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We'll be performing a database upgrade this weekend which will result in a 2 small downtime periods for Campaign Monitor. The first period will be a quick 30 mins this Saturday, 27th February at 11PM EST (see this in your own time zone). The second window will be for an hour this Sunday, 28th February at 2.30AM EST (see this in your own time zone).

What will happen when my account is unavailable?

This maintenance period will have the following effects:

• You and your clients will not be able to login to your Campaign Monitor account. If your client does try and log in they'll see a non-branded "Down for maintenance" page letting them know when they should come back and try again.
• Campaigns scheduled to be sent during this period will not go out, but will be sent automatically as soon as the application comes back up. However, subscribes, unsubscribes and bounces will be captured during the downtime and processed into your reports afterwards. Images will continue to load in emails, and clicks and opens will also be recorded.

We will update this post once the application is back up and running and we'll also be updating our Twitter status during the maintenance to keep you in the loop. Thanks in advance for your patience while we complete this upgrade.

Did you know that people in Tajikistan use Campaign Monitor? Neither did I. In fact, when I look over the list of 187 countries where you guys live, I suddenly feel like a fresh student back in high school geography. Even though we've been doing this for six years now, it still boggles my mind that someone in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan rely on us each day to handle their email marketing.

For the first two years of Campaign Monitor's existence, all our customer support was handled in Sydney. We'd get up early, stay up late and do our best to get helpful answers back to our customers as fast as possible. There were only a few of us then, and during that time we learned some crucial lessons about helping customers. It's always important, but when you're a very small, bootstrapped business, giving your customers an awesome experience is just about the most important thing you can do.

I've never understood the traditional mentality toward customer support that I still experience when dealing with most big companies. Something to outsource. A cost centre. In those early days, and still today, our customer support team is one of the most important parts of what we do. They are sales, marketing, product research and a support department all rolled into one.

Evolution of a team

As we continued to grow, particularly in the US market, helping customers from Sydney meant an unacceptable wait for some of you. We were lucky enough to find Diana (who leads our overseas support team today), and in the years since have built up a great team across the US, Canada, Norway and Australia to provide 24 hour support all over the globe. Even in Tajikistan.

Here's a quick chart showing the number of questions we get from you guys over time and when we expanded the team. You'll notice a few spikes here and there around big releases.

Every member of our support team has a web design background (and many of them still freelance on the side). This means they can help customers with complex email design and coding questions from the get go.

Standing behind our support team is a second level member from our development team. We rotate the second-level support role through our development team on a weekly basis so everybody gets a chance to work with our customers and see the software from their perspective.

Our tools of choice

No doubt most of you have had a chat with our support crew at some stage or another, so I figured it might be interesting to share some of the tools we use behind the scenes to get answers back to you as quickly as possible.

HelpSpot

HelpSpot is the most important app in our support toolkit. It's where all of your questions are pooled and the support team responds. HelpSpot makes it easy to assign questions to any other member of the team and keeps the conversation centralized.

Our customer management tool

Over time we've developed a home grown tool our team can use to manage just about anything about your account. From approving your campaigns, paying your markup profits adding help content and everything in between. We're constantly improving this tool with most releases as we continue to streamline things to give you (and our support team) the best experience possible.

Clearspace

We use a heavily customized version of Jive Software's Clearspace to keep everyone on the same page internally. This includes sharing upcoming features with the team, what do to for our next Friday Fun and anything else worth discussing. It also includes a real-time snapshot of how we're performing each day, including number of paid campaigns sent and our support load.

Campfire

Over time Campfire has become a crucial tool for the entire team at Campaign Monitor. It's brilliant for a distributed team, and allows our support staff to chat about anything and everything, as well as catch up on previous discussions. It also provides a platform for the conversations that are often missing when you have a team spread all over.

CoTweet

These days we do more and more direct support over Twitter. To make managing the questions from our 8,750 followers a little easier, we use CoTweet. It lets you schedule tweets, assign tweets to other team members who might be better at providing an answer, and it has a gorgeous interface to boot.

Tokbox

The support team catches up on a regular basis for a group video chat using Tokbox, a super simple and free web-based tool that lets you chat to up to 20 people at once.

On top of these there are also the usual suspects like Dreamweaver, Coda and TextMate for helping customers with coding problems, as well as a stack of virtual machines with different browsers and email clients installed so we can replicate any problem a customer might be having.

We're looking for a new person to join the team

As we continue to grow, the time has come again for somebody new to join our support team in our Sydney office. If this sounds like the sort of gig you'd be interested in, check out the job description and read a little about how we roll at Campaign Monitor.

We’re packing the tour bus, finalizing the set list and dusting off our rhinestone jacket. With less than a month to go until the geek universe converges on Austin, TX for SXSWi, we’re pleased to announce that we’re taking the Campaign Monitor show on the road!

Bigger than Texas: Campaign Monitor at SXSWi

First stop on our tour of the antipodes is Austin, TX. We’re honored this year by not only having one of our staff presenting at the festival, but by having a considerable portion of our team head over to learn, greet our awesome customers and wave the flag, both from Sydney and abroad.

Being unacquainted with the New World, we asked Google Maps for their advice on how to get there. It seems that we may have missed the, um, kayak.

Undeterred by more conventional means of transport, here’s the skinny on where you’ll find us at SXSWi:

Saturday, March 13: ‘Keeping Sane While Working From Home’

Courtyard Rio Grande B, Austin Convention Center at 5pm

Do you telecommute, or are planning to work from home? Diana Potter, our customer support queen bee tackles the issues that arise when working from the comfort of your own home becomes, well, too comfortable or too crazy. Make sure you catch up with Diana and the rest of the Campaign Monitor team as she presents, ‘Keeping Sane While Working From Home’ at the Courtyard Rio Grande B, Austin Convention Center.

Not quite as big as Texas: Campaign Monitor in New York City

March 18: NYC Meetup at The Smith, East Village

The Smith, 55 3rd Avenue, New York, NY at 6pm. RSVP.

Determined to out-party herself, Ros Hodgekiss, our community manager, blogger and dame about town will be hosting supper and drinks for our New York City customers. Between cocktails, we’ll be discussing where we’re taking Campaign Monitor this year, listening to your suggestions and generally having a rad time. So, come along for what’s set to be great night out in East Village.

Places will disappear fast, so register your spot to avoid disappointment.