One thing I have noticed recently is the premium that small internet start-ups place on interacting with their users.
The multi-layered phone menu systems employed by big corporations has become a staple comedic joke. We have come to expect large corporations to be slow to respond to our questions and requests.
But most start-ups are very small. It is often one or two or five people sitting in their office, doing the coding and responsing to queries on the fly. In the past few days I’ve received quick and human responses from Medium, Marquee and IFTTT to my questions, and it makes me want to use their services all the more.
Meanwhile, an e-mail to ByPost last week, complaining about a difficulty I was having with the app, prompted a very quick out-of-hours e-mail response from the founder, Luke Heron. Interestingly, I was just about to download a competitor app to achieve the task at hand, but Luke’s prompt trouble-shooting response kept me loyal.