November 2007 Archives

Peter, our customer support guru at Sproutit, recently interviewed Brian Ghidinelli or PukkaSoft, one of our clients and makers of MotorsportReg.com, about their experience with Mailroom and how it helps them with providing great customer support. Here's what we found out.

Peter: What you are doing?

Brian: MotorsportReg.com is an event management and registration service for motorsport event organizers. Whether it's wheel-to-wheel racing, high-performance driving schools or social events, we're the best system available for managing an event from start to finish. We have a wide range of customers from the SCCA, BMW Car Club of America, Audi Club of America, Porsche Club of America and other groups from all over the country who depend on us.

Peter: Why you got into doing this [the passionate version ;-)]

Brian: My favorite motorsports quote is by Peter Egan who said "Racing makes a heroin addiction seem like a vague longing for something salty". I started sliding down this slippery slope with a high-performance driving school in 2000 and within a couple of years I was volunteering with my local car club to earn a discount on entry fees.

What I found in the registration process was a bunch of overworked and under appreciated spreadsheet jockeys and paper pushers. I prototyped an online registration service for them and within a year I had a handful of customers around the country but I didn't think it was something I could make a living from.

In the past two years, however, adoption has skyrocketed and I feel like a celebrity when I talk to our customers. They love our application, they love our customer service and they constantly tell us that we're making them successful. That's what every product company wants to hear. That not only keeps me coming to the office excited but it keeps me awake at night thinking of new ways to make MotorsportReg.com even better.

Peter: What makes you unique (technology/service/product)?

Brian: In the big picture, our unique value is that we're a niche player with tools and domain expertise solving a problem exceptionally well. We're using our professional consulting backgrounds to convert customer problems into effective technology.

In our niche, we're the 500lb gorilla in the ring. Where most of our competition are part-time enthusiasts, we've built a business that allows us to operate a full-time company and invest more resources into our application, infrastructure and customer service. When these clubs want to trust their most critical operational system and money to a third party, we're the most professional and most reliable choice.

Technology wise (and excuse the techy-talk), we're very pragmatic. We use a lot of open source with Linux, Apache and PostgreSQL but our application server is Adobe ColdFusion because it's so fast to build robust applications. We use Dojo and jQuery in our UI and have a rapid development cycle with frequent releases all managed by Subversion and Trac.

Peter: How you are using Mailroom to help communicate with your customers?

Brian: Mailroom helps us primarily in three ways.

• The first is probably quite common: people ask the same question over and over and over. In our case as an ASP, we also receive inquiries that are intended for one of our customers. We used to manually type replies to these inquiries which would take at least an hour per day. With Mailroom, we speed through these questions in just a few minutes.
• The second is a subtle usability trick we've picked up. We periodically review the saved replies to see if there's something in the service itself that we could change to eliminate the inquiries. This process has led to several key changes that have reduced our inbound mail by more than 50%.
• The last is that it's much easier to synchronize who has answered what. Previously we used an email alias to handle inbound customer questions but we frequently replied multiple times. Customers love this level of attention but it wasn't a very effective use of our time! :)

So, not only can we fly through the email we do receive, but we're receiving a lot less of it because our approach to customer email is more methodical.

Peter: Anything else you would like to say? (new products/shout out to your hommies)

Brian: Well, we're looking forward to offering our customers Mailroom because they will benefit just like we have!