I had a conversation with someone in support yesterday and I want to share this story with you. The story starts with David responding to a follow up email we send to people who signed up and became inactive. We have amazing responses and learn a lot from them. David was unsurprisingly short in his answer – “Need off-line version”. I responded quickly asking what exactly he needs. He instantly responded “Wow your a live person responding! This is really neat talking to a living person though most of it is just bots auto replying”. Rule number one – be quick and talk like a human.

For developers ‘off-line’ means ability to check tasks, add them or respond to them with no Internet connection. Rule number two – never assume things – always ask for details as it saves time down the road. It turned out that he is looking at full and complete program that lives on his hard drive and allows him to put in work without having to open a browser at all or be connected. David also wanted to use it for personal task management.

So I suggested to look at Evernote, TODOist and Wunderlist, which I knew have desktop applications. Here is rule number three – help people to solve their problems first. If your product can solve them – great, if not – do your best to help people.

David responded: “I already have Evernote but I would like a more lush ‘planning’ aspect. Evernote seems to deal primarily with present thoughts and does not organize future events very well.”

At Freedcamp we follow closely a lot of vendors – new and well established, we work in the collaboration space so we know it pretty well. In fact, we have a huge Discussion group in Freedcamp, where we share our findings and thoughts. I recalled that I saw very cool and free desktop application for Windows – ToDolist. I opened our Discussion but found that Codeproject.com page, where project is hosted. Here goes rule number four – save stuff you like, download it and make screenshots. Especially things which might get handy to help your customers. Fact is – pages get deleted and sites do get shut down. Typically you find it when you need it most 🙂

So I shared a link with David. If you are looking for a cool Windows application for personal task management with lots of features – try it. Below is a main window screenshot. Program does not require installation – just put a folder from zip file to your “Program Files” folder, make a shortcut from .exe file and put it on your Desktop.

Here is a response from David after he tried it:

“WOW this is AWESOME. Exactly what I was looking for. I’m really impressed by you guys. Let me know how I can help you out if you need someone to beta test something. Just the support you have shown makes me want to use Freedcamp now, but I think for my little Stream tablet this Todolist app will fill the void for now!”

This is what true company support should be doing day and night – make people happy and “Just the support you have shown makes me want to use Freedcamp now” should be the highest reward.

We strive to support our customers in a way we ourselves want to be treated and we will do all we can to keep it this way regardless of our company size. We know there are other companies having same high standards who succeeded in it 😉 and this conversation with David reminded me of this short movie:

Like it? Here are other movies created by Zappos and based on real recorded support calls (well, most of them – see disclaimer in the beginning of each video).