So I am sitting in Panera’s outside enjoying a beautiful spring day – free WiFi and all that, is a beautiful thing. Anyway, I was watching the store manager as he was coming outside to check on the patrons out here and to see if they needed anything from inside. Just a small gesture, but you could tell that it impressed people, especially the guy who didn’t have to go inside to get his Coke refilled.

Customer service, even from a large chain is something that is rare these days, and when you get that extra touch of it, you really remember it. It made me think of my own recent customer service “warm fuzzy” moment. Often times in the web world, you don’t think too much about it. Of course, as a Freelancer you do all the time, but do you really think about it when you, for example, order something online? I know a lot of the software I order is followed up by my confirmation email and then, unless I have signed up for the company’s mailing list, I probably won’t hear from them again – spammy emails aside.

So, I have been searching for the best time tracking software for my freelance business. Of course, most of my jobs are contracted at a set price, but I run my updates hourly, and during a project, I also like to keep track of my time to see how I am doing, and to have something to show the client at the end of the work.

I had been previewing applications for months, most recently Virtulia for Mac. Liked them all, but didn’t feel that the invoicing, reporting systems were robust enough. Need to keep track of everything “just so” for the IRS and all.

However, I think I have settled upon a good one, and the customer service extra-mile may have sealed the deal.

FanurioI have been using Fanurio for the past 6 months (along with all the others) but got an email not too long ago from after sales support. Just a canned email thanking me for my purchase (from several months ago) and seeing if there was any questions, concerns, or additional features I wanted to see. So, I wrote back not expecting any response actually, about a feature to allow me to automatically generate an invoice for a paid receipt with the check number, date paid etc that I could send the client. Certainly not a necessary step as the client usually keeps track of this themselves, but just an extra little bit of customer service I would like to provide.

So anyway, I sent that on, not expecting much, but a few weeks ago I got an email out of the blue from their customer support that they were getting very close to rolling this feature out and did I want to send them my invoice template so they could finalize it and get it back to me along with the new functionality of sending an invoice paid receipt.

Now, granted, I haven’t actually seen the final product yet, but just this level of customer support has gone a very long way for me. Yes, I got the canned emails from them too, but to have a real person on the other end actually take my suggestion, roll it out in an upgrade, let me try it out and to incorporate my template into it all in one….that is just really fantastic customer service, imho. So, I will wait for the final product to see if this is the final choice I will make for my time/invoice tracking software, but without a doubt, this kind of hands on approach will go very far in helping me to reach my final choice.

If you have need of it, check out Fanurio yourself. They have a free demo version you can “try before you buy”.