Solutions: Craftsmanship and Customer Service

I’ve been thinking about product “solutions” lately. I’ve been thinking about how there are so many customer service “solutions” that consist of a team of telemarketing employees with an up-sell agenda, or worse, a shrink-wrapped software package.

I catch myself using Silicon Valley tech lingo to wax poetic about the benefits of crowd sourcing and web 2.0 technologies. At the end of the day, I know that FixYa’s strength is not its technology, but its code of craftsmanship and individualism. In essence, our strength is that behind every question and answer, there’s a human being.

BEYOND THE SHRINK WRAP
When you strip away the fact that FixYa is a website, it’s pretty simple. FixYa is a place where mechanics, appliance specialists and IT people talk shop. We’re sorta like the lunch counter at a no-frills neighborhood diner.

While the community contains a great deal of tech-savvy features and experts, FixYa is not an impersonal corporation or subsidiary call center. We’re just people who care passionately about improving and repairing familiar products – and this is sometimes even years after a sale has been made.

With a people-powered question and answer service, there is no obvious underlying agenda, no bureaucratic over-arching service manual, and very little duplication of service. For the most part,we let 2 people talk about what’s bugging them. It’s not business, it’s personal.

When you think about it, who would you rather spend time with – a software program, someone who’s been trained to talk like a software program, or an expert who’s so passionate about your product, that they’re volunteering their free time to fix it?