ExpanDrive

Along with making awesome software, we strive to provide the highest quality support to all of our customers. From the beginning, we’ve done 100% developer based support. We, the developers, are held directly accountable and are pushed by our users for new features and fixes.

For the first year, all support traffic ran through support@sftpdrive.com. You could usually expect a response within a few minutes [or worst, a few hours]. People love a quick response from the lead developer of a product they just shelled out $39 for. Predictably, as the volume of e-mail grew, we had to switch over to some method that would allow us to consolidate some of this effort.

Next came the Magnetk Support Forum. Forum-based support works great. We avoid answering the same questions by making public all our previous support interactions. Users help each other and answer questions for us. Some users really buy into the forum and provide all sorts of interesting tips and tricks that we wouldn’t have thought of on our own. That’s awesome. In addition, a forum builds a searchable ad-hoc-knowledge-base, where anyone can search for an answer without ever having to ask the question. But it’s not some super-lame knowledge base where some chump in the “support” department decided what questions you wanted answers to. Man, I hate corporate knowledge bases.

Still, the forum isn’t perfect. The idea of a message board really turns some people off, and it is hard categorize or organize support in any meaningful way. Enter Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction is a great small company who is squarely focused on helping companies like Magnetk provide support to their customers. Get Satisfaction reduces the amount of friction required for a user to ask a question and makes it even easier to receive notifcations of a response.

Now our users can also quickly follow the responses and progress of a problem they also have by clicking the “I have this problem, too!” button. Get Satisfaction also excels in helping categorize Questions, Ideas, Problems, or pure discussion. In addition, it provides some more of that modern-web-2.0-application feel that most of our customers have come to really appreciate in other places. I must admit, it’ll be nice to be able to tag posts with meaningful information so we can help build up a good search index later on.

Get Satisfaction is being used successfully by hundreds of companies: Timbuk2, Twitter and Pownce are just some of our favorites. They have a huge number of active users providing support to each other and to the companies. I have a feeling this will work great.