AnyHosting

After finishing my post on customer focus, I found this blog entry by fellow planateer Isabel Wang. I wish I had found it before I wrote my previous post, as it’s a very insightful piece and I would’ve hit more on the customer focus versus “traditional customer service” aspect. Here’s an excerpt:

Which is why I don’t buy it when folks in web hosting say that they’re not worried about Amazon or Microsoft or Google - because they have “better customer service”. It’s also why I disagree with this Texan’s view that in order to build a better hosting company, you’ve got to make sure your employees understand the importance of customer service.

In my mind, there are two types of “customer service”. It’s great if you pick up the phone before the second ring, answer how-to questions with super human patience and respond to billing disputes with courtesy and generosity. But sooner rather than later, the need for this kind of generic support will be eliminated through innovation and automation.

On the other hand, there will be increasing demand for Rackspace’s kind of support, for helping the Slideshares and YouTubes of the world (aka the successors to today’s shared hosting resellers) plan and manage and scale their infrastructure. In fact, support might be the wrong word for their kind of requirement. Expert advice would be a better way to describe it. In depth knowledge from someone who understands your technology infrastructure - AND your business - at least as well as you do.

I totally agree, except that I think there is a further distinction - your customers (no matter who they are) should never need to contact your company for support, in the general. It’s not a user experience anyone wants, in almost all circumstances.

But no matter how redundant and automated and innovative your setup is, there are always bugs (or perceived bugs), network outages, and the like. Having appropriate communications channels with your customer is absolutely key, and one of those channels should always be a real human being (and they should have a “real” job as well, because they should almost never get calls ).

Hooking customers up with a knowledgeable person who has the authority to solve their problem is expensive, and should be treated as such. Their experience should be quick and easy if they are contacting you directly, because they have already run into something that is not working as they expect, and they are already frustrated.

In the end, it’s really all about the user experience. Everything should work seamlessly and easily as much as possible, and the last resort should  be getting a human to manually intervene for you. Customers really don’t want to be *forced* to interact with you (nothing personal!), so put effort into making it so they don’t have to.

In this excellent article on remarkable customer service, Joel Spolsky lays out seven things he learned from doing customer service himself for his “bootstrapped” software company.

I’ve done tech support and customer service in the past, and a lot of these points resonate with me, but particularly #4 (”Take the blame”) and #6 (”Practice puppetry”). I think the title on #6 is pretty self-deprecating, and I wouldn’t put it just the way he does, although his description certainly brings vivid imagery to mind, and packs a more visceral punch.

I’d emphasize more that, when doing customer service, you are on the customer’s side, representing them to the rest of your company (and not the other way around).

“Practice puppetry” is about how to handle abusive or otherwise offensive customers, and not take it personally. This is absolutely key to running a worthwhile business, in my opinion. There’s nothing to be gained by winning an argument with your customer (that link is a poignant response to this post showing someone taking their customer’s frustration personally).

#7 (”Greed will get you nowhere”) really got me thinking. AnyHosting is purposely a very small operation, and we tend to be flexible about billing (e.g. if someone signed up for a year and decides to move, there’s no contract lock-in), but the idea of having an explicit no-questions-asked money-back guarantee sounds like a really great idea. We have a lot of policies about putting the customer’s needs first, that we need to be more explicit about.

(EDIT - removed “over the phone” from “customer service” )