Jitbit Blogs

How we nearly lost our domain (and how you can prevent this)

TL:DR version when we transferred our domain to NameCheap during the GoDaddy SOPA boycott NameCheap has silently changed our domain's main contact email to "support@namecheap.com" (wtf?), so we were not getting verification emails from ICANN, so ICANN has blocked our domain. Watch out.

Today our domain name ("jitbit.com") went down for nearly 30 minutes. Our website and all our hosted apps, including the hosted version of our help desk ticketing system were inaccessible (our hosted customers access the app using "xxxxx.jitbit.com" URLs). Here's what happened.

How to apologize to a customer

As customer support engineers we have to apologize a lot. This is probably what we do most often. When I was just starting out in customer support it was the hardest thing for me to figure out. When a customer is upset, angry or furious — what do you do to make things right? Simply solving the issue was never enough. I was struggling to find the answer for a long time and I think I finally found it - after years of working in customer support and developing a helpdesk ticketing system. The right apology can work magic. An apology is a chance to convert a disappointed customer into a loyal customer if you know how to handle it right.

Amazing customer support defined

You probably already know that providing great customer support should be a top priority. What exactly an amazing customer support experience is? Over the years of answering support tickets and developing a helpdesk ticketing system, we figured out what works and what doesn’t and this is my attempt to give a definition of a “great customer support interaction”.

A single most effective SaaS email follow-up you're probably not using yet

Email follow-ups are a growing trend in SaaS startups community — every successful founder I’ve met swears by it. At Jitbit we are no exception. Over the course of last two years we’ve sent thousands of emails to customers and prospects.

We’ve tried different types of follow-ups with different sequences — pretty much the same things that everyone else is doing. But lately I’ve come up with a follow-up that is five times more effective than anything else we’ve tried.

Setting up a low-memory email alert on a Windows server

Since most of our customers are helpdesk teams and IT-support departments, we will sometimes publish useful tips for IT pros on this blog.

This is how you set up a low-memory email alert on a Windows 2012 Server:

[Jitbit News] Hosted Helpdesk downtime post-mortem

Our hosted help desk app was down for more than half an hour today. The outage affected all the services including the email-pickup modules and the web-app. During the outage anyone accessing the helpdesk app was getting a 503 "Service unavailable" error.

Startup hacks we learned in 2013

When I first started my company 7 years ago I thought running a software startup is 80% about writing software. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the other way around. Coding takes only about 20%. The remaining 80% is marketing, team-management, SEO, product management, strategy, taxes/accounting, customer support, hiring/firing and a hundred other things a typical programmer knows nothing about. And likes nothing about - to an average programmer most of these activities are dull and boring.

Great customer support improves metrics: the numbers

Let’s be honest, we put marketing and development first and everything else second. Despite the overall positive trend, customer support is still an afterthought for most small SaaS companies and that is a huge mistake.

I know, the only thing that could convince founders to do something nowadays is numbers and data, which is perfectly fine. That is exactly what I’m going to do – I’m going to use numbers to convince you to invest in customer support

Making churn an actionable metric

By now, everyone probably knows that the churn rate is one of the most important metrics you can track in a SaaS app. It’s a perfectly good metric apart from one thing – it’s not very actionable.

When we talk about, say, “new customers per month”, it’s perfectly clear what we need to do to increase that number: we need to get more people into the funnel or optimize the funnel itself, right? Things are not that obvious when we deal with the churn rate.

My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

In February 2013 Amy Hoy has shut down "Charm" - her web-based help desk app. The primary reason for the shutdown was high availability requirement (since downtime is not an option for a helpdesk app) and the product becoming too demanding in terms of server architecture and monthly bills. To sum up - it stopped being fun and became an engineering PITA.

older newer