Case Study of Perch CMS

We're so happy to be able to grab a few minutes to speak with Rachel Andrew, Founder of edgeofmyseat.com, the creators of Perch. Which is a wonderful little CMS that's light, flexible and optimized for web designers and consultancies.

What are you primarily using Snappy for?

We use Snappy to manage our hello [@] grabaperch.com mailbox. That tends to be mostly pre-sales queries but also responses to a current promotion we are running that requires people to get in touch and replies to the emails we send out if someone is trying our demo.

Do you find Snappy has improved the speed at which you can work through your emails?

Absolutely, and I think that it is not just that it gives us a way to quickly process and deal with queries. Somehow Snappy helps change the way I feel about these emails. Rather than them being “yet more email” into already overflowing mailboxes, these are potential customers to be treated as a priority. The messages haven’t changed but by filtering those out and into a place better suited to dealing with them my thinking about them has changed.

What features of Snappy do you find critical?

The basic premise of Snappy is just so simple yet well delivered. Take a chaotic mailbox and turn it into a simple support desk environment. I do think that the key feature is the simplicity and the fact that it doesn't require customers or leads to do anything different, they can just use email.

It took me a while to start to use Phrases, but now that I do I find this really useful. In particular at the moment I am typing one handed due to having had surgery on my arm. Anything that helps cut down typing is a bonus for me! In addition I do think that setting up standard responses helps to ensure that we offer consistent service to people making requests and it is easy to customize those standard responses as needed.

Since adopting Snappy what improvements have you seen to your processes and customer support?

Before using Snappy we were using a shared mailbox for the hello@ account. Both Drew and I were checking this, and what would tend to happen was that we would each believe the other would be dealing with a particular email. It would then disappear in the mailbox and never get answered. With Snappy we can see that each email is being answered far more easily.

I like the fact that both Drew and I can see the Waiting queue. It means that a chain of responses doesn't end up in one or other of our own inboxes and unanswered if we are out of the office. If I can see that Drew has been responding to someone but is then out of the office all day, I can just jump in on that conversation and continue to advise the person. That is a real plus over using email.

It would have been really difficult just to use email for responding to emails regarding our current promotion, as we need to respond and send each person a unique offer code. With Snappy I can flag up these emails as they come in and I have a phrase set up which I type and then all I need to do is pop in the customer name and their code. This meant that we didn't need to set up a special system to deliver this offer as using Snappy takes enough of the manual work out of responding.