Customer service: Why don’t we just ask them what they think?

by Jim Hitch, Director of Community | March 21st, 2011 | 2 Comments »

If you’ve called our support line lately, you may have answered a couple of questions for us.

One of our main goals here at Emma is to take care of our customers — we want to make them happy with everything we do. From the features we build to our online help resources to the way we answer the phone, we want working with Emma to be a great experience. In fact, we go so far as to say we want to have the happiest, most loyal customer community on the planet. Pretty big idea, huh?

So we asked ourselves how we thought things were going on a recent chilly Nashville afternoon. It probably went something like this, actually, “Hey, how are we doing on that happy, loyal customer thing?”

Our Community support team, answering (and asking) questions.

And then we thought, what better way to find out than ask our customers. So that’s just what we did. Our Community team began to ask every customer on the phone, “What’s a great Emma experience you’ve had? And what’s one that’s not so great, so we can improve?” We had some fantastic conversations and got some interesting answers.

A bit of what we’ve learned so far:

• We heard that we need to get better at offering resources for our more savvy users. And that the billing process could be easier. We said, “Can do.”
• We heard that sometimes it’s harder to get us on the phone than it should be. We said, “Good to know. We’re on it.” Then we updated our phone system.
• We heard that you can dream up things aesthetically that you just can’t do with our campaign editor. We responded, “We agree, and that’s huge. We’re putting our best heads and everything we’ve got at that one.”

One of the best answers to the question of what we can improve, though, was “none.” Ahh, what a beautiful four-letter word. In fact, 21% of customers said “none.”

As for the great experience part, folks had a lot to say about the friendly way we take care of their problems, the overall ease-of-use of the application and the fantastic custom designs we’ve done for them. That was nice to hear because these are all things that we work hard on every single day.

What about you? Do you have a positive Emma experience to share? Or a negative one we could chat about and hopefully fix? Let us know in the comments or give me a call personally at 615.296.0818.

Following up on our earlier security breach

by Jim Hitch, Director of Community | September 21st, 2010 | 3 Comments »

About a week and a half ago, we reported details on a security breach at Emma that compromised the data of some of our customers. Today, we want to post a quick follow-up and share a few more details with you about what we’ve been working on since then and what’s next.

+ We’ve conducted more security audits both internally and with outside advisors, and those audits have come back clear.

+ We’ve continued round-the-clock monitoring of our systems to prevent any additional abuse.

+ We’ve kept working with customers whose lists were compromised, and we’ve posted some some education here on the blog for customers who’ve been creating new, more secure passwords.

+ We’ll be rolling out our new, more secure password system to all Emma customers in the near future.

+ And of course, we’ve continued with our standard security and data protection regimens. The safety of your data isn’t a goal we’ll ever just check off the list and be done with. Security here is always evolving, always improving, and you can always trust that it’s a top priority for every Emma staffer.

As always, don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any follow-up questions of your own.