37 Signals

Several months back, we at LogicMaze revolutionized how we manage our projects when we started using Basecamp. Since we started using it, it's made all of us more organized and made my job a good deal easier.

Not a day has gone by where anyone in this office has doubted the positive impact Basecamp and Highrise (another product of 37 Signals) have had on our business. And I can't think of any hurtles in project management that the two programs combined couldn't easily help us jump. If there were any insurmountable project management issues for which we couldn't find a solution in Basecamp or Highrise, well there's Backpack and Campfire, which we don't use here, but I'm sure are just as useful.

Last Friday, something we haven't seen in the entire time we've used Basecamp: it went down. Any previous lapse in service has lasted a matter of minutes. 10 minutes of downtime, then you're back up and running with a message at the top of your dashboard explaining what happened. They don't need to do that, but they do. Why not? It only takes a minute to let your clients know what's up when you've got a way to send the message to everyone at once.

So on Friday, Basecamp went down for something like 2 and a half hours. No big deal. Kind of a bummer, but honestly, an excuse to be slightly less productive for a little bit.

As soon as Basecamp was back up and running, 37 Signals posted a message letting everyone know what was up. They also posted a message on their blog.

... we still want to compensate anyone who felt they were negatively affected in their work because of this outage. Please write support(at)37signals.com (and include your application URL) and we’ll get that taken care of.

Pretty classy. For a two-hour outage. We're not talking about being out of commission for an entire day.

Cody emailed them and replied:

I want you guys to tell everyone who actually wants compensation to sit and spin and bcc me on the emails. Ha just kidding, this product has revolutionized our business and if the worst thing that comes from it is we have to play with our remote control helicopters for 2 hours on a Friday then I should be paying you more. (Ok that was just kidding as well, I don't really want to pay you more!!!!!

Thanks for everything.

Shortly after that, he received a personal email reply (they personally dealt with each email that came in about the outage):

Thanks Cody. You are awesome.

I'd still love to comp your account for a month of service. What's your URL?

- Sarah

Thank you, Sarah. We really appreciate it. We gave her our URL and got our comped month. But she did one better and saw that we had a Highrise account and credited that too!

Why? She didn't have to since we were already (and still are) very satisfied customers. She did it because she (and the whole 37 Signals team) understand the importance of taking care of all of your customers. Make the angry ones happy again and keep the happy ones even happier.

That's how you turn customers into evangelists. We at LogicMaze already were evangelists. We've suggested the 37 Signals arsenal to anyone that would listen and will continue to do so. What happened last week just gave us even more reason.