How FogBugz helps an "old school" software company reach their goals.

Jonar Systems is a successful ERP software developer in the middle of an exciting transition, and they are using FogBugz to help them reach their goals.

The clothing and footwear industry—the manufacturers that Jonar services—have tended to be conservative. They evolve slowly. As Jon Ruby, the son of Jonar’s founder, and the new Managing Director says of Jonar, “It’s a twenty-five year-old software company whose clients never really evolved because they have production lines where one hundred people stand on a line making a thing. It’s only recently that you see evolution coming into the industry. So, Jonar as a software company, was very, very, very old school, and I have to change that.”

New Directions at Jonar

This is the mission he’s set for Jonar. And yet, despite being old school, Jonar has been deeply committed to stellar customer service. “This company was started on and run with my father’s personality,” Jon says. “He is all about service, service, service.”

One of the first things Jon needed was information. “My management concept has always been management by evidence,” he said. “We were using a 15-year-old home grown system and I couldn’t get real numbers.”

“I would ask how many outstanding cases are there with our customer group, and the answer would be ‘We don’t know.’”

This was a huge problem. It made them feel like they were constantly fighting fires. “For me the first driving force was being able to make decisions, and I wouldn’t be able to make decisions until I had the full picture, and the only way to get the full picture was to implement a system that gave me answers, on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis,” Jon said.

They settled on FogBugz.

“I was looking for two things. 1) To know what was going on. And 2) By knowing what was going on I could target the most pressing customer problems. I could even discover problems before the customer called fuming,” Jon said.

Customer Service

Jonar began using FogBugz for all aspects of their customer support. “The goal was to change customer service from reactive to proactive,” Jon said.

As an example, Jon said, “We have a relatively new customer who works in an aspect of the health care industry. Because of that they have very strict requirements—they have to comply with Federal regulations and so on. In February when I started the process of joining the company, they were our number one fire, in terms of a customer that was not satisfied, and in March I went to go see them. And I said to them, ‘I am going to make you these promises, and I want you to tell me at some point, when you’re ready, whether we are fulfilling them.’ And yesterday I got an unsolicited call from the CEO who said to me, ‘I just want you to know I’ve been talking to all of my people, looking at all of the cases, and you have met and exceeded every promise that you made.’ I could not have done that without FogBugz.”

FogBugz let them change their focus. “It has allowed us, instead of putting out fires all day, to step back and make far more long-range decisions about the direction of our company. It lets us decide what the right things to do are. We couldn’t have done any of this without a tool of some kind, and this tool I particularly like.”

And his customers and prospects are noticing. “The customer satisfaction level, heavily because of FogBugz and how we’ve used it, has become multiples better—at least five times better—and that’s measured by how fast quotes are signed, by the type and volume of complaints that we get. Rather than calling us because they are upset by something, customers are now calling us and asking for advice on how to do new things. It’s a very different kind of customer interaction.”

FogBugz Spreads at Jonar

After Jonar sorted out some of their customer service concerns they started to use FogBugz in other parts of the company. They use it for project management, and for software development, and they even use it to track job applicants (just like we do here at Fog Creek!).

Jon has large ambitions for Jonar, and this has compelled him to examine all aspects of the business. “We’re in an exciting and interesting time at Jonar right now. It’s been a successful software company for twenty-five years that has a client retention rate of over 90%.” And yet he thinks there are ways to improve and there are new markets to capture. “Now I have the chance to look at how we do everything, from what food we buy for employees to vacation policies to recruiting to customer service and everything we do.”

He says, “For me the difference between vision and reality is execution.”

“What FogBugz has allowed me to do is, whenever I have an idea about how to do something but I need a way to implement it—the first thing I do is to think ‘Huh. I was able to use FogBugz successfully in one way. Can I use this tool in a different way?’”

Jon says that anything that is “event based” gets run through FogBugz so they have a central way to communicate with everyone on the team. As they use FogBugz more it’s even helping the morale of the internal teams, “The stress level of our support team has dropped dramatically. The output level of our programming team has increased.”

During the conversation John mentioned the auto-reply feature of FogBugz. Because of their insistence on service there are no phone menus at Jonar—a person always answers the phone. The FogBugz auto-reply fits with that service model. As Jon says, “The thing I especially like about FogBugz, is that if someone responds to us by email, they will automatically get responded to right away. In a communication challenged world knowing that everything from charitable donation requests, to feature requests, to support requests didn’t just drop down a black hole is huge—it seems like a really simple feature, but it fits with our emphasis on service, and it’s something I love.”

He adds, “It’s funny; I sound like a cheerleader. I’m not. Usually when it comes to technology and companies and service providers, I’m usually extremely critical. But I really like the way you guys work. I like your products. I like your approach to things.”

Jonar’s service philosophy pre-dated FogBugz—it was laid out by Stephen Ruby the founder, and is carried on by Jon. Commitment to these kinds of values determine what kind of company you’ll create and have, but as Jon said as a parting thought, “FogBugz allowed us to take our philosophy and just get better at executing it.”

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