Entries Categorised as 'loyalty'

The Planet – A Reflection on 7 Years Hosting

September 23rd, 2010 · No Comments · Opinion

It’s interesting how your perspective changes of a company after you have worked with it for many years, perhaps even decades. Of course you see it grow and like to feel like a valued part of the equation, but what happens when it all starts to go oh so wrong?

The price of growth and success? Well I suppose it’s that you start to do things wrong, that you no longer care as much about the individual customers and that you focus more on the big money clients and bigger things. That’s pretty much how I feel about hosting at The Planet.

Rewinding The Last 7 Years

The first invoice I have in their billing system is from December 2003. That’s nearly 7 years ago now. When I joined their rank and file as a customer, I had been dragged from pillar to post by some hideously awful hosting companies, many of which still operate today, shockingly enough. Their network and server solutions, for the small company they were, offered bullet-proof solutions and great and fully configurable options. In effect you could find what you needed and at a reasonable price given the quality of the service they provided.

So if it was so great, what started changing? Well companies with investors, with owners, all wish to grow and serve their board and their shareholders, and that much The Planet has done. They have grown and grown and grown, swallowing up competitors and enlarging their infrastructure in the great state of Texas. All this growth has turned them into the second largest host in the world, and little me? Well I have learned a whole lot in the process.

How So Wrong?

The rumblings of thunder started long ago when their tiered support started signing off every ticket with the parroted tune “Thanks for choosing The Planet.” That would be all and well, bar for the fact that probably at no stage in the breath of that sentence does any employee actually mean it, and the more they say it, the more meaningless it becomes.

With their increasing size comes their obsession with performance and their need to track every last detail of employee productivity. The problem with this is that it starts to get in the way of courtesy to customers when every time their ticket is closed, the client has to fill out a survey. Moreover, the obsession to perform leads to employees closing out tickets before identifying that the customer is actually satisfied with the conclusion, something that only makes you look yet more cavalier with your customer service.

What Does It Matter?

What should it matter you might ask yourself? So long as their network up-time is solid and their machines work? Isn’t that the whole point to a good hosting company? Sure! I would wholeheartedly agree, but I think at some point you also need to respect clients more than being a mere # in an accounting system or a credit on the balance sheet as it rolls off the billing department’s laser printer, as paid for by said customers.

In addition, the reality is that their growing network hasn’t been bullet-proof. Over the last year or two there have been a number of network outages, one of which caused routed traffic online to drop 25% as I recall. That’s pretty shocking. Before that they had an explosion at one of their datacenters that took out the second floor, something they recovered from in 24-48 hours amazingly (round of applause), but still, another painful experience nonetheless.

I suppose this was all inevitable as they grew, taking on datacenters that were setup outside the core of the initial Planet infrastructure. How hard can it be to setup up a decent datacenter right? But of course no two people look at the task the same way, plenty try to cut corners where The Planet hadn’t in the past and which gave them the edge they required to get to where they were.

A Long Time in Business

I have been hosting ever since I hooked up a slackware box on a T2 line in my garage during the dot com bubble. I started with 1 client and I grew my own business to a few hundred sites serving millions of visitors a month. I did so based on the quality of the personal service I offer. Many long time clients, with me since the beginning have become good friends. They aren’t just faceless entities, they are artists, designers, musicians, and business owners, all people for whom I have provided a service, whose business I care about, and to whom I have provided that service with a smile and friendly face, always being available and helpful as required. How else would I have retained their business for so long?

Maybe I am just tooo kind. The reality of the subscription based model, that goes month-to-month, where clients stick around without ever questioning the status quo just leads to a kind of service that is run without care and abandon for the customer, and that in reality just seems as if the customers are a thorn in the side of the business operator, whilst they milk the cash cow they have created. I see it all the time, and not just in hosting.

Personally I prefer the niche or boutique approach because it personalizes the service and can be highly profitable. Of course though this doesn’t mean that one can grow a business to be the second largest in the world in its field, but at least you can ensure the quality of service, and it provides rewards on both sides of the business equation. Business needs to be kept on its toes or it becomes complacent and lazy, and the ones to do that are the customers.

Happy Again?

