We are happy to profile a company run by two college students for our latest in our series of customer interviews. Freebirds Delivery is a testament to how our form builder can be used essentially as the backbone of a business. Take a read below on how Matt and Colin, two enterprising college students, are using FormSpring to help increase efficiency and service for their customers.

Company: Freebirds Delivery

Overview: We are a food delivery service for a popular Isla Vista restaurant, Freebirds. We are located next to the UC Santa Barbara campus and almost 100% of our business comes from students or people affiliated with the University. Isla Vista is a very unique college town because it fits 13,500 people in about 0.6 square miles. This allows us to deliver by bicycle and actually makes us more efficient than using a car. Colin Jenkins and myself are also both second year undergraduates at UCSB, so we have been fortunate enough to find an incredible amount of support from the college community.

FS: How did you find out about FormSpring?

FBD: We searched the internet high and low and looked for a form company that A) had extremely positive ratings B) was easy to use C) competitive prices and finally, D) a company that was professional; good support, clean forms, zero advertisements and little to no downtime. Formspring hit all of these.

FS: How do you currently use FormSpring?

FBD: In my opinion, Freebirds Delivery is one of the most unique users of Formspring. Our ability to operate as a business relies on one thing, getting an order (via formspring) and being able to view and deliver it as quickly as possible. This means that the second we get an email from FS we have to view it, confirm it and send it out within five minutes or less. This is compared to other users who receive a form submission and view it maybe an hour to a day later.

FS: Any other ways you might use it?

FBD: We use the information from FS and do a lot of data crunching. Where are the majority of the orders going? Around what time do we see an increase of demand? With this information we’ve been able to become more and more efficient. We can accurately predict when we’re going to get extremely busy and we usually have a pretty good idea of where it’s going. This has also helped us determine where we need to advertise more. If we notice that 50% of the orders are going to one residence hall on campus over another, then we know that we need to do a better job of spreading the word about our service at that specific location.

FS: How has FormSpring solved a business/organizational issue?

FBD: In the beginning, we were a little bit blind as to knowing when we were going to get swamped with orders. FS allowed us to view our submission logs and look at the data to figure out when to put more delivery people on shift to handle the demand bubble.

FS: What do you like best about the product?

FBD: Simplicity. It is clean looking, easy to build forms and if we ever need to update something, (for example, the restaurant runs out of an item,) we can do it quickly.

FS: What features do you find most helpful?

FBD: The “Snapshot” feature. If I need to look at a large number of orders without opening them all up, I use this.

FS: What improvements to FormSpring would you like to see?

FBD: A 1-800 number would be nice, but so far your email support has been superb. I just find that sometimes it’s easier for me to find an answer to my question if I talk it over with somebody, compared to waiting for a response from an email. It just allows even faster support.

FS: Any specific features you would like to see?

FBD: Facebook integration. A lot of our customers have and actively use Facebook. If you could build an application that allowed someone to fill out and submit a form from within FB, then I believe even more people would use our delivery service.

FS: Any other tips/tricks/words of wisdom you would like to share with others users/readers?

FBD: Never let a form submission or email go unanswered for more than a day. It’s always impressive to receive a response with in an hour or two.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under User Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.