Do you like cotton candy? Ever wanted to see yourself as a caricature? Always fantasized about being tied-up with your friends?
Well, FreshBooks turned five years old this year! And we’re throwing the best birthday party a five year old could hope for—loot bags included! It wouldn’t be a party without all of you, so be sure to RSVP for a great afternoon together of games, prizes and surprises you won’t want to miss!
When
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
As the most loving of festivities approached, we thought it was a perfect opportunity to remind you all how much we care about you. On behalf of the entire team at FreshBooks HQ, thanks so much for choosing FreshBooks. We really do love you ‘round these parts!
Check out our Valentine’s Day video dedicated to all of you, shot and produced by our very own, talented Randy.
We are upgrading our infrastructure to improve performance and plan for the future. To accommodate this, we have two scheduled downtimes coming up this week.
On Wednesday September 3, 2008 at approximately 12:00 PM Eastern, your FreshBooks account will be unavailable for approximately five minutes while we switch to our new beefy database servers. We know this is early in the month and an inconvenient time for some, but it’s the best time for some very worthwhile reasons, so please bear with us.
Next, on Saturday September 6, 2008Sunday, September 7, 2008 starting at approximately 11:30 PM1:30 AM Eastern, your FreshBooks account and our public website will be unavailable while we move our web servers across our primary datacenter. We estimate this will take approximately one hour. You can monitor our progress at: http://status.freshbooks.com
If you have any questions about the changes or anything else please let us know.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and thank you in advance for you patience.
(Update: The start time for the second downtime described above was off by two hours because Rich can’t calculate time zone differences. September 7 at around 1:30 AM Eastern/5:30 AM GMT is correct.)
It’s been 13 days since we announced that we would pay for someone’s ticket to the SEED conference. To earn this right we asked that people submit stories of truly remarkable customer service. We’ve received a slew of outstanding entries. In fact, we’ve had customers of FreshBooks account holders (like Sky IT Support) take the time and write in to tell us stories of how FreshBooks users provided them with exceptional service. Absolutely marvellous.
Among all the great entries this one stood out:
Hey Mike and the rest of the Freshbooks team – I’m writing to submit to the “best customer service story” contest for the SEED conference ticket.
The Internet company that I believe has the best customer service going today is Zappos.com. Having ordered from Zappos.com many times, their customer service is phenomenal, and they’re driven by creating the best experience possible for their customers. They’ve truly created a culture of service, this is hard to do within the organization but when they get it right, it’s truly amazing to witness.
Speaking of witnessing it, I had the opportunity to visit Zappos.com in January of this year. I was blown away at how welcoming all of the employees were and how as we walk through the entire building, everyone we passed stood up smiled and waved hello to us. It was a fantastic look at the behind the scenes operation of a truly focused company. I blogged about it here. After our trip there, and we were so inspired as a company that when we rolled out our “customer service is the new marketing” initiative, we referenced our experience at Zappos.
As far as the best customer service story I’ve ever come across, actually came upon it the other day. It’s not an original story by me, but I think it’s a wonderful example of the extent to which Zappos will go to show that it cares about its customers. Here’s the post:
I Heart Zappos
I really do.
One bright, extraordinary note in all of the sad stuff of the last few weeks – in May we had ordered several pairs of shoes from Zappos for my mom. She’d lost a lot of weight, and her old shoes were all too big. She had a whole new wardrobe of clothes in pretty colors, that fit, so I wanted her to have some pretty shoes that fit, too, when I took her up to Oregon to stay where her sister is. Out of seven pairs, only two fit. Not bad considering she’d never been this thin, so I was winging it, and the return shipping is free.
The rest were here waiting to be returned. Because of various circumstances – lost label, my mom being hospitalized and me being away, the shoes were never sent back. There’s a time limit on the return of 15 days. Remember this. When you do a return to them, they pay the shipping, but you have to get the shoes to UPS yourself. Remember this, also.
