Thank you for using Reamaze Beta!

When we first set out to build Reamaze, we had many aspirations and wanted to be many things. As the months rolled by and as we spoke to more and more of you, we were able to single out one goal that meant the most to all of us: We want to help your business grow and we want to be a part of your amazing growth by providing you with simple and effective tools that are designed with your needs in mind.

Since opening up for public beta on January 1st, Reamaze itself has grown quite a bit. We’ve been able to hit important internal milestones and are amazed by the amount of support from all of you. At least from what we hear, we’re happy, our investors are happy, but most importantly, you’re happy.

In order to continue growing for you, Reamaze will be officially ending public beta on May 31st. Reamaze will officially launch on June 1st with official pricing. Please remember to check our website for more detailed information. As our valued early beta users (you know who you are), you will of course enjoy special pricing. Our support team will be reaching out to you soon. Your account will still enjoy an additional 15-day free trial until paid subscriptions kick in.

Don’t worry. We don’t intend to just take your money. We intend to earn it. Over the next few months, our team will be busy making changes and adding new features. And we don’t intend to stop until all of you are happy. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at support@reamaze.com or to me personally at david@reamaze.com.

Happy Reamazing!

Team Reamaze

I worked at a nonprofit organization that specialized in short public service announcements to inform people of endangered species. If there was one thing I learned from that experience, it was this:

“It’s almost never about the issue itself. It’s about how we make people feel about the issue.”

Like any great ad-man, my CEO was brilliant at pulling on emotional heartstrings. It’s almost impossible to satisfy everyone’s needs. It is possible to change how someone “feels” about an issue, even if it is only for a few monumental seconds.

Brilliant customer support beats in a similar cadence. Periods of interaction with any given customer come in short bursts. We have a limited amount of time to not only resolve issues, but to also leave lasting impressions and emotions. If you make an effort to make customers happy, with short bursts of joy, even if we are not able to help them 100% of the time, they will remember you for those experiences.

The truth is, customers won’t remember what problems you’ve resolved for them. They will remember the way you made them feel. Focus on creating positive emotions and on yanking on those heartstrings!

We know how important it is to demonstrate things to customers through videos. It is still one of the most convenient ways to learn something. You can now embed videos using native iframe tags from YouTube, Vimeo, and a variety of other sources right into your KB articles. As awesome as markdown is, we make it even easier for you to simply copy and paste the iframe right in.

We hope you enjoy laughing babies as much as we do!

Tired of ticket numbers yet? We certainly are.

1. They’re long and impossible to remember.
2. They’re robotic and absolutely meaningless.
3. They’re ugly and alarmist to look at.
4. They just kinda suck in general.

Well, we’re ecstatic to announce a new approach to communicating “Ticket Numbers” internally. Why internally? Because your customers should never have to deal with anything meaningless. Instead of having to remember a string of randomly generated numbers, Reamaze generates random phrases that are not only easy to remember but also great fun for everyone involved.

Like passphrases, Reamaze’s Conversation IDs are designed to appeal to your innate ability to memorize and recall interesting and appealing things. When was the last time you memorized a math formula? Not fun right? But if all math formulas (or formulae, whatever) came in the form of “Blue mangoes eat flies.”, you’d have hard time not remembering it.

Imagine this scenario:

Agent 1: “Hey Olivia, can you take a look at ticket # 3902916F?”

Agent 2: “Okay. Can you send me an email with that number? Or wait, let me grab a PostIt.”

Or would you prefer this conversation:

Agent 1: “Hey Olivia, can take a look at ‘Ugly clowns kill bees’ for me?”

Agent 2: “Haha! That’s a good one. Let me see.”

Yeah…We think you get the picture. Not only are conversation IDs more memorable, they’re also way more fun. Conversation IDs: 1, Ticket Numbers: 0

Happy April Fools Everybody!

Hooray!

Another public beta feature is now out of hibernation! You can now add internal/private notes for your teams’ eyes only. Internal notes were designed to be a seamless part of your conversation thread with customers. We’ve also made it as easy as and as intuitive as replying!

Unlike internal notes found in other applications, we’ve designed it so a note will never get lost in translation. Whenever you add a note, it is inserted into the conversation in chronological order. Never trouble yourself with sorting and finding the right note ever again

If you have any questions about this feature, please feel free to write to us!

Guest Post | Haje Jan Kamps, CEO at Triggertrap

It ain’t easy being a start-up: For every little issue you solve, six others crop up. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the earliest phases of spooling up a new venture.

At Triggertrap, our company was sparked into life after an incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign which reached 300% funding, back in the early days of Kickstarter (http://tri.gg/kickstarter). As with most Kickstarter campaigns, I suppose, we had a lot of setbacks in the early days.

We’ve come a long way since then, but one thing we learned early on, is that even – perhaps especially – if everything goes horribly wrong, the communication you have with your customers is absolutely paramount.

As a small company, we live by word of mouth marketing. Encouraging our customers to shout about us from the rooftops is great, but it’s also risky: You can give your customers a platform and give them a nudge, but you can’t control about what they are shouting about you.

One way we can gently guide how people speak about us is to make it as easy as possible to contact us, in case they have any issues. Our philosophy is that if we are able to quickly and privately help customers who run into a problem, they will hopefully say nice things about us in public. So far, it seems to be working.

