Having a bad customer service experience?
Introducing: Service Blazer
When you call a company and get a customer service representative, how do you feel during that process? Powerless? Frustrated? Confused? Impatient? Those are feelings I’ve often felt. I’ve spent a lot of time on phone calls with customer service at big companies, like insurance companies, and it’s hard to keep all the facts straight; what they promised, what you are supposed to do next, what paperwork is required. During most of the important calls I jot down notes on a scrap of paper, that ends up getting lost or tossed, and when I need to refer back a few weeks later, I have to trust my memory. So, a few months ago I started thinking about a better way to track all of this. It seemed like the perfect opportunity for a web application. So, I began to write it. I’ve just launched it in Beta, now you can track your customer service calls at ServiceBlazer.
It’s not perfect. There will be some rough edges, but please let me know what you think. It’s a free web application that you can use to track all the details of your customer service issues. They big companies all have support ticket tracking systems that let them manage their version of what happened to your call. You should have the same power. Get organized and stop feeling like big companies are taking advantage of you. Hold them to their promises, remind yourself when it’s time to call back and follow up on their end of the deal. In the call logging screen you can record the length of time you talked, who you talked to, what your reference number was, and your feelings about the outcome of the call.
I hope this tool can help me track my calls better, and I hope it’s useful to other people too. It’s also exciting for me to actually launch a real software as a service product for the first time. It’s free right now, but I might charge money in the future if you want to upload more than 5 documents, or if I come up with some extra special features. I also hope that enough people start using this tool, that big customer service companies will come to me and ask for a report card on how Service Blazer customers rated them.
Personal Notes
I wrote this application in ASP.Net MVC 3. I started it a long time ago and have worked during little spots of personal time for a while. It’s pretty exciting to design and build a whole product from scratch just for myself. I used Twitter Bootstrap for a lot of the user interface elements, then tweaked the look a lot. A lot of it isn’t “right” yet. I haven’t made the site mobile friendly. I haven’t enabled OAuth or even Email support, yet. Part of my plan for this service is to create something that can provide a little recurring income to support Becca and I as we pursue our missions trips and whatever else God has in store for us. I hope people get excited about it, and I will learn a lot from trying to market and support it.