When I came home this last time, I had an email from Zappos asking about the shoes, since they hadn’t received them. I was just back and not ready to deal with that, so I replied that my mom had died but that I’d send the shoes as soon as I could. They emailed back that they had arranged with UPS to pick up the shoes, so I wouldn’t have to take the time to do it myself. I was so touched. That’s going against corporate policy.
Yesterday, when I came home from town, a florist delivery man was just leaving. It was a beautiful arrangement in a basket with white lilies and roses and carnations. Big and lush and fragrant. I opened the card, and it was from Zappos. I burst into tears. I’m a sucker for kindness, and if that isn’t one of the nicest things I’ve ever had happen to me, I don’t know what is. So…
IF YOU BUY SHOES ONLINE, GET THEM FROM ZAPPOS.
With hearts like theirs, you know they’re good to do business with.
Tony Hseih has done a fantastic job building an culture of service within Zappos. During my visit I learned the extent to which the employees are empowered to go to keep a customer happy. If a customer cannot find a shoe they’re looking for on Zappos.com, the customer support rep is empowered to browse competitors websites, Nordstrom.com, shoes.com, and help the customer look for the shoe that they want all the while on the phone with the customer. This is truly about keeping the customer happy.
Zappos recently introduced an industry first free shipping both ways. This encourages people to order as many issues as they want in different sizes and try them on. Through this initiative Zappos is competing directly with brick-and-mortar high-end shoe stores.
The story above is not the first I’ve heard of Zappos ordering flowers for customers. The culture of WOW encourages employees to go the extra distance to wow their customers with great customer service. This is truly the company with the best customer service going today. I hope this wins the magic ticket! Thanks for caring about customer service.
This account of great customer service — and more importantly a culture of extraordinary customer experiences — was submitted by Chris Schultz of Voodoo Ventures. Congratulations Chris — you’ve earned yourself a ticket to SEED.
We are going to post one or two of the other entries because the companies and the people they highlight deserve the recognition. Thank you to everyone who entered. We’re going to send you all FreshBooks shirts as a token of our thanks.
I just got my most recent copy of the Harvard Business Review, and there is a lengthy interview with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in it. Here’s what he had to say about competition:
“We don’t ignore competitors; we try to stay alert to what they are doing… But a lot of our energy and drive as a company, as a culture, comes from trying to build… customer focused strategies… I think they work better in fast-changing environments”.
I believe many companies spend too much time setting strategy against what their competitors are doing—especially in large organizations like banks. One of the things I love about FreshBooks is our proximity to our customers. Everyone on our team answers the phone, replies to e-mail and is in contact with our customers, and we make decisions and set strategies based on the close relationships we have with our community.
When people ask us about competition, from now on I’m going to direct them to this post.
A few years back I spoke with a sales guy at PC World about buying some advertising. Every month since we’ve received a copy of PC World and every month that we do, I am reminded of that sales guy, PC World and buying their advertising. That’s the power of leaving something behind.
We built FreshBooks to help manage our design, development and internet marketing agency. When we ran that business we used to have to present/sell to new clients, frequently at meetings and I know many FreshBooks businesses do the same. Whenever you have the opportunity to present, be sure to leave your prospects with something tangible that reminds them of the value you add. We used to leave a one page sheet of case study summaries. The summaries included the client name and website URL, the percentage amount we helped them improve their online selling capabilities and how long it took for the project to achieve its ROI – usually measured in months. We also included a short testimonial with a contact name who was willing to endorse our services. The summaries were food for thought, demonstrated our value and surely left the prospect pondering what upside they were missing if they did not work with us.
So if you are meeting people, strategize about what you want to leave behind. If you go to a conference, does your business card communicate your value, or does it just offer your contact information? Think about it.
When you are in business, it’s really important to be able to tell your story well—it’s both an art and a science. To do this effectively, I find it helpful to have a good verbal logo.
