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Comment by andrewingram | Hacker News Reader

Great customer service too. When Tower was first released at the end of 2010, I asked for a feature (multiple windows) but they said it wasn't part of their plan for the UI. Anyway, this morning I got an email from them to specifically tell me that the feature I asked for was in version 2. They'd bothered to go back through 3 and a half years of support tickets to find customers who would benefit from the new release, I was hugely impressed.

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I'm assuming you're not involved in the tracking of tasks and releases in your job ? Because linking support ticket / customer to a task, and a set of tasks to a release, is a very common and regular feature of task tracking.

I'm not saying it's not awesome that they contacted you and others like that, it's the rare kind of great marketing that benefits both sides, but I certainly do hope that a company working in their field would know to use proper dev tools and not "go back though 3 and a half years of support tickets to find customers".

(I have no idea why there aren't more companies doing it)

Because it is hard and costly to have a system that does that effectively, and harder and more costly to actually maintain integrity in that system over time.

It IS impressive to be doing this, at least once you're past the stage of having a few guys doing customer support.

Building an integration between a CRM and a backlog/bug tracker has some complexity. Maintaining that over several years and proactively contacting requesters back is impressive. At least in my world. :)

> Because it is hard and costly to have a system that does that effectively, and harder and more costly to actually maintain integrity in that system over time.

I don't think this is really true. I implemented it with Redmine for ~12 customer support people in a day or so. Been ticking along for five years without a complaint.

I'm more impressed with the social aspect than the software.

Trackers exist and are great, but people tend to ignore bugs/requests and either let them rot without cleanup or do sweeps that kill old information.

I've not worked in a company that sells an end-product, I've only worked building websites themselves. Like you say, i'm sure their issue tracker does most of the legwork for them, but it's still a big deal that they actually do this.

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