December 2007 Archives

If you have a Mac, get Fluid. When you run it, type in your Sproutit domain and name the app “Mailroom”. Fluid will create a native Mac application that you can launch just like Apple Mail, Safari or any other app, but this application will run Mailroom.

Apps like Mailroom work really well in this kind of environment. They honestly feel more at home this way than they do in a browser, IMO. I just tried this with the new version of Mailroom 3 we are working on and its even better.

Call it old fashioned, but we love featuring and talking about our clients. Our stance: helping others with their business is just good business.

This month, I am featuring JibJab, a company which I am sure many of you are familiar with.

Interviewer: Chris (that’s me)

Interviewee: Galen Foard

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What is JibJab? Where did the idea come from?

JibJab is a digital comedy studio founded by brothers Evan and Gregg Spiridellis in 1999. The company achieved international fame in 2004 with its political parodies, “This Land” and “Good to be in DC!,” which were seen more than 80 million times on every continent. The company was started as a result of a desire to distribute original, animated comedy content over the web.

Who are you and what do you do at JibJab?

As Operations, we are responsible for the administration of both the company and the website. Customer support is only a small portion of the job, however it is large enough that it involves the entire Operations team. Through customer support, we ensure the high standards of the company are upheld and the highest quality of customer support is given through email.

Why does JibJab use Mailroom? Don’t you just serve up free funny cartoon videos?

Although we do serve jokes, social greetings, and interactive greetings, we are also dedicated to maintaining a high standard toward quality. To provide high quality services such as JokeBox, Starring You! and Sendables, we want to help users enjoy the environment of JibJab. Not all users are computer experts and can fix their own problems on the site, so we like to see our users experience the best funniest stuff on the web every day by helping them solve issues they encounter on the site.

Does the support team at JibJab take on a certain ‘personality’ when responding to customers? Add humor to all emails? Straight laced?

As a humor-related site, we do keep a rather lax attitude in our emails, without exiting the realm of professionalism. We go by alternative names like “Nigel” to help us guarantee privacy of our employees and keep the feedback friendly. Many of our replies are geared toward relaxing the customer to make the exchange as pleasant as possible.

Why did JibJab choose to use Mailroom?

We needed a solution that would help us manage the thousands (literally) of emails we get each month, as running email operations through Outlook is painful. Mailroom helped us decrease the number of redundant issues that can easily be solved by looking at our FAQ, and it also helped make responses to emails more effective and efficient.

Is there anything new at JibJab? Planned for the new year?

In 2008 we are going to be producing more Starring You! videos, funny JibJab Sendables greetings and loads of election stuff!

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We were awestruck by the new Sendables that we decided to make a couple of our own for you. Consider it a gift for the season.

Snowball Fight

Minora Hora

Check out the Sproutit Snowball Fight

Also, read the Interview with JibJab.

Just a bit of fun to kick off the holidays.

Check out the Sproutit Minora Hora

Also, read the Interview with JibJab.