codevader

Running Codevader for the last year has been really exciting and we’ve worked on some great projects with some awesome clients. One of those clients was a startup that has now hired the entire Codevader team, including myself.

So Codevader will not be taking on any more work. If you find your way to the Codevader website because you’re looking for a team to build you something, contact me anyway, since I know many other developers who are always looking for work.

What happens to CustomerFu? We’re licensing CustomerFu to Joerg Diekmann at These Lovely Days. He’ll be relaunching the site in the near future and will be operating it thereafter.

Our startup will be launching in public beta in November. We’re keeping the Codevader blog to post about Ruby and Rails stuff as we work on the project. The new project will also have its own non-technical, business-focused blog.

This blog has been really quiet for the last few months while all this was going down, but we hope to get back to more regular posting.

Finally we’ve gotten CustomerFu out the door and into a limited private beta.

If you would like to give CustomerFu a run in your company, please drop us a line at support@customerfu.com. We’re looking for people that will try this out with real complaints, real customers and real staff.

So the first question all my tech mates ask me when I tell them about CustomerFu is “So, its like a ticketing system?”

Sort of, but not really. CustomerFu is designed around the customer, not around a “ticket”. Customers are real, tickets are not. All complaints in the system are strongly tied to the customer that made them. There are no complicated ticket numbers to reference complaints with. You want to find a specific complaint? Then find the customer that made the complaint.

Why did we take this approach? Firstly, tickets are impersonal and hide the fact that this is a real customer you’re dealing with, with a real complaint. Secondly, outside tech and big business, the ticket terminology has far less traction. As a customer I don’t log a ticket with your company, I complain. I want my complaint sorted out and I don’t care how you track it. And don’t involve me with your internal terminology.

A quick heads-up on a product we’re launching soon. CustomerFu (www.customerfu.com) is an online tool for companies to manage customer complaints.What happens in many companies - when they’re small, its easy enough to follow up complaints through a paper-based system, or spreadsheets. But if your complaints are being received by more than one person in your organisation, or you have more than one branch or office, things quickly get out of hand. Bigger companies would start up a call-centre, or outsource to one. But that’s an expensive exercise.So CustomerFu will provide a centralised tool for companies to manage all of their customer complaints, making sure that none of them go amiss, and that every complaint is dealt with properly. Without breaking the bank.We’re in the home straight with development, so more information soon