On October 23, 2020 Rewind received an award that means the world to us. During the 2020 BigCommerce Partner Awards (virtual) ceremony, Rewind won the Merchant’s Choice Award.
The Merchants Choice Award is bestowed to partners who are a customer favorite in the BigCommerce App Marketplace. Winners are determined by the number of reviews they have, the average rating of these reviews, and the number of times their customer service team is recognized for excellent support.
Although we are ecstatic, Rewind customers are praising the efforts of our team to go “above and beyond”. This award is significant for us because it reinforces one of the core values our company was built on. A value which is at the heart of each and every decision we make.
Do Whatever it Takes to Help and
Delight Customer
Putting our customers’ needs first dates back to the beginning of Rewind’s journey. A few months after we launched, one of our very first customers had all of her products deleted by an inventory management app. It happened just weeks before Christmas. Having your online catalogue go missing is every merchant’s nightmare coming to life. Ecommerce businesses can’t afford any downtime during the busiest shopping time of the year. As you can imagine, this store owner contacted us in a panic.
Since these were early days many of our processes were manual. So the entire company dropped everything we were doing and worked to get her data restored, pushing aside our own projects and deadlines. We helped every way we could. It’s all that mattered. After long hours, we brought all her products back as if nothing had ever happened. She’s still a customer today.
That event was the catalyst for making excellent customer service of our core values. It influences how we hire people, the products we build, and helps us prioritize what matters most as our company grows and expands.
It’s a value that’s become contagious.
Putting the “Service” Back in SaaS
I think a lot of companies struggle at the service part when building out “software-as-a-service” tools. There are likely many reasons for this but James & I never wanted lackluster service to be an impediment to our success. Especially in a world where customer reviews mean everything.
At Rewind, this core value has been embraced by every team, every employee. It doesn’t matter if you are knee-deep in code or drowning in spreadsheets; everyone at Rewind has made a concerted effort to put customers first. Here are some stories, directly from our team:
Kaleigh Harley, Head of Customer Support
I remember a customer who was trying to fix an information screw up in their customer-relationship manager (CRM) and we spent days going back and forth, jumping on calls, talking to developers and the product manager to try and work out a solution for this person. I remember him telling me, “I don’t think any other third-party app would have spent this much time on a screw up that wasn’t theirs”.
Sean Mandegar-Fard, Senior Software Engineer
In October 2019 my house was flooded, working out of the basement and a customer requested a full export of their inventory. Initially, we tried to provide them with a full backup export, but due to the size of their shop it was taking a while and time was of the essence. So I said I can craft together a script to do a multi-location inventory export. This was not a feature our product supported. It was midnight and I had a hundred other things rolling through my head with regards to my house, but the customer was scrambling and they’ve been with us for ages, so I felt proud to work on this new feature for them and be able to provide that export. At the end of the day, the export fixed their issue and they were very appreciative of it. They remain a customer to this day.
James Ciesielski, Chief Technical Officer & Co-Founder
Mike and I went to San Francisco for the first Shopify Unite event. At some point during day one of the presentations, we received a support request from Bartact (still a customer to this day!!. They had messed up a seat cover product in their store and the restore function wasn’t returning the variants to their proper state.
Over the course of the next two days, I spent free time between presentations and after parties with my nose in my laptop trying to figure out why the restore logic was failing. The Shopify API was returning obscure and unhelpful error messages; the experience quickly deteriorated into trial and error which was both incredibly frustrating and a little dangerous as we were changing the product in the customers’ live store.
On the final day of the Unite, Mike and I were waiting to catch an Uber to the airport and while sitting in the lobby of the hotel, we finally stumbled upon a code path that returned the product to its proper state – much to the elation of the customer!
Alamin Mollick, Controller
One of our products, Backups for Quickbooks Online, is used primarily by accountants. If you don’t have a financial background, trying to understand tax and accounting lingo can be like trying to read Latin. Over the years, I’ve jumped on several calls with customers restoring their Quickbooks data. Once a customer needed a hand after a bookkeeper she hired went through hundreds of transactions that weren’t correctly reviewed, matched, and reconciled. After we took care of our part, I walked them through all the additional manual steps, to get the books back in order. She eventually hired a more experienced outsourced controller and I worked with them on the pieces to take over afterwards.
Julian Huff, Senior Software Engineer
In the early days, I frequently had to interface with customers to understand how a restore was supposed to work and get them operational. One memorable customer was Wood Bill, they contacted us about a failed restore. I worked with them all afternoon and into the night. James even drove over to my house to be a second set of eyes, since I literally hand-stitched their product listings back together. (Footnote from James: If I recall correctly, we finished around midnight!)
There are dozens of more stories just like this. Many of them are on our reviews page for each of our products. 2020 has been an incredible year for Rewind; we are growing at a pace we never could have imagined. We have our eyes on building new products that seemed like a dream four years ago. But the one part of our business that has remained a constant, our north star, is to “Do What it Takes to Help and Delight Customers”.
On behalf of everyone at Rewind, thank you for this award – it means the world to us.
Mike Potter">
