TechCrunch have just announced the nominees for the Europa awards, celebrating the European tech scene, and we're very delighted to be nominated in the Best Enterprise / B2B Startup category.
It's a tough category with some other excellent web applications, including ones we even use ourselves like Zendesk.
We'd love it if all our users could support us by voting in the awards, and thank you to those of you who already have. We appreciate it.
Thank you to everybody who filled in our recent Freelancer Report 2009 Survey.
We'll be publishing the results once we've had a chance to crunch the numbers, but in the meantime here are the winners of the prize draw.
Drum roll please...
Well done guys!
We recently introduced a new and improved customer support service, which is enabling us to better respond to customer support requests, and even integrates with Get Satisfaction.
So, far be it for us to disagree with Mick Jagger, but we're trying our level best to make sure you can always "get what you want".
If you think we're doing a good job, then we've got a little favour to ask. FreeAgent has entered into the 2009 Software Satisfaction Awards under the categories:
and we would be eternally grateful if you could take a moment to fill in the survey.
Due to popular demand, we've now introduced the option of paying annually for your FreeAgent subscription, with the juicy worm of getting 12 months subscription for the price of 10. Your new annual subscription will take off from the next payment due date so you won't lose out on the current month.
To change your subscription type, click My Account and then change your payment method.
We're going to make some changes to the way invoices and emails are handled in coming releases, which will see us tackle some oft-requested features like email templates and late payment reminders.
To kick things off, we're reworking recurring invoices.
To create a recurring invoice you now first create a Recurring Invoice Profile which defines the invoice details, template and amount as well as when the individual invoices will be created. This in turn generates the invoices, and optionally emails them out automatically.
Separating the recurring profiles from the invoices themselves means it's now a lot easier to go back and edit individual invoices or the profile itself.
All the best,
Roan & The Team at FreeAgent Central.
We've been big fans of "Customer Support Community" service Get Satisfaction since we started using it last year. It's been criticised for blurring the boundaries between official customer support and customer discussion, but for companies who do opt-in, it's an excellent opportunity to create a community of users openly and transparently discussing their product.
It's allowed us to have some great discussions on what's right, what's wrong and what people would like to see from FreeAgent in the future.
There is one minor catch with Get Satisfaction and that's the amount of, how can I delicately put this, "noise". One of its appealing qualities is the ability for anybody to chip in to a conversation, which often means that another FreeAgent user or partner is able to answer a question or help with a problem. This is brilliant, but there are occasions when the volume of discussion isn't conducive to swift and decisive customer support. Despite our commitment to excellent customer satisfaction there are occasions when topics slip through the cracks or we don't respond as quickly as we should.
Get Satisfaction has released a number of tools that help companies manage outstanding issues and topics, but it still excels as a forum for sharing ideas and thoughts, rather than one-to-one resolution of a specific, possibly sensitive, problem.
To fill that gap, we recently adopted ZenDesk as our official helpdesk, and any emails sent to support@freeagentcentral.com automatically raise tickets there. This allows us to do a couple of things that weren't possible with just Get Satisfaction:
So, we have two excellent systems working in parallel, with one obvious flaw: many problems are initially raised on Get Satisfaction that should really be dealt with privately in ZenDesk.
This hasn't been a major issue for us thus far, but it does create an overhead when we have to tell people to email support where we can deal with their problem better.
The great news is that ZenDesk and Get Satisfaction have been working on an integration that will allow a seamless transfer of Get Satisfaction topics into ZenDesk tickets. It's currently only in Beta but we've been trying it out for the last few days and it works great!
The integration allows us to take a topic raised in Get Satisfaction and escalate this into ZenDesk where it is assigned to a member of the team, who can then respond privately to the user, improving dedicated one-to-one customer service when it's needed.
You can optionally repost all updates back to Get Satisfaction but we've decided against this, although being able to synchronise the status of a problem between the two systems is a nice touch that benefits other users tracking the problem on Get Satisfaction.
We're already seeing the benefit of this, and we think it will improve our customer support a lot so well done to the Get Satisfaction and ZenDesk teams.
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