On May 4, 2010, otherwise known as Star Wars Day, MailChimp’s login screen absolutely blew my mind and was one of my favorite interweb moments of the year. I should have taken a screenshot, but at least they’ve memorialized it on their flickr.

Today, I went from MailChimp fan to MailChimp fanatic. In a day and age where customer service has almost become a bad word, I just expect long response times, canned answers, and a transfer to a supervisor when the individual I’m dealing with is not empowered to resolve my issue. MailChimp, this is NOT you.

The Issue
Basically, I had a free SurveyGizmo account user who had issues with their MailChimp integration. After resolving the issues, I asked the user if there was anything else that I could do to help. What did they want? Reimbursement for the unsuccessful MailChimp campaigns.

My Predicament
During my time at SurveyGizmo, we’ve always been empowered to do whatever it takes to resolve customer problems, whether this be working extra hours to help fix a survey or giving a refund for unsatisfactory service or performance.

However, this was a free SurveyGizmo user wanting compensation for a paid MailChimp account. How could I reimburse them outside of writing them a personal check? I don’t even have a checkbook!*

*Big shoutout to ING Direct! Save your money and bank online!

The Email to MailChimp Support
Not knowing where else to turn, I submitted the following support request to MailChimp at 8:07pm EST:

Hi guys! Marybeth, Support Manager at SurveyGizmo, here. I have a free SurveyGizmo/pay-as-you-go MailChimp account user who just ran two problematic campaigns.

In the first campaign, it appears that the API pulled the incorrect survey link, causing an “online survey not found” error. I helped the customer by creating a new campaign and ensured that the link worked.

When they resent the campaign, it turns out that the survey itself had a corrupted question, so survey takers were unable to submit their survey. Pretty much an all around disaster.

Unfortunately, this customer didn’t test either the survey or the emails or they would have found the issue themselves before their contacts did. Regardless, they aren’t very happy with us right now and want us to reimburse them for the campaigns.

Is there anyway we could hook them up with like 2000 credits? From my calculations, that is around what they used during this debacle. I would refund or credit them from our end, but they don’t pay us anything!

Any kind of help you can give me to appease this person would be great!

The Response
Now, MailChimp’s website shows their live support being available Monday-Friday, 9am to 5pm EST. Seeing that, I was not expecting an answer until the next morning at the earliest. Even then, I had guessed that whoever received my request would need to speak with someone else to see if they could help me out.

Much to my surprise, I received the following response at 8:28pm, just 21 minutes after submitting my after-hours request.

Hi MaryBeth,

No problem, we added 3,000 credits. 2,000 to cover useage and an extra 1,000 for apologies.

Feel free to email us back if you have specific comments beyond this that we can assist you with.

Regards,
Edwin
MailChimp.com / Client Services

My Reaction
I couldn’t contain myself. After responding with the following email, I proceeded to call our Marketing Manager to rave about how I just had the best customer service experience of my life.

Not surprisingly, she knew exactly what I was talking about because she has awesome experiences with their support as well. Anyway, here’s my response to Edwin which I wanted to share with the world because MailChimp is so amazingly awesome!

OMG. Edwin, you rock.

I wasn’t expected an answer until tomorrow and didn’t even know if you guys could/would help. Your customer service is amazing!

I was such a huge fan of MailChimp and now I’m a fanatic!

SurveyGizmo <3's MailChimp,

Marybeth Alexander
SurveyGizmo Support Goddess/Manager

Why MailChimp Support is Super Awesome
What’s not to love? Here are the specific things Edwin from MailChimp did to rock my world:

So how about you? Have you had any customer service experiences that make you want to shout from the rooftops?

This is the first of two how-to articles on using SurveyGizmo to create Contact Forms, Lead Gen Forms, Support Requests, Newsletter Signups, or any kind of custom form. SurveyGizmo makes a great all-purpose web form tool for embedding data-collection forms on your website. We use the term “survey” frequently around here (duh!) but take it to mean any kind of data collection. The word “survey’ here can easily stand in for web form, and vice versa.