The key to a verbal logo is to focus on the benefits—not the features—of what you do. For example, when people ask me “what do you do?”, I could say, ”I help run an online bookkeeping service,” but that doesn’t really compel the average cocktail party guest to ask more, does it? What I say instead is, “I’m in the business of saving people time,” and that never fails to hook people… they are inevitably compelled to ask, “geez… how do you do that?” And once you have people curious I find the conversation has a lot more momentum… and once you have momentum your correspondent will indulge you with their attention and their time and you’ll have the opportunity to describe what you do in Technicolor. Once you can do that you’ll be remembered for sure, and chances are whomever you are talking to will be well enough informed to refer people to what you do—and that’s when you know you’ve hit it out of the park.
Depending on my mood and the company I’m keeping, my verbal logo tends to vary and that makes things fun for me.
Something I have taken an interest in over the last couple of years is product reinvention. I’ve been thinking about this lately because of something Triscuits has done. I grew up in a Triscuits household. Two things we ALWAYS had in stock when I was growing up were granola and Triscuits. Don’t ask…my friends used to tease me about this because it was something that never failed. Anyway…take a look at Triscuits. All they have done over the last ten years is change the amount of salt and sodium in their product – that’s incredible boring if you ask me. But look at Triscuits now…
Just recently I have come across two new ingenious variations of their crackers: Rosemary and Olive Oil (which is awesome), and Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil (which is even better…I can’t believe how good these taste).
These new offerings have totally reinvigorated how Triscuits are positioned in my mind. Sadly I went to their website to learn more and find links to point to in this post and was utterly disappointed by the uselessness of their marketing collateral…no dedicated pages for each new product, links that are confusing, hard to find and, in some cases, barely work. Classic flash driven advertising agency approach to usability…no wonder ad agencies are in trouble these days. And to top it off, Nabisco has not domain-proofed their brand by buying Triscuits.com. But I digress…
Despite all that, if you are a Triscuits fan, it’s time to go shopping. And may I recommend some Brie cheese with the Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil for your delight? Happy snacking.
We bought three new Dell machines and four monitors earlier this month and since then we have been receiving a steady stream of sales emails from Dell. Daniel unsubscribed from their mailing list this morning, which as he says “was easy, but…” after unsubscribing, Dell informed Daniel it can take ten business days to become fully unsubscribed. Here is the message:
As of 19/03/2007 8:59:28 AM, this e-mail address will be opted out from all marketing e-mail subscriptions within 10 business days. In the interim, you may continue to receive e-mail marketing to which you originally subscribed.
*Weak*
Now we are getting more emails from Dell like “Spring Blowout Sale”. Dell…we bought your stuff, now please let us go and stop wasting our time. If we love you, we’ll come back…that’s how it works – or at least how it ought to work. Right now this relationship is on rocky ground.
The data is compelling. Our web analytics indicate the article sent FreshBooks 1009 visitors of which 113 trialed FreshBooks. Perhaps the best stat of them all is “Average Time per Visit” which indicates that of the 1009 people who came to FreshBooks.com from the article, on average they stayed on our site for 3 minutes and 36 seconds.
Now I’m not going to tell you how these numbers compare to other links we receive to FreshBooks, but I will tell you that that length of visitor over such a large sample size (1000+ visitors) indicates a very high quality of traffic referred. In fact, in my teleseminarpodcasts with John Marshall – the CEO of ClickTracks – he indicated that average length of visit is the best single metric to establish visitor intent by referrer.
I would never have guessed that of Digg’s traffic would have been of such a consistently high quality. And yes…”technically” this article was not Digg traffic, it was only an article with a high number of Diggs. But the article looked sketchy to me…it has 880 Diggs and only 3 comments. Due to the low ratio of comments to Diggs I figured someone was trying to game the Digg system and just send any traffic they could get to the site. After reviewing my stats however, I find my scepticism was totally unfounded.
Imagine the traffic to links higher up in the article…FreshBooks was link 6 of 26.
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