When we switched our hosting to Amazon's EC2 service, we spent a good bit of time looking at other hosting providers that were out there. There was one company* that I was super impressed with because they have this "fanatical support guarantee" where, if your servers go down they'll kill themselves getting everything back up and online. They're fanatics. Whoever has to die to get your servers back online, they're willing to kill. They even offer goats in blood sacrifices to the gods of IPv6 to ensure that uptime is maintained. At least, that's how it was described to me.

I like that a lot. They're not competing on price, they're competing on customer care. They're willing to say "Yes, you might pay more with us but when there's a problem, no one will work harder to fix it." Any idiot with a cable modem can offer hosting. It's something else to take care of your customer.

So it's pretty disheartening when they send me sales pitches. Not that I mind them trying to get my business. What bothers me is that they're sending me form letters.

Dear Ben,

[We put our] customers first. It's what we do. Anytime, anywhere, and any way imaginable. In fact, our driving purpose is to take care of your business. And The Fanatical Support Promise guarantees that we will. No excuses. No exceptions. It's a support commitment that no other hosting company could ever live up to. Blah, blah, blah.

And the email goes on from there. Can you really claim that you're going to put my business first when the best you can do is send me a form letter that went out to 100 or 1000 other people? The whole point of the support commitment is to say "you are special, you're not going to get lost in the shuffle." Unfortunately, their sales pitch says "you're a lead to be generated."

This is one of those times when it would have been so easy to get right. They already know a ton about me. They've worked up quotes based on the hosting we need. I've spent time on the phone with their sales people going over what kind of traffic we do, what kinds of services we need and what kind of backups we run. I'm sure that's all saved in a database somewhere. It would have been really easy for them to take two minutes to look at my record and just write "This is where you were at six months ago. Has anything changed? How can we help?"

If your whole business model is based around superior service and customer care, the time to start taking care of your customers is before they're customers. Not after.

*I'm not going to name names. I want to focus on how to do good and not calling out companies on their mistakes.

Posted by Ben Corman at 10:33 AM

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Posted by: Andrew McMillen at August 29, 2008 05:19 PM

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