Rypple is a product oriented company so it’s essential to get people excited about our product. We are also often praised for our customer service. Is it possible to maintain this high level of user satisfaction with both our customer service and product quality? Can a company, especially during its early stages, afford to focus on both of these battleground? Here at Rypple, we believe we can do both.

Zappos is a great example of a customer service driven company. They rely on other companies for products they sell but Zappos customers can call them at any time and they will experience a friendly, expedient, and efficient service. Not to mention their unmatched free shipping and free 365-day return policy. On the other hand, have you tried calling Google after your Gmail inbox became sluggish? Gmail became the fastest growing online email offering because it simply beat the competition by its unmatched performance, simplicity, and massive storage. Unless you pay for the corporate edition, however, you will have a hard time reaching their representatives over the phone.

I’d like to share a personal story to show you how we at Rypple imagine offering a great customer service while building the best product.

I joined Rypple in May 2008. One of the first features I implemented was an AJAX-based auto-complete widget. It was an elegant solution that performed admirably during my benchmark testing. I was proud of it! We wanted to prove our design quickly so we immediately got it out to our alpha user base. The following day I heard that an executive at our alpha site could not use my widget at all. You can imagine my utter disbelief and embarrassment. So, my first customer support call at Rypple was directly with this executive. I apologized and tried to understand what happened. I listened. And I discovered that I did not handle a simple copy and paste use case properly. Doh! I learned plenty of other things, too. After the call, I summarized what I’d heard and explicitly outlined follow-up action items. I emailed those to my team and the concerned party. The next day I released a fix for what seemed like a blunder in hindsight.

That insight has taught us a number of lessons:

I kept reaching out to our alpha users every day. I would set aside time every morning to reach out to all alpha users who had used our service the day before. We made sure all developers did this. We listened. We showed that we cared. We learned to move our developer egos out of the way.
• The most important lessons came when we tried to understand what went wrong. We started improving quickly. We completely revamped our architecture, front-end design, and our overall service offering in the following months. This culminated in Rypple’s launch in less than 6 months after I joined the company. It proved our product decisions were dead-on.
• We were guided by what we learned through customer service. Talk about a cheap way to perform user-centered design!

We are a young company with a novel product idea. We still have a long way to go before Rypple becomes a great and lasting success. This is why we welcome your feedback! Because, after all, …

A little feedback goes a long way.

(Don’t forget that you can connect with us using our Get Satisfaction forum, email us at support@rypple.com or call us at 1-888-iRYPPLE.)