We’ve all that those customer services experiences where someone goes the extra mile for you (you’ve left your wallet in a cafe and they track you down to deliver it back to you; they ring you back after you book a performance to let you know that the guest artist is only appearing on the other night and do you want to swap your booking). Sadly, they are all too uncommon. But then they happen, it’s gold - remarkable really, in the true sense of the word - it causes you to remark. And it’s the sort of thing that breeds loyalty and again demonstrates that merely meeting people’s needs is not enough.
You get the same feeling when you encounter it with software. It happened to be twice this morning.
Drag-n-Drop Registration in MarsEdit - I’ve being using the Mac OS blogging client MarsEdit, liking it a lot, and decided to buy it. The registration dialog in the application is pretty standard: a button to go to this online store webpage and then fields for your name and serial number once you’ve purchased it. But then there was this: Highlight the registration details in the resulting purchase confirmation email and drag it to the dialog and it fills out the dialog’s files for you and advanced you onto the “all done” screen. No field-by-field copy and paste.
Running Applications in Spaces - Later, when I wanted to bind the MarsEdit application to one of my Spaces in Mac OS X, I clicked the “Add Application” button expecting to be dumping into the operation system Applications folder showing all my applications. But now in 10.5.3, you get a shortcut menu that first shows you all the running applications before offering you the full list. Nice. It’s probably more likely that the application I want is one I’m already using.
Both of these examples leave you with the feeling that the people responsible care. Both required extra detail to be designed and extra code to be written. But somehow that mattered more than getting me to do the work. That’s great customer service. That builds loyalty.