A key element of getting back to customers quickly is having a good system for receiving, processing, and replying to queries. As many other small companies, we automatically reached for Zendesk, but right from the beginning, there was a nagging feeling that something was just a little bit… wrong… about Zendesk. That was pretty weird, to be honest, because it is an incredibly powerful tool, and it took us around 4,000 support tickets to formulate what the problem was.

The first glimmer of an idea was to try to change our support e-mail address from ’support@…’ to ‘hello@…’. “We’re humans, after all, not machines”, we figured. As soon as those words had been uttered, we looked at each other… And we understood what was wrong with Zendesk; It is all a little bit too machine-like.

In our hunt for a replacement, we found Reamaze as a potential alternative; one of the blog posts on the Reamaze blog (“Your Request Has Been Deemed Solved“) struck a particularly harmonious chord with us: That blog post eloquently puts into words what we couldn’t.

I discussed it with our CTO, and we decided that ‘f*ck it, let’s give it a shot’. We’re about a month into our experiment, and we haven’t looked back; With Reamaze, we’ve been able to pick up the pace of our Twitter, Facebook and E-mail communications hugely, whilst keeping it light-hearted, conversational, and human.

Best of all? The customers love it, which means that they’ll hopefully reserve their criticisms for us (so we can do something about them), and their praise for shouting from rooftops.

—

Haje Jan Kamps is the CEO at Triggertrap, a company that creates awesome ways of creatively triggering SLR cameras via iOS, Android, and Arduino. Check out http://triggertrap.com for more info. And drop them an e-mail at hello@triggertrap.com.

Reamaze is all about simplicity. After gathering feedback and running extensive A/B tests for the past two months, we are excited to announce a freshened-up conversations dashboard. While the old conversations dashboard was easy on the eyes and great at-a-glance, we wanted to convey some more information about a conversation before you have to open it.

Before

This meant unifying important information about a conversation in a way that maximizes accessibility while preserving readability. With the new view, you can easily identify which channel the conversation is in, who it’s assigned to (or if it’s unassigned), how many back and forth messages there are within the conversation, and how many participants there are in the conversation. Our beta customers have communicated these as the most important pieces of information. We’ve also pumped up the size of the thumbnails while we were at it

After

Stay tuned! There’s more where that came from!

We’re introducing a nifty little feature to help you better manage existing conversations living in environments outside of Reamaze. Several of you have voiced a need for this in order to make keeping track of relevant conversations easier. So here it is!

You can now forward a customer’s email from any inbox directly into your Reamaze email channel. If you are recognized staff user of Reamaze, Reamaze will intelligently parse out the relevant information, log the forwarded message as a new conversation on behalf of the original sender (your customer), mark it as unassigned, and send out notifications to everyone on your team.

Let’s take a look.

The customer, Frank Startusk, emailed Olivia, a support agent with DaffyWidgets, an email requesting help. Frank probably should have emailed the support address directly. No worries, Olivia forwards Frank’s email to support on behalf of Frank.

Because DaffyWidget’s support is run through Reamaze, what happens next is magical. Because Reamaze knows Olivia is a support staff with DaffyWidgets, it takes Olivia’s forwarded email and parses the relevant content and transforms it as if it came from Frank Startusk. Olivia is now able to reply to Frank from support.

We’re still beta testing this feature. If you see any funny behavior, please feel free to let us know! We hope this will make life easier

Cheers!

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of our book: Customer Service Handbook – A Guide to Great Teams and Cultures. This is a continuing series that will eventually be a downloadable book. We talked to 35 companies, including Stripe, Twilio, and Mailgun, to get a sense of what it takes to run a great customer support organization. While every company is different, there were some trends that we could identify as benchmarks for great customer support. The team at Zapier was kind enough to offer some of their experiences!

Case Study:

Wade @ Zapier

On Transparency: At Zapier, everyone has a login to our support desk. Everyone does support for the entire first week on the job. Everyone has access to all the tools from the top of the stack to the bottom. This gives employees access to everything they need to know to let customers know how to solve their problems.

On Accountability: Separating engineers from support lets engineers get careless about their code. Making sure everyone in the company including engineers do support causes engineers to hold themselves accountable for the code they ship, because ultimately they’ll be supporting that code too.

On Fast Responses: Responding fast doesn’t necessarily mean solving problems fast. In a perfect world you can do both, but the world isn’t perfect. Because of that, we try and send a quick acknowledgment email as soon as we get a support request. That way customers know we have seen the request and are at least working on it.

On Social Media: Social Media is pervasive. You never know where a support request will wind up. Because of that we use monitoring tools to make sure to notify us when people are mentioning our brand across the web so that we can follow up quickly.

On Satisfying Customers: The best customers can satisfy themselves. We work hard to provide tools and documentation for customers to find answers on their own. When that fails, we give everyone on the team the tools they need to get the customer an answer.

On Consistency: Wish we were better at this

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Thanks Wade!

Want to read more? Sign up for our book on the right hand side –>

We had a brief chat with Naomi from doeswhat.com about the origins of Reamaze, the small business pains we plan on addressing, and the general direction we’ve picked for ourselves.

You can read the full interview here.