A whole lot of customer love
When I started this company, one of the things I wanted to do was offer true excellence in customer service. I’ve seen great customer service during my days at Adobe, and I’ve suffered my share of bad customer service as a user of various products. We want MyPunchbowl.com to be the best possible event-planning site, so I figure if we want to truly be the best, we have to embody that in everything we do — including customer service.
Customer service in the very early days of MyPunchbowl.com was challenging. We received lots of emails and calls about things we already knew about and were feverishly trying to fix. However, rather than ignoring the emails or calls, we took the time to talk to our early users; to make a personal connection between Punchbowl Software and users. I answered many calls on weekends and evenings (often to the dismay of my very patient wife) and Sean (my co-founder) responded to every email that we received. This is a practice that continues to this day– every single person that contacts us gets a personal response from someone at Punchbowl. Of all of the things that we do on a daily basis, I think I’m most proud of that accomplishment.
As a result of this kind of customer service, we made a very personal connection with our users, and ended up apologizing about the product alot. Eventually, MyPunchbowl caught up with customer issues, and the product began exceeding customer expectations. Yet as with most software products, we still heard from far more people with complaints than those with compliments.
In the past few weeks an amazing thing has started happening: a whole lot of users have written to us just to express how much they love MyPunchbowl. There’s been quite a MyPunchbowl lovefest going on, and I thought I would share a few examples from just the last week:
“I plan about 20 events a year and I am very excited to have your new service. I sent out our St. patty’s day invite this week and already 2 friends sent out invites using mypunchbowl.”
“You guys rock. Thanks for writing a site that doesn’t suck!”
“Just read about your site in the Orlando Sentinel. I love it!! What a great site!”
“A gracious “thank you” to MyPunchbowl for helping make our adoption group’s Chinese New Year Celebration a wonderful success. I cannot express how much it simplified the planning and helped me stay organized! MyPunchbowl was completely user friendly for myself and the guests. I will absolutely use MyPunchbowl again in the future!”
Thanks to all of you who have taken the time to write to us– I can’t tell you how much it lifts the entire team to hear such nice things from our users (the entire team reads all of the user feedback).
If you have something to tell us, we want to hear from you. Simply click on the “Feedback/Support” link that’s located at the bottom of every page. We can’t promise you the answer you’ll want to hear, but we can promise that you’ll hear from us.
Party Planning and Online Invitations with MyPunchbowl
