First up, Customer Service is the New Marketing. The panel featured, among others, Nick Wilder of 30boxes and Heather Champ of flickr. I learned a lot from this one. The topic was definitely geared towards offering support for products or a web-based service, but a lot of the basic principles apply to a company like us that’s selling services. A few of the points that really connected with me:

• From Zappos (a huge online retail store) - each new employee takes a 4 week orientation course on the culture of the company. Two of those weeks are spent answering customer service calls - and this goes for the designers to the lawyers to the CFO. It forces new hires to really empathize with the customer from day one.
• 30boxes’ approach is to use web-based forums exclusively for support and offer no support by email. It’s worked for them - in Nick’s former company, Webshots, support was handled by email alone and as a result 50% (yes… 50%!) of all customer issues never got resolved. Now, looking at 30boxes, 50% of all customer issues are resolved by other customers on the forums. Double the success while only spending 4 to 6 hours per week on customer support for an active user base of about 30000. Not bad.
• And a great tip that came from a comment by a Google Reader developer in the audience - monitoring the blogosphere for mentions of your company or product can allow you to deal with complaints/criticism on the blog(s) in a very direct and transparent way. A great way to turn critics into fans.

The second session, entitled Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer, kind of picked up where the first left off… or at least dovetailed it nicely.  On the panel were Shaun Inman (Mint), John Gruber (various projects) and Nick Bradbury (FeedDemon, Homesite and TopStyle).  Customer support was a recurring theme in this panel, especially when the topic of how these relatively small applications and compete against the big boys came up.  The main advantage that Nick and Shaun pointed out was that indie developers are able to respond much more quickly to their customers - whether it’s fixing bugs, adding features or just general customer support.  Another factor that was mentioned was that the indies generally have more attention to detail, design and aesthetics.  I don’t know if that’s really true or not, but in terms of the panelists in this session I would tend to agree.

Unfortunately today’s schedule ends here. We had to high tail it out of Will Wright’s fascinating keynote to catch our flight back home. That meant missing a couple of afternoon sessions… but more importantly we missed the night’s open-bar parties. That’s the pits.

See y’all in Ottawa.