Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
Doing Things Right
It is rare that I make a supplier decision that makes me rave with happiness. It happens, but not often. This is one of those times.
The other day I blogged about choosing a project management system and my decision to go with Teamwork instead of ProjectPlace or Basecamp. Six days later I can report that Teamwork absolutely was the right decision – not only for the application, but for the team behind it.
In terms of functionality, there are a lot of things I like about Teamwork, but the things I love the most have nothing to do with managing projects. At the bottom of every page on my Teamwork site is a button that says Feedback/Suggestions. This isn’t just a form you fill out that disappears into the ether; it’s my feedback page. Every comment I make gets logged, timed, date stamped and posted there. And underneath every comment I make is Teamwork’s response to me. These people aren’t just filing away user feedback for some future user metrics calculation or later version rollout; they’re holding themselves accountable for responding to it.
I absolutely love that; it’s a real world, real value example of the transparency we all blather on and on about but so rarely see implemented in meaningful ways.
Way more than that, when these folks say “We take it all on board… seriously” they aren’t kidding. This morning at 9:06 I made a suggestion for a new feature. By noon, Dan Mackey had not only responded to me, but implemented my request:
As a product user, I’m really not sure what more I could ask for.
Alas, not everything is as flawless as Teamwork. Late last week Teamwork’s host, Hosting 365, suffered a denial of service attack and Teamwork was down for about two hours. Since I have quickly become a dedicated Teamwork junkie and am now using it to run my entire work life, I was on the phone to Teamwork in the first ten minutes. In the two hours that followed, I got two emails and a phone call to update me on the system status. That’s customer service – and I haven’t paid these people a single euro yet.
Today I caught up on some of my far-behind blog reading and read a post from Richard Hearne on another company doing things right: Intertrade Ireland is running around trying to get bloggers to raise the profile of Seedcorn, and managing to do it without pissing off the entire internet. Seedcorn’s got €280,000 for startups who are really going for it. I think Teamwork is a fantastic application with a huge potential audience. It’s an Irish Web 2.0 company with an actual, functioning revenue model, and I think they should enter.
The only thing that would make me happier is if they’d sign their feedback responses to me with “Lurve, Teamwork.”
25 Jun 2008
| In: Ireland + Technology |
Submit your “Lurve, Teamwork” request through the Feedback channel? At least then it’d get logged ;-)
27.06.2008, 7:46 amHi Sabrina,
Thanks for the kind words about us. I’m glad Teamwork is helping you out with your work and we look forward to all your feedback in the future and in the process helping to make it a better product.
Lurve,
22.09.2008, 12:15 pmTeamworkPM team
I agree with you about Teamworkpm. They have made me happy as well. I especially appreciate their realistic pricing (free LOL)!
05.10.2008, 7:53 pm