Sticker Mule is a California startup with an amazing birth story. It involves two brothers and a family friend who's their sole angel investor. That investor is also their 70-year-old godfather, a long-retired executive eager to tackle a new project. Without even knowing what the business would be, the small team assembled funding, began development of a website, fleshed out their business plan, and staffed their company-in that order.
Several weeks after forming the company, the team still hadn't settled on a product line. Eventually, over drinks, they decided stickers would be fun to make. Shortly thereafter, work was underway to build Sticker Mule: the easiest way to buy custom stickers.
They recruited another close friend to design the site and connected with a Java programmer who proceeded to teach herself Ruby on Rails. The team designed every detail of the design and functionality of the site during a 6-week buildout and launch. Today they are at ten employees and counting-and already awaiting additional manufacturing equipment from abroad.
Customer Service as a Marketing Tool
"Word of mouth is our secret weapon," says Anthony Thomas, one of the co-founders.. "A huge percentage of our business comes through our existing customers. So, of course, we put a lot of time and effort into customer service. We think of every touchpoint with a customer as an opportunity to deepen the relationship, keep existing customers happy, and grow new sales. With this philosophy, we have dramatically lowered our marketing costs-in fact, we've had almost none since our launch. We're using customer service and support as a competitive advantage."
The Competitive Advantage of Service
"Our goal is to be known for having extremely happy customers. That means obsessing over every detail of their experience. We want our customers to be able to order hassle free, expect the highest quality product, and get all the help they need from our team. We've learned first hand that this philosophy works to grow your business. It makes you happier running it, too."
Whole Company Support
"One of the primary reasons Assistly works so well for us is the pricing-everyone in the company can participate fully without penalties-and all of us do participate. We love the hourly pricing because we can use Assistly to the fullest. With our first software product, we had to purchase licenses per seat, and so we couldn't share information, links to tickets, and easily communicate what people were saying. It wasn't transparent. Now, customer service is a big information center for all our employees. We don't have any confusion or dropped issues with Assistly."
Assistly for Awesome Customer Service and Support
"We expect to grow very fast over the next few years, and we know how important it will be to stay on top of customer service and support. The first platform we tried felt unfinished and didn't have the power we needed. We're loving Assistly's features and tools, and there was no learning curve. Google Apps integration made it easy to install, provision, and access Assistly."
Assistly's Many Benefits
"With our philosophy of progressive customer service, Assistly is the perfect choice. It's easy to customize Assistly to suit our evolving needs. We can easily monitor our Facebook customers, and the Twitter integration is so good that I ditched Twitter for Mac. We're able to collaborate company-wide and offer customer service pretty much around the clock. All of us regularly check in and answer customer requests, and now that we found Assistly we are confident that customer service will keep up with demand. We couldn't be happier."
"Assistly is the most significant improvement on business email since Gmail and Google Apps. Assistly is just a dream come true."