What Do Digipede and FreshBooks Have In Common?

I saw a post about going the extra mile by Josh Catone at Read/WriteWeb, and I wanted to give credit to one of my colleagues. Josh recounted the story that Oceanic had with FreshBooks, and notes the importance of good customer service.

I made a reference to this the other day, but I want to tell the whole story to give a hat tip to my colleague Nathan.

A couple of weeks ago, one our partners wanted to do some unsupported work with the Digipede Network. Matt Davey of Lab49 wanted to install the Digipede Network Developer Edition (which includes the server, an agent, and the SDK) on Vista. While we support Vista for the agent and the SDK, we hadn't yet upgraded our server installs to work with IIS 7 on Vista (not a problem, since most customers run our Server on Server 2003).

When Matt had a problem with the install (predictably), he contacted my colleague Nathan Trueblood. Rather than tell a valuable partner that we don't support that configuration yet, Nathan took time to figure out how to make things work for Matt. He could have said "Just install a VM and run it in there," he could have told him to wait a couple of months, he could have done a lot of other things.

Instead, he went the extra mile. He tweaked an install, and even had to use LogMeIn to help configure things properly on Matt's machine.

Matt loved it: "I have to say digipede probably have the best customer support in the world. " He also went on to create a very cool LINQ/Digipede sample.

As Josh at Read/WriteWeb put it:

But doing the little things that allow you to form a connection with your customers on a personal level can score you a lot of capital with them.

Good job, Nathan.