GymFu is doing something right: Extreme customer support

This is our customer service approach:
1. Answer ALL emails and tweets.
2. Build a support site that is SEO’d and contains all the questions people ask (support.gymu.com).
3. Find our evangelists and love them.
4. Find our haters and love them more than our own mothers.
5. Do whatever it takes to fix a customer’s problem, even if that means meeting them to give them pre-release code!

We try to do the same at Posterous. When you can't even get a response from other services, we'll try to get back to you within 12 hours or less.

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11 responses
It's awesome when you email Posterous support, and one a founder personally replies to you. Now that's great customer support!
That's how you build brand loyalty, one microtransaction at a time. Over years, these little strands build a powerful foundation and community.
Thanks! We'd not expected the customer services element to be what was picked up on in that article, but we're really pleased it was.

This sounds corny, but the world would be a much better place if people had more empathy. The shear fact someone contacts a company (even if it's to complain) should be seen as a real sign of success; it means someone cares - the least organizations can do is care back :)

FWIW, your amazing customer service is definitely getting out - I've seen a few tweets about how helpful you guys are!

All the best!
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GymFu Jof

@"the boy" - I couldn't work out whether that was a comment at us or posterous. If it's at us - my apologies; can you email me your username and I'll look into the trail and see what went wrong.

Even if it's not at us, I will make a general comment about Uservoice/GetSatisfaction; they aren't always ideal. In particular, GS has limitations like no SEO (until last month), no branding, rigid structure and lock-in which don't suit everyone. It's also quite hard to use. We've discussed this with GS (we got a phone call from them asking if we were happy! fantastic!) a fair bit and I know they are keen to improve, but until they do forums, blogs and emails work better although admittedly not ideally.

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GymFu Jof

I agree that one of the great things about Posterous is the personal responses I have gotten to every single email I have sent to help@posterous.com. Awesome support.
I think this is def making a case for GS/user voice , albiet GS is more general in nature.

The new plan they just launched allowing you to host it at your URL is crucial for the SEO puzzle, so its good they understand it.

I know a lot of people like being able to skin or theme their apps, but I feel a lot of people (both users and companies) like the neutral 3rd party feel.

Whats your take on that? Is it all up to how brand conscious the start-up is?

@Evan - (Sorry Steve for hijacking your post!)

The new SEO stuff is great - sadly launched a bit too late to be used on GymFu. For us, it's not really about controlling a brand from an aesthetic/skinning approach, but rather from the POV of its presence on twitter/facebook/google. We haven't really focused on this area yet but using a hosted solution we could, for example, optimise the google description text to better guide and inform the user.

The other advantage of hosting the solution yourself is that you can follow the user's trail with much more granularity. This can help you improve the support site features/layout/sitemap, as well as generating previous-unseen opportunities.

All this is alluding to how flexible a self-hosted solution is, but there's also another issue; cost. Our support site shares all it's code with our blog, which is coding by us, so the annual cost of launching and maintaining it is effectively nil - and yet it has the power of GS's premium options.

Garry. I meant Garry. FAIL :P

(Sorry - there's a similar conversation about this subject I'm following on Steve Rubel's Posterous!)

This is exactly the approach we take at Topify. As we grow it becomes harder to keep up, but we will never leave a user's query unanswered.
the boy: Sorry I'm so late to this thread -- We've been talking about adding UserVoice. It's been definitely difficult to scale this approach as we get bigger, so UV will be essential.

What was the issue -- which platform, etc? Its definitely a tough line to walk -- very hard to support 100% of all scenarios, especially if it's just us three guys. =) Feel free to fire me a line garry@ youknowhere.com

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