Davide Di Cillo

What I learned doing support for SyncPad

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

About a week ago we launched SyncPad, the very first iPad whiteboard app for remote collaboration. This was the first time we released a ten-dollar application, and things were different than usual. Here are a few of the things I learned:

• They will e-mail you: For most of our previous applications, most of the feedback we received was via reviews on the App Store, but when it comes to a business-oriented application that cost $9.99, expect to receive e-mails. Luckily for us, most of them were very nice e-mails with positive comments and a lot of suggestions on how to improve our product.
• Users love great human support: It may sound like an obvious thing, but it’s not. A lot of companies still don’t understand the value of great support. Good support solves problems. Great support creates evangelists and enthusiasts. Here are two examples:
  

  Thanks for the email, I know you guys are busy, taking the time to send an email was enough for me to buy your software. I’ll let you know how it goes. Try to keep the human touch as a simple email went a long way.
  Regards,
  Dennis

  or

  That is great to hear.
  I also want to let you know I appreciate your feed back and will be sure to mention that in a positive way when I rate the app on iTunes.
  I know it is not much, but so few developers reply it is great to find one that does!
  Brian *****

  Try to reply to all the customers within 3-4 hours;  they will love it!

• Be yourself: If you are not a corporation, don’t reply to your customers like one. If your users see that on the other side of the e-mail there is a person who cares, their attitude will immediately change, and they will start caring more about your product. They will feel as if they are supporting you instead of feeling as if they just bought a product from Walmart.
• Learn from your users: When we came up with the idea for SyncPad, I mostly envisioned how I would use it myself. Well, apparently that’s not how our users want to use it, and we couldn’t ignore that. Most of the people who contacted us are using, or planning to use, SyncPad more for presentations than actual collaboration sessions, and they had a specific set of features to improve the app.

  It’s important to know how to say “no” to your customers, because you can’t add every requested feature, but at the same time you need to know when you just have to follow their lead. In our case, we took those features we thought would make SyncPad a much better product, and you will see them in version 1.1.

Being on the front-line of support really connects you with your users. I’d recommend that anyone with a startup or a product try it for at least one week, and I assure you that you will learn more in that week of dialoging with your users than in months of researching.

For more info about SyncPad visit mySyncPad.com
or download SyncPad from the AppStore

Tags: iOS, iOS Applications, SyncPad
Posted in Apple, Business | 1 Comment »