This Company Run By Real Humans
Most companies have people working at them, but how many companies have people that are truly engaged?
At my company, Brinkster - a web hosting co, we talk to hundreds of people a day through our live chat support system. Live chat is the single best thing to come to customer support since the dawn of the Internet. It allows almost instant answers to customers problems.
At the end of each live chat session our customers are asked to answer a quick survey about there experience. A few days ago a customer had this to say...
"Louise is a one woman customer service wrecking machine. She is taking travesties and turning them into sunshine... all with the click of a mouse and a wonderful spirit of care and compassion. Much thanks and appreciation!
"
In today's world where everything has a shortcut and a way around it, it can sometimes feel that robots are running the companies that we do business with instead of real people. By providing real service, from real people, solving real problems without cookie cutter solutions customers will feel that they are truly valued. And when customers feel truly valued they will become a live advertisement by simply sharing their experience.
I believe that in today's world we are seeing a shifting of the pendulum in many different areas. Customer service is one of them. As people have less money to spend and are a lot more picky about where they spend it, they are starting to choose companies that are run by real humans.
- Jared (Follow me on Twitter - @JaredStauffer)
Br.st is Giving Away 21 Wii Systems & 4 MacBook Pros
Announcing the Br.st 25 Days of Christmas Giveaway!
Last week we launched br.st. We worked hard to make sure it was the best place to experience Twitter on the net. We did not get the press coverage we anticipated. So, to get the word out we decided instead of buying advertising we would do a giveaway contest and give the money in the form of prizes to our users.
We are giving away 21 Nintendo Wii game systems every day (except Fridays) from December 1st through December 24th. AND we are giving away 4 MacBook Pros (13 inch) every Friday in December.
It is pretty simple to enter: login to br.st, click the Wii or MacBook button on the right sidebar, submit the tweet, and you are entered! You can enter each giveaway up to five (5) times per day. And you have to re-enter the contest every day for the Nintendo Wii and every week for the MacBook Pro.
Read the main giveaway page, the FAQs, and the rules. Here's to hoping you win!
Today br.st was Released
Today br.st was released. This project is near and dear to my heart. I conceived the original idea for br.st back in July as a leading URL shortener and then with my team evolved in to the killer twitter client it is today over the last several months.
Huge kudos go out to my team at @brinkster for help in designing and developing this tool: Nat, Clint, August, Jason and Marc.
Br.st truly has some unique features that we are very proud of. It is the first web based Twitter client to auto shorten URLs as you type them. It is the only Twitter client to have Text Shortening (the feature loved by all and derided by English majors). You can share images or files, see geo tags in a google map, view advanced stats on links/images/files shared. It has an awesome open conversation feature that works like no other Twitter client. AND you can email in from your mobile phone images to post and a tweet in the subject line!
See screenshots of all of these cool features here: http://br.st/features.aspx.