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After Gabriel Weinberg wrote about us in Services I Pay For, I thought I’d do the same. The only difference is that I’ll write about services that we pay for at HelloFax.

Uservoice Help Desk

When we got started, I would reply to ever email individually. I slowly realized that I was re-writing answers to the same 40 questions over and over again. Uservoice has this great feature, called a “canned response”. What you do is search for the most commonly asked question and insert it. Then, you can personalize it to each person (see below). The trick is to write like a human, not a robot. We went through hundreds of customer support emails and  put our answers into the system.

Plus, as a user is writing in, Uservoice dynamically displays the user your Frequently asked questions, as they’re writing the question. So, many times Uservoice can answer their question, before they send the email.

We compared Uservoice and Zendesk; we ultimately went with user voice. Zendesk has amazing integrations with other services. But, we found their interface and ironically their customer support, lacking.  With all the time we’re saving, signing up for Uservoice feels like we hired someone dedicated to customer support.

Olark

Olark lets you chat with visitors to your site, in real time. It’s one of those service you’re not sure you need, but once you use it, you realize you can’t function without it. There are many moments when someone visits your site and may have a second of indecision or a question. If they’re confused, they’ll leave and never come back. During those moments, a visitor can chat with one of us and solve whatever question they have. Plus, we also get the benefit of learning what those confusion points are, so we can improve the service. It’s also great to see people visiting your site in real time. It’s motivating to see people using your service in real time.

Amazon Web Services

Surprise surprise. Your biggest services use AWS for hosting, since it’s insanely simple to grow your infrastructure. I’ll leave it there.

HipChat

We’re still in the free trial, but so far, so good. We just needed a way to communicate as a group, since gchat wasn’t cutting it. HipChat came highly recommended.

Google Apps for Business

We signed up for Google Apps for Business mainly to use gmail as our email provider. The gmail interface rocks and we don’t have to deal with mail servers. The only downside is that sometimes outbound emails have issues; so, I have to send the email from my person email account, which is unprofessional. But, it’s not incentive enough to switch.

Mailgun

Mailservers are just difficult to deal with and unless you’re a massive company, it’s not  worth spending the time managing them in house.  Mailgun has an extremely simply api and they’re do what they do really well, which is send email. Plus, their customer support is wicked fast.

Mailchimp

We use mailchimp for all of our email newsletters. I just realized that we’re paying for 3 difference services that deal with email.  The thing is, each emailing need is different and you need a tool that is focused on doing that one job really well. Mailchimp is one of those few tools that combines great user experience with something extremely useful.

Fogbugz

Bug tracker that’s been around since the beginning of the internet. What’s not to like?

Github

Github is just awesome.

Zerocater

If you think about it, you spent a lot of time each day deciding where to eat every day, going there, waiting for the order, eating, paying, then walking back to the office. Magnify that by the entire company and that’s a lot of hours. So, we get ZeroCater three times a week.

Having the right combination of services is helpful to having a company run well. Plus, you need software that will scale with you as you grow. We put a lot of thought into these choices, so I hope it helps.

Any great services you feel I left out? It’d be great to look into.

Neal (see more on Neal) was doing a technical interview when he noticed a tree in the back yard burning. We called the fire department, snatched up our laptops and crossed the street. Good thing all our servers are on Amazon. So, we had uninterrupted services on HelloFax.com during this entire episode!

Here are some photos of the fire. The building next to the office (see left) fared far worse than us. The place was pretty much gutted.  At one point, the fire department axed a hole through our office wall to get better access to the white building.  You can also see a hose going through our front door.

On that note, HelloFax is hiring! Never a dull day at the office. If you can still do well on a technical interview, while the building is burning, you’re hired! Email us at jobs@hellofax.com.

I have a friend who does health risk assessment. For fun, she quickly pulled out photoshop and started a redesign. The topography and layout are awesome. It’s also an approach I never considered. You see how the 1 is big, it encloses both the information and the actions required on the right side. She called the 1 a “house”.

Some people have to learn things. Other people just get it. She could easily be a full time designer at a company. But, I think she’d rather stick to science.

I use gmail for my personal email, and Google Apps Enterprise for my hellofax email.  So, sometimes I can see UI tests in action.

Google Apps Enterprise

Notice on the Google Apps Enterprise version, the ” << Back to inbox ” link looks like how the ad looks in the free gmail.

Free version of Gmail

Now, look at the free version of gmail.  They got rid of the “<< Back to inbox” text and replaced it with a backward arrow. I’m so used to looking for a blue text link, that I feel compelled to click on the ad instead. I’m completely blind to a button with black styling.  Plus, blue is really compelling to click on (Bing blue is apparently worth $80 million). Now, the “<< Back to inbox” blue doesn’t compete with the advertisement’s blue.

Is Google Intentionally Optimizing for Clicks?

I’m not sure if gmail optimizes the UI for ad clicks. Intentional or not, I can almost guarantee that a statistically significant number of users now click on the advertisement by accident. At least, people finally notice it again, after getting used to ignoring it. Over time, people get blind to ad placements. One approach is to simply move around the ads. What’s brilliant about Google’s approach is that they just changed the color & made it into button, without moving the UI at all. I’m sure this had a significant impact on the revenue of this ad placement.

This is where I work. Apparently, sitting down all day is pretty unhealthy. So, we’re giving standing desks a test ride!

Last week I wrote a blog post about cancelation policies and why we decided to make it really easy to cancel. It’s still unclear if it’s the right business decision in the short run, but I would never change it. I simply don’t want to run a business that does the exact things that annoy me as a customer.

Then, Steven Steiner just blogged about HelloFax and mentioned our cancelation policy!

“I cancel anytime I want – and they are not sleazy about it. They have an actual CANCEL button under your account options, which is huge for me. If I had to call them to cancel, I am out. I do not want to have to do a DirectTV dance with them to cancel the service, because I won’t always need it, and I will have to cancel at some point and then rejoin.”

Steve makes me believe that not only is this something that companies ought to do, but it will also generate good will over time.   No one likes to feel tricked into paying for something. In fact, it’s so rare for companies to have an easy cancelation policy, it’s amazing that it’s something worth mentioning.

Steve, thanks for writing!