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Right around this time of year, you’re going to start seeing Predictions for 2009. Let me post mine: 2009 is the year you as the CEO of your microISV, startup or ISV get on Twitter.

For those of you who’ve managed to avoid Twitter, or dismissed it as some pointless flakey time waster, here’s a few current facts you should consider:

• Twitter usage is skyrocketing. In October alone, Twitter experienced a 25% climb in traffic, according to comScore, bringing the number of active Twitterers in the U.S. alone to 1.45; worldwide in September it was 5.6 million.
• Twitter has just about retired the “fail whale”. While in the first quarter of 2008 Twitter had more than a few crashes, those issues have been resolved, as this chart from the Royal Pingdom Blog shows:

• Companies - both micro and not - are being wildly successful using Twitter as a way of providing online customer service (read marketing). More about two examples of that next.

Photo credit: NARA(SPB) - National Archives and Records Administration, Still Picture Branch

Unless you’ve been on a raft in the middle of the Pacific this last month, you’ve noticed more than a few financial sharks circling around your microISV or startup.

The Credit Crunch, Iceland - the hedge fund with glaciers - hitting the Titanic of ansy bankers and locking up more than few billion pounds in the U.K., Germany, with banks being reorganized faster than a new round of beer during Octoberfest; the United States - partly nationalizing its banking system in order preserve the Free Enterprise System (sic), governments changing their tune and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars around: Something is Going On. Call it the Global Economic Crisis, with film on every newscast.

I can’t tell you how much of the Global Economic Crisis is real, hype, or somewhere in between. I can tell you the other economic crisis, the measurable slowdowns in consumer/business spending, rise in layoffs and unemployment and flat or negative economic growth is real, and its name is Recession and it’s going to impact every IT company large and small.

At most companies, customer and technical support are the least resourced, least important and least respected functions. How else can you explain why so many large companies treat their customers - their paying customers mind you - like something that should be scrapped off the bottom of their shoes?

Whether it’s voicemail hell and 45 minute wait times or “knowledgebases” with 250,000 pages that tell you exactly nothing or “self-help” online forums where unanswered pleas outrun useful information 100:1, the message is as clear as a slap in the face: screw you, buddy, go away. I for one as a microISV/startup hope these companies go right on treating customers like dirt - because they’re minting new customers for me and mine.

Put another way, the design, delivery and infrastructure of your customer and technical support can be a key strategic competitive advantage for your startup or ISV against your traditional ISV competitors. In this post I’m going to cover five key ways of turning your startup/microISVs tech and customer support into a factory assembly line where disgruntled and upset customers go in at one end and (mostly) come out the other, singing your virtues and bothering their coworkers with this neat app they just have to see. Done right, and the software systems and procedures you put in place become an awesome leverage point: single solutions solve multiple problems and improve multiple things. This is a good thing when you live in the startup world.

1. You’ve got to have a system.

If you go to this page at Wikipedia, you’ll find over 100 bug/issue tracking open source, desktop and web based software solutions. This tells us:

• There is no one “best” bug/defect tracking application: there’s only a very wide range of approaches catering to different kinds of organizations and situations.
• Developing a bug tracking application as your startup or microISV’s product is probably not a good idea. :)
• You can spend way too much time on this very easily.

While I’m sure there are many other good defect tracking packages out there, there’s only two I recommend to microISVs and startups: FogBugz and HelpSpot.