Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

Re:Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consist... by RickS on Monday December 12, 2016 @01:14AM (#13155997)

Here's an internal facing one: We send an automated greeting from the CEO as part of onboarding, but he actually sees and replies to every customer response, in both english and spanish, and forwards the more heartwarming ones on to the entire office.

It's pretty cool to get a handful of emails every day from actual customers who are very grateful for the work we do.

It also changed my opinion on the "canned CEO greeting". As someone who knows how those are built, they always struck me as annoying and disingenuous sales gimmicks, but our customers are significantly less tech savvy, and a huge number take the correspondence at face value and actually start a real conversation with the CEO.

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Re:Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consist... by mercer on Monday December 12, 2016 @03:42AM (#13156586)

I generally respond rather negatively to automated emails or chat messages that seem human but are not, and I've been thinking of how I would approach this if I had a company big enough that automatic greetings are 'necessary' (or desirable, at least).

Perhaps one solution is to use a clearly non-human company 'avatar' character specifically for some of these interactions? A robot or pet character?

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Re:Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consist... by reustle on Monday December 12, 2016 @05:48AM (#13157162)

A few saas products do this and I love it. It feels honest.

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Re:Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consist... by mercer on Monday December 12, 2016 @06:25AM (#13157291)

I rather like Trello's little dog informing me of updates.

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Re:Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consist... by paleite on Monday December 12, 2016 @08:32AM (#13157890)

How about a clip?

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Re:Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consist... by x97256 on Monday December 12, 2016 @12:58PM (#13160130)

only if it has giant eyeballs and doesn't disappear no matter how hard you try to make it go away... Otherwise, it just seems disingenuous.

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Re:Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consist... by mercer on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @09:28AM (#13229320)

Or perhaps some purple creature?

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Re:Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consist... by morgante on Monday December 12, 2016 @07:04AM (#13157452)

I think the key here is that replies actually have to go to the CEO.

I've seen way too many companies implement this where any replies are actually just sent into normal support channels.

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Re:Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consist... by Ntrails on Monday December 12, 2016 @08:28AM (#13157873)

exactly - i don't care that it's a canned initial email from the CEO if I can reply to him directly.

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Re:Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consist... by pcarmichael on Monday December 12, 2016 @01:09PM (#13160230)

I did the same for new account registrations on my site. The humorous side effect was actually LinkedIn. That whole thing where you can auto invite everyone on your contact list... led to me getting several connection invites a day from users I had never personally met.

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