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Fresh Books
“WE WOULDN’T DO it if it didn’t make business sense.”
That statement defined customer engagement for me. It was spoken by Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks, an online invoicing, time-tracking, and expense service. I was on a marketing panel with him last year and I was spewing my normal sermon about how you need to build relationships, when he interrupted me with that statement. I loved it. Meaning at the end of the day, as a business you have to justify financially your engagement efforts. FreshBooks is not only able to see that it helped their bottom line, the execs are experts at it.
In 2008, company reps famously drove an RV from the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, Florida, all the way to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. They made this trip, in this way, so that they could meet as many of their users during the trip as possible and spread the word about their company. They stopped along the way and took people out for dinner. They made videos during the entire trip and uploaded them to YouTube.
But it’s not the big public things that FreshBooks reps do that makes me want to sing their praises—it’s the individual efforts that make them stand out. For example:
• Michelle Wolverton, a Virtual Assistant based out of Boston, tweeted about being stood up on a date. FreshBooks reps responded, “We’d never stand you up.” That’s already pretty sweet—coming from a brand; kind of unexpected. But, the next day, they sent her flowers—something not terribly common coming from a web app you pay a monthly bill for—and made a friend for life. Michelle still screams her love of them from the rooftop and they’d still never stand her up!99
• A while ago, Mike McDerment wrote a blog post mentioning some new flavors of Triscuits. Jonathon, a customer of theirs, commented on the blog post, joking that they shouldn’t talk about things he can’t pick up in his home in Fiji. The FreshBooks team felt for Jonathon, so they took the liberty of sending him a couple boxes of Triscuits. He was excited when he received them. So excited, in fact, that he wrote a feature article in the Fiji Times titled “Separating the good buzz from the bad,” about FreshBooks and a handful of other businesses with outstanding service that had touched him.100
Even the new hire process focuses on support. McDerment told me:
Everyone who starts at FreshBooks—no matter their role, marketing, VP, CEO—starts by doing customer support for at least two months. There’s no better way to get to know the product and our customers than talking to them and answering questions. Four days a week, a new hire’s job is to pick up the phone, answer e-mail, and respond to forum posts.
When someone graduates from support, he or she is still responsible for one day on support about once every three weeks or so. We have a core support team every day built up of our support team and members of other teams assigned to do support for the day. All their other tasks are put on hold until the next day.101
FreshBooks is active on Twitter @freshbooks as well, both with personality and support for customers, all out in the open. So, as Mike said, treating your customers well is good for business.
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