The Idea Blog

Lyn Rollins, our designated consumer, is serving as “consumer-in-residence” on a major project we’re working on for a client. One of the things she’s doing is identifying remarkable touchpoints in customer service, especially those she encounters online.

Here’s one for her book.

As many of you know, we at Burris are hugely reliant on an online project management system called Basecamp from 37 Signals. Since we’re, you might say, “far-flung” in terms of where we work - and so are our clients - we find it best to keep all communication and information in one central place. Our clients use Basecamp; our vendor partners use Basecamp … it’s become a critical tool for how we run our business.

A couple of early mornings ago I logged into Basecamp as I normally do and I saw this header message at the top of my screen.

Seems in the wee hours of the night the site went down, and the company felt it needed to (a) let us know and (b) apologize just in case we’d been inconvenienced. I wasn’t affected. I doubt anyone at Burris or our other users were affected. But they wanted to tell us all about it … just in case. Further, they wanted to give us an opportunity to learn more about the outage, providing a link that detailed the events.

That’s good online customer service. Tell me what you want me to know before I have to ask you about it.

These guys are good.