Gordon Murray

In the last couple of weeks I have been working with a new customer to come on board with eWrite using our email marketing software called eWrite Messenger. Today I received an email letting me know that they would like to stop using our software to return to a previous method of emailing their customers each month.

Despite a great track record with our existing customers and a lot of work on my part to resolve the situation our software failed this company. They had ended a contract with a leading email marketing company and began to use eWrite Messenger.

From the outset there were problems across the board. Layout of the email was the first problem. I recreated the email ensuring it looked identical but with far less HTML. The next problem was that many people didn’t seem to be getting the emails despite being received in all the tests. I started from scratch with the programming and procedures to send emails too, relearning all what I thought I already knew about sending emails the proper way and not being labelled as spam. I took many steps to make sure the email got into the recipients inboxes and when I did the formatting of the email was fecked once again. This formatting problem was caused by something very very small, line breaks in the email headers.  This was very frustrating considering all the tests to my toolbox of hotmail, gmail, eircom, yahoo and more email addresses all landed and displayed fine.

I recorded the measures I took to ensure the emails were received and I will post them up in my next post, hopefully they may be of use to others in a similar situation. I received plenty of great help and tips from a few people, especially some of the Blacknight staff.

I learned many things from this experience. Im writing about it here because I set up this blog with the intention of writing about the good stuff and the bad stuff as I develop eWrite. Losing a customer like this is not a good feeling and all the worse because not only are they a great business, the kind of customers everyone wants to have, but they are also a family led business which were neighbours growing up.

I’ve gone through embarrassment and plenty of anger with myself over this.  Much of the anger was directed at the customers hosting company who were nowhere to be found when I needed answers and assistance, their online support was fecked too.

The email from the company today to end our service wasn’t out of the blue, I could see it coming.  I know one thing for sure after this, when all tests are done and work, test some more, it could save you losing a valued customer. I won’t be losing any customers again.

I’ve never been so acutely aware of the value of great customer service. When I needed answers or expertise the expected avenues weren’t available. I’ve decided that with our own software the work is not only in creating great software that fulfils a need or solves a problem for the user but also to be there in spades any time they need support.

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un-development by Gordon Murray