Done!

After six long years, I get a piece of paper.

Joel Spolsky on Remarkable Customer Service

"As a bootstrapped software company, Fog Creek couldn’t afford to hire customer service people for the first couple of years, so Michael and I did it ourselves. The time we spent helping customers took away from improving our software, but we learned a lot and now we have a much better customer service operation.

Here are seven things we learned about providing remarkable customer service. I’m using the word remarkable literally—the goal is to provide customer service so good that people remark."

This is a remarkably excellent article, even amongst Joel's generally great articles. If I ever start a company, I'm going to take a hard look again at each of these principles. Some of them just make sense, and it makes no sense to me why companies nickel-and-dime when they will certainly lose more business that way.

I do slightly disagree with one point of his: he argues, in regard to the notion of avoiding outsourced service droids, that "Somehow, the phone companies and the cable companies and the ISPs just don’t understand this equation." While in some cases this is true, one must also realize that phone/cable companies have to deal with the same request that is no fault of their own, day in and day out. That said, if a company has droids, I think they should ensure they have proper resolution mechanisms so that problems that propagate up are actually fixed. Alas, it always seems to be one extreme or the other, and more recently towards the worse side.

PayPal will take your bank account information!?

The above screen is what you get when you add a bank account to PayPal (to transfer money in and out). I'm traditionally not a huge fan of adding accounts to PayPal, but I had some money in it, and my checking account doesn't have that much, so it should be safe, right? That said, this screen disturbs me tremendously. PayPal is willing to take my bank account login and verify my account for me. Despite every bank telling you not to tell anyone your password, period. Despite my bank account having extra verification. Unsurprisingly, I went with Option 2. Too bad there aren't other convenient ways of exchanging money internationally...