[skmurphy]

It would be interesting to know the size of the customer set being served to understand how far this method has scaled. Of course in the early days Excel can replace SalesForce and GMail can substitute for a CRM, how would you tell that the current GMail/IM paradigm is breaking before you start to lose prospects and/or customer issues?

[skmurphy]

I am in no way against IM as a component of customer support: I think it should be used in conjunction with (or even in leiu of depending upon your customer base) a phone call wherever possible. But I don't see how you keep score on your pipeline or your customer base purely from an inbox or buddy list. One thing that CRM and bug tracking systems offer is statistics and an aggregated view so that as you scale you don't have rely purely on your intuition or escalations (e.g. customers angry with your deteriorating service levels). My fear with an ad hoc approach is not that it's not appropriate for the early days but that it won't scale with your success, and may fail unpredictability if you get distracted by other issues.