I’m a big fan of Basecamp, the online project collaboration tool plied by 37 Signals out of Chicago. We started using this ’software as service’ ten years ago and have kept with it as our company has grown. We’ve found it to be a reliable and friendly tool that clients can easily get to grips with, and it’s proved invaluable in helping us to manage multiple projects, milestones and disparate team members. Over the years Basecamp has become assimilated into the daily life of the business and assumed a higher status than the phone system, which to be frank, has become principally a vehicle for recruitment agencies to cold call us.

A few weeks before Christmas a letter arrived with a Chicago franking mark. It contained a hand-written personal letter from Jason Fried, the CEO of 37 Signals, thanking us for using the service for ten years. ‘Wow!’ I thought, I’ve never received anything like that from a business before. Impressed, I posted about it on Twitter as we passed the letter reverently around the office. Also included were the personal business cards of Jason and his head of marketing so I could contact them should I so wish.

A couple of weeks ago another letter arrived, this time from Tampa, Florida. This letter had a dinosaur (T-Rex) sticker on the back of the envelope and inside was a handwritten note from a developer at Wufoo (the online survey supplier) introducing himself and personally thanking us for using Wufoo. Not quite the CEO but then we haven’t been customer’s for a decade.

Perhaps these two letters indicate the emergence of a new trend of personal notes thanking customers personally for their business; the power of the handwritten note trumping the less-than-personal, manufactured emails that are automatically churned out by eCRM systems the world over. Will we soon get thank-you notes from the likes of BT and London Electricity? Will it extend to the shadow-faces at HMRC thanking us for filing their coffers every year? Some how I doubt it, but in an age when we’re constantly pushing the digital boundaries it is great to see that those leading the online revolution are the ones reverting to good old pen and ink.