No need to get the IT department involved or set up custom processing code. Just add your questions and drop a small snippet of code on your website – done! Plus, you get some special features that you can’t get from a regular web form.

• Track complete vs. abandon stats
• Send email auto-responders (as with many forms), but also have a downloadable text file with contact info.
• Send your data to more than one place – i.e. accept newsletter subscriptions as part of a contact form and post the subscription back to your Email Service Provider’s API.

This week we have several new, related updates

• New Tutorial: Creating Contact, Lead Generation, Newsletter, and Support Forms
• New Question Templates: 4 new templates for quick form setup
  1. Contact Form – Simple
  2. Contact Form – Extended
  3. Support Form
  4. Newsletter Signup – Extended
• New Look & Feel Template: a Contact Form/Embedded design template with clean simplicity for embedding surveys into your website smoothly

You can see examples in use on our own SurveyGizmo contact form and Widgix contact form. We have reprinted the tutorial here for convenience, but you can find it and others on the SurveyGizmo Tutorial pages.

Creating a Single Step Contact Form

A single-step contact form means that users fill out a single page, and then they see a thank you after submitting.

Step 1: Create a new survey using one of our contact form templates

Create a new survey and choose one of the contact form templates that seems closest to your need.

• Contact Form – Simple
• Contact Form – Extended
• Support Form
• Newsletter Signup – Extended

You can and should edit the questions and layout, so just pick something similar. Read more about the basics of creating a new survey.

The templates all have examples of forms and email auto-responders.

Step 2: Edit the questions

Modify the questions to suit your needs. Clicking the notepad icon will allow you to modify many options. You can also add or reorder questions.

Step 3: Handling the submitted data

You have to decide what happens after the user clicks the submit button. Every data form or survey in SurveyGizmo always has at least two pages. The second page acts as a Thank You page, but it can also hold actions to act on the data collected. Use these actions to send email or push data.

Email auto-responders

All of the Contact forms contain examples of email auto-responders. You can modify these or add additional ones. You can read more about setting up Email Auto-responders here.

Pushing information out of SurveyGizmo

SurveyGizmo Pro and Enterprise accounts have access to an Action type called HTTP Post. This is used to push data to outside services like Email lists, newsletter signups, customer databases, etc. You can transmit information to other outside services such as SalesForce.com, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, etc.

Step 4: Modify your look and feel

When you are finished with your questions, it’s time to move on to modify your look and feel. If you used one of our Contact Form Templates, it already comes with a look and feel template that is well-suited to being embedded on a website.

You may, however, want to tweak the width of the form, the font size or font family, text color, the background color, or Submit Button text. You can change all those things on the Look & Feel tab. You can also select different templates or modify the HTML or CSS if desired.

You can click “Preview” to view the included Look & Feel or modifications. For you designers out there – it is also possible to modify the look of a survey by adding CSS to your site that acts on the survey form’s ID and Class names.

Step 5: Embed the form on your site

When you are happy with your preview, it’s time to “Launch” (publish) the Contact Form. Clicking Launch will take you to the Publishing tab. You’ll most likely want the Embed Option 2 – the Javascript Option. You can cut and paste this small snippet of Javascript code and place it on the page in your website where you want the form.

Usually you’ll create a blank Contact Us page on your own site using your own template/design. When the page is viewed, the form will fill in dynamically and be wrapped in your site’s design.

A Special note to WordPress or other CMS users like Drupal, etc.

You can create a page or a post and paste in the Javascript snippet. You need to make sure you paste the Javascript code into the HTML, so if you are using the Rich Text Editor click on the HTML button and paste the code in there. If you paste it in the Rich Text Editor directly it won’t work, because the code will be interpreted as copy text.

You’re done – go visit the page and test your form!

Email auto-responders will run immediately (unless you set a time delay). Stats will begin to show up in 10 – 20 minutes. It’s useful to think of the “Abandoned” data as “views” on your form where someone didn’t fill it in. This is natural on most web sites, but if you feel more people should be filling out the form, you might make changes and compare the data over time to achieve a more useful form.

If you create some forms, feel free to post links here to show them off.

Read Part 2 . Contact Forms: Increase conversions with multi-step web forms