Starting today, Mailroom is available with PayPal support.

Nope, I am not talking about us accepting credit cards via PayPal. What I am talking about is the ability for Mailroom to provide you with a summary of your user’s PayPal transactions with you, while you are answering their support email questions.

This is very useful for anyone who currently does use, or is thinking of using, PayPal to process their credit cards on their site. Since this is more geared towards business use, we have designated it to be available on our $19 plans and up. So, if you have a Basic, Plus, Premium, or Enterprise plan, you know have PayPal support built right in.

Now, to get it to work, you will need to login to your PayPal account and change some settings, but it shouldn’t take you more than 2 minutes to do it. You can see what needs to be done here – http://sproutit.com/support/paypal This is a set of step by step instructions on how to set it up.

So, what is in this summary? You are going to be able to see how many times someone has purchased from you in the last year, and what the total of all of their purchases amount to. This should help you know if your support email needs to just answer a quick first time purchase question, or might include some ‘upsell’ ideas as well.

So, go ahead and give it a try. The way we see it, the more you know your customers, the better.

From time to time I get a chance to actually meet in person, some of our clients. When that happens I am very eager to hear what they have to say about Sproutit, Mailroom and how they tackle the inevitable job of support. So, I sat down for a bit of fish ‘n chips with Ryan MacCarthy, co-founder of Uloop, and picked his brain.

What is Uloop?

Uloop is an online classifieds platform for colleges.

Classifieds? But, what makes you different than every city’s newspaper online classifieds?

We have created a college specific classified site that thousands of students are using to sell textbooks, find roommates, events, housing, full-time and part-time jobs, internships and even rides home. Take textbooks, for example. Not too many people using the local Herald, or Times will be needing the same biology text book.

So, what are the audiences and customers that you deal with

99% of our support comes from students. It is a mixture of feedback, suggestions, comments, and problems. We also work with employers to provide college specific job postings and housing management to provide housing listings for students.

Do the responses that you provide take on a certain tone and feel?

Absolutely. We make it a point to respond to every single email that we get. We try to be very straight up with students and respond with a casual, and youthful tone. Many of the ideas we build in, come straight from the student feedback. But, if we don’t think an idea is beneficial to more than one person, we’ll let them know what we think.

What do you think is the best feature of Mailroom? Why?

By far it is the multiple user support. This way, we don’t have to have a specific support person, but we can share the load. And, this also closes the gap between the students making requests and the team that creates new features. Less is lost in the middle and keeps our whole team more connected with our users.

Got a favorite company for support?

I like Apple. It fits they way I live.

Peter is training Dan to do support:

“The important thing to remember about doing support is that you have to use Mailroom and absorb it until you love working with it. That way when you write people back, it will show that you love Mailroom and, once you help them fix the problem they are having right now, you are sure they will love it too.”

Support is a challenge because most of the email you receive will be negative (people having problems, needing help, etc.) but you must be able to look past that, enjoy solving their problems, and keep a great attitude about using their product.

If you think having evangelists for your company is important, don’t forget support. Support people have a hard job, but they are your most important evangelists.

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Earlier this week we hired Dan Munzert to help us around the office here in Prague. He’s a great guy who’s going to do a lot of things for us, including helping out with support.

Thankfully, we were way ahead when it came to support because we are using Mailroom. Simply by giving him an account, Dan can access and send all the of the replies we normally use for support. He can also find out every communication we’ve ever had with a customer in just two clicks. Mailroom even helps him dig into all of this information by suggesting replies and assigning emails for him.

It’s amazing how much less training you have to do when so much of the knowledge you need to do the job is available and organized in Mailroom.

How are you using Mailroom? Drop me a line if you want to talk about it, and maybe we can do an interview blog post about you and your company.

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