Yesterday the signals wrote a great post on the kinds of email they receive from customers asking for support. This comment generated a lot of comments, but my favorite came from Josh Williams at FirewheelDesign:

We use Mailroom to tag incoming support email. Some or our tags include: buzz, client, and moron.

How do you use tags in Mailroom?

Update: The kind folks at Central Desktop called me on this post and they are right. I highlighted this comment by Josh because I thought it was a little funny. As a someone who dealt with customer support for years, its important to keep a little sense of humor about things so you can continue to provide great support.

We definitely think providing great customer support is really important. That is why we created Mailroom. It’s also why we wrote on this topic a few weeks ago saying that Customer Email is a Gift

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I recently picked up word of Mapable a recent startup from the Dallas area. After trying it out, my best explanation of it is a cross between 37signals’ Campfire and Jambo. You can create a chat room that different people can join and you can see where they are in the world, via the use of the big GoogleMap in the middle.

I did encounter a slightly better experience than I did with Riya a few days ago. I was able to login and set up an account, but a lot of the UI needs work in order to work with Safari. Alignments of text and pictures was off kilter. I wasn’t even able to post a comment using Safari (isn’t chatting the crux of it all?). ouch!

SO, I used Firefox as my backup, again. I created a chat room that you should visit. I am curious to see where you are writing from, and how well it works. Just click on the link below. They don’t have ‘invites’ yet.

BigActTest @ Mapable.com

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A listen to some new features we added to Mailroom.

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Have you ever had that experience where every time you email a company, they act like it’s the first time they’ve ever heard of you? It’s especially frustrating when you have a technical issue to resolve and you have to re-explain your problem every single time you contact the company.

This happens because most business have a problem of context. They receive so many emails that they can’t possibly remember everyone. After a while, every message seems to come from just another faceless user. We wanted to help with that and that’s why today I am excited to announce a new feature we’ve just deployed called “More About”.

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I mentioned in a post a few days ago that I have 43 feeds in my Newsreader just dedicated to Sprout. Ken Yarmosh asked where I came up with those feeds and how we keep them organized. Chris answered that question. But then I thought maybe a few specifics about what feeds I use for Sproutit might be helpful to others wondering how they can use feeds in their business.

So here is a summary of the feeds I have for Sproutit:

Sproutit Internal – 17 feeds – These are feeds only shared by members of our team. I want to know about pretty much everything, so I subscribe to almost all of them.

• 1 feed for our CampaignMonitor account to keep track of how many people have signed up for our newsletter mailing list.
• 6 feeds from our website to keep up on new blog posts, comments and trackbacks to both the Big Act blog, our Newsroom, and a forthcoming Mailroom blog.
• One feed for Basecamp feed. We have 13 projects right now in Basecamp. These projects act like “internal” blogs so people can post updates on different projects. We even have projects for our Investors to log into and our board. Aside from Mailroom, this is probably our most used webapp.
• One feed for our wiki. Our wiki has our marketing plan, policies, guidelines, notes on how to administer our server and how to work with our code.
• One feed for Collaboa, our source code manager. Here we track bugs, planned features, and code changes.
• 2 feeds for Mailroom. Of course, all of our support, contact, and other shared email is done through Mailroom. The best part is, this is all in my newsreader, so my personal email inbox stays clutter free. I love it!
• 1 feed for our del.icio.us bookmarks. We use this to bookmark interesting pages among our team, informally.
• 3 feeds sundry other blogs we have used over time that now get updated rarely if at all.
• 1 feed from the prototype of our Super Sekret Second Product.

Sproutit External – 23 feeds – These are feeds that help me find out what others (especially our customers) are saying about us.

• 5 Technorati feeds. One for each different blog and some ‘ego’ keywords and such.
• 2 Google feeds. One for Google News another for the Google Blog Search
• 1 del.icio.us tag search feed.
• 1 furl feed.
• 2 MSN search and News feeds.
• 2 Yahoo Search feeds
• 1 Icerocket search feed
• 1 Feedster search feed.
• 1 Topix.net feed.
• 1 Feedsfarm feed
• 1 Blogdigger search feed
• 1 Plazoo search feed
• 1 Blogmarks tag feed
• 1 LookSmart search feed.
• 1 WiredNews search feed.
• 1 blogg.de tag feed.

OK, that’s only 40 feeds. Since I last wrote I have actually dropped three feeds that we no longer use. In a few days, I plan to add a few more from our new forum. This is the great thing about feeds; you can add and remove feeds easily in a news reader to get just the information you want to do your job right now.

I hope these are helpful to you. A lot of the tools we use in our business, like Basecamp and Mailroom, can apply to almost any business. Maybe you can use them in your own!

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How are you using feeds to run your business? Write your story on your blog, tag it ‘imanagebyfeeds’ and we’ll link to it from our blog here.

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The folks at “37signals” mentioned Sproutit Mailroom today:

Took a look at this nice review of SproutIt. Jason said, “Def a cool product. really nice idea. very niche and very useful.” (from Fly on the wall (week of March 10) – Signal vs. Noise)

I’ve been looking at their new product Campfire as well. It’s an interesting approach to chat. I’m exploring ways we can use it to better connect with our customers.

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just a few books that we are reading.

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There is something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for a while. In fact, its a big part of why I personally wanted to do Sproutit. I’ve never been able to express it well enough before, but after some feedback I’ve had since DEMO, I think I finally have the words. So here goes…

Here is the simple fact: business software costs too much for small business. And there is nothing the big software companies can do to fix it. They can’t drop the enough features, they can’t reduce the price enough. That’s because it’s not so much the cost of the software that is the problem—its the cost of maintenance.

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