central Time right now. I work M-F 8am-5pm Central Time. Replies outside of that might be a bit slower.

If you’d like an answer outside of those hours, the quickest route is to send us a new ticket at
https://basecamp.com/support. One of our…[Read more]

@hoonpark - What I’ve seen so far is that if it’s a non-urgent question, the customer just replies to the existing ticket. If it’s something that needs an immediate reply, they create a new ticket. I’ve only been testing that out for a few months but it seems to be working well so far!

Great question! With our team, the support pro who replies first handles all the replies to that ticket. It keeps things simple and the customer doesn’t get passed around to a bunch of different people.

We also include our working hours in the bottom of the first email. That way the customer can start a new ticket if they’ve got a question in the…[Read more]

We’ve got a pretty fair refund policy that’s worked well for us so far. https://basecamp.com/refund

Depending on the situation, we do full and partial refunds. It’s hard to set an overall policy since refund situations are best looked at on a case-by-case basis. I’m more concerned about reaching a good end point with the customer over worrying…[Read more]

@mathew - Love that DQ Time, although I must admit I thought of going to Dairy Queen when I saw that name.

I think having that DQ Time is super important. If you’re just answering emails all day, that can get old real quick.

I’d also add that you need to take time off work. If it’s been months since your last vacation, take one. Rest and…[Read more]

Seems that laptops are winning on this thread.

A solid laptop has my vote too. There’s been a lot of great reasons for posted by the gents above. I’d add that having a laptop means your online quickly when something goes wrong. If your app goes down in the middle of the night or a server upgrade goes wrong, you’re able to jump right in rather…[Read more]

Dog person all the way!

I haven’t tried it personally from the support side but I have been on the other end of it as a customer. It ends up feeling creepy to me. You think you’re alone just looking over a product’s site when all of a sudden this live chat box pops up with “I see you’re looking at X. Did you see our product could do Y too?” As a customer, I’m not a fan of it.

@evan - Definitely will! We’re still in training mode for them right now. But I’ll get a post written up after we’ve ironed out the kinks.

@Mathew and @Shelly both hit the nail on the head here. I’d only echo the need to set clear expectations for the customer. “We might do that” often ends up being a no in the long run. Go ahead and be clear with the customer that even if it’s a great idea that your team is thinking about, that doesn’t mean it’s something to bank on. By setting the…[Read more]

@shelly We’re Tennessee buddies! I’m in a little town called Fayetteville, TN. It’s right on the border with Alabama. My wife’s family is from Alabama.

I’m with @jake on this one. I’m much rather spend time making the current features and tools the absolute best they can be. It doesn’t matter how awesome a new idea is, it won’t make customers happy if you’ve got a lot of pain points that need some love.

We don’t have any regularly scheduled team meetings. Communicating in Basecamp takes care of those conversations. Plus it’s hard to have a recurring meeting since we’re all in different timezones.

Big thumbs up to a staycation or two! That’s my plans for Christmas. For Thanksgiving, we’re headed to Auburn, Alabama for the Iron Bowl (rivalry game between University of Auburn and University of Alabama). Should be a nice week with the family.