Wildbit

We at Wildbit are kind of hooked on Olark, a simple live chat service. Ever wanted to add customer chat to your sites or applications, but even thinking about using another third party app on your end made you forget about it? Well, Olark to the rescue, a small JavaScript snippet and an IM-Client with Gtalk or Jabber support is all you need. Assuming that everyone pretty much uses the latter already, implementation should be a cakewalk for everyone.

One of the most difficult things for us to manage as a team has always been schedules. As in working schedules for each person on the team. We always work more than we should, and nobody has specific hours. On our recent retreat, we decided that we finally needed to set some concrete schedules for a few reasons.

We’re a small team at Wildbit. This means that all of us usually contribute in support. A lot of times I will get responses like “Oh wow, you’re the founder and doing support!”. The same happens when our lead developers or designers are answering requests as well. To me though, this is natural and important. The best way to enhance a product is by understanding what your customers want and need, as well as where they have trouble. Since we all participate in communication, we want people to know more about who we are and what we do. If they talk to Gilbert in chat, we want the customer to know that he has direct responsibility for the design. To make Wildbit a bit more personal, we decided on a few things that could help.

Last week, the entire Wildbit team was in Aegina, Greece for our 2010 retreat. Hopefully you didn’t notice, because we tried hard to keep up with support. If you don’t know, Wildbit is a completely virtual team across six countries. Each year we meet up to discuss goals, improve and just hang out like a regular team. This was Wildbit’s 4th retreat, the last ones being in Bulgaria, Turkey and Cyprus. We usually rent a big villa in a nice location. 2010 has been a great year for Wildbit, so we tried to splurge a bit.