Startup Customer Service

I upgraded this blog last week to WordPress 2.6. Prior to the upgrade I had been using a custom permalink structure. Upon upgrading from 2.5 to 2.6 the link structure would not display individual posts.

As I a result I changed my permalink structure to one of the defaults and my blog began displaying the posts correctly. Now I had changed my permalinks throughout the site.

I use Disqus the great full featured commenting system. Disqus essentially creates a forum area based on your post permalink for your comments. As I said I had just changed all my permalinks and my comments were now disconnected. My comments were effectively floating in the blogosphere.

I searched Google for a fix. I searched around on the Disqus site. David of the KnightKnetwork pointed me to this thread on the Disqus forums.

Apparently I was not the only one having this issue. In the thread Daniel Ha the founder of Disqus said,

“Please email help@disqus.com and we can, well, help. 🙂 “

I immediately sent an email as prescribed. My email basically said I upgraded WordPress and changed my permalink structure, Help! I sent the email at mid morning.

I received a reply at in the early afternoon from Jason Yan of Disqus. It said,

“Hi Franklin,
I’ve merged all your threads so they point to the new links.
Thanks,
Jason”

This was outstanding customer service. A while ago Marc Andreessen wrote several posts about startups. Startups are interesting entities. Building business processes from the ground up seems to be very challenging but very rewarding for the startup entrepreneur. Infrastructure needs to be built from the ground up. Customer service could be easily overlooked or handled very poorly.

I try many Web 2.0 Alphas and Betas and it seems the successful ones pay attention to the details. It is rare to find a good software product with poor customer service. Customer service is important to the end user.

I want to thank Jason Yan and the Disqus team for their prompt service.

I believe Disqus will be successful not only because of their great product but their great customer service as well.

In the world we know as Web 2.0 who is good at customer service? Who isn’t?

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