I spend a lot of time at work thinking about ways to improve the ways our clients communicate with their customers. This can mean things like how we assemble emails, what sorts of subject lines we use, it can mean making sure that unsubcribe links are clear, and that the customer feels in control of the communication they recieve, it can mean lots of different things, but the end goal is the same – making sure that the user feels like a valued customer, who has a relationship with our client’s brand. (You’ll have to forgive the lapse into marketing speak there – it’s quite hard to talk about the less directly technical side of what I do without sounding like a bit of a cock.) Because if we make our clients customers happy, they spend money with the client, and then the client spends money with us, and I get paid. So I spend time thinking about digital communications, and how we can use new technology to improve things.
I have just been blown away by one of our suppliers. They’ve put all my work in the shade with a five minute job. We use 37signals Basecamp as our project management tool of choice, and we have done for almost as long as the company has existed. And they’ve just sent us a personal note to thank us for it. A hand written, personal note. We’re one of their longest standing commercial customers, and one of them has taken the time to sit down and write us a personal note to thank us for that.
One worth remembering, I think.