So will I ever be happy again with The Planet? Well so long as their network up-time remains the same, and they reduce the frequency of sporadic network downtime, then sure. I know that there is little point in griping about support and customer service, because unless the big boss listens, nothing will change, and it could likely be a whole lot worse, irrespective of the size of the company.

If they actually stood up and listened to their customers, actually provided the personal service and care they claim, then that would be great. Recent interactions with other big companies have worked out well, and the reward to the company, versus the actual cost to them was minimal. On the flip side, recent requests to The Planet regarding an outage were met with a link to their Legals and a closed ticket. The reality is that the actual cost to them of the SLA credit is minimal, but the cost in terms of this client, possibly much larger.

When you become a faceless organisation to your clients and your employees work like automatons, then you know it is time to look hard in the mirror.

Gwilym’s Disloyalty Card – Consumerist Counter-Culture

December 17th, 2009 · 1 Comment · Opinion, SEO

The Dis-Loyalty Card Not to paint a bad picture, I actually love the idea of Gwilym Davies’ (current World Barista Champion) dis-loyalty card, but for everything I love about it, I also find it, for all its harmless fun, kinda missing the point. What point is that? You might ask.

Maybe there is no point to it and it is just for fun, but it’s an interesting commentary and view on the whole notion of loyalty and loyalty cards in particular. For everything one can hate about loyalty cards, they are not the only part of building loyalty with customers, but they form an easy part of thanking those customers who do grace your business with the pleasure of their repeat business.

I wrote, not so long ago, a piece about customer loyalty and how to generate it, and though this is a fun idea and might drive traffic initially, I don’t think it is a great way to enhance long term visitor numbers through the door of specific businesses, and surely at the point where it sits on all the counters of the grouped coffee shops it just becomes another loyalty card. Perhaps the disloyalty card is just like one of those wicked design ideas that look awesome but when it comes to their real world application rather fall flat.

On the flip side though, I like the idea of diversity, especially when it means highlighting quality, and diversity, rather than being spotlighted in a 60′s counter-culturist fashion should be celebrated and that, by ganging together in a ‘coffee panthers’ kind of way, the caffeine percolating one-stop-shops could offer something more solid and cool to their new and existing customers.

In reality though, I am likely over-analyzing the entire shebang and of course the notion of this collective dis-loyalty will spark the public imagine and be a run away success. We all know how subversive and zany those Shoreditch, Dalston and East End types love to be!

So really. Who does have the best coffee house in the ‘hood? Replies below …

Customer Loyalty & How To Generate It

November 25th, 2009 · 2 Comments · SEO

Having had to deal with a bunch of different companies of late, it got me thinking about customer loyalty. There are some companies, true service companies, that really get the gist of taking care of their customers, they understand the symbiosis of the relationship, and then there are those companies that just take, take, take.

Sarah Worsham wrote a brief blog post recently on the difference between saying thanks and showing customers you really appreciate them – there is a difference – and it touched on a valid point, that few companies really know how to reach out to their loyal customers and say thanks.

Those Who Just Do

I have been with Orange, my mobile provider since 1997, they have done little to reward me for over 12 years of month-on-month payments. To them I am just a number, but then again Orange is a HUGE corporation. My gym, Market Sports, on the other hand is a small business, a 1-stop-shop for blood, sweat and tears, but even there, as with just about every gym I have ever been to and despite 2 years worth of membership, I am just another guy walking through the door dressed in his track pants and holding out his membership ready to go through the turnstyle and onto the treadmill. As if we need more examples, here’s a dreadful story of the way one US chain of gyms, Planet Fitness, treats the family of a dead man, and this isn’t even a case of trying to build customer loyalty, it’s basic decency we are are talking about.

The problem in both these cases is that the monthly payment is a given. They draw it from my bank account, and whether they provide good or bad service, I will always be there, at the end of the electronic payment transfer come rain or shine. Alas it’s a similar story it seems with the datacenter I use for my hosting business, The Planet, despite 6+ years of custom. Clearly, businesses that have to work for their monies and to keep attracting customers get the notion that they have to chase customers, reward them for their loyalty and give back as much love as they get. Taking your customers for granted, as businesses on monthly revenue cycles seem to do, is a very slippery slope.

Generating Loyalty

Sixt, the car rental company, know how to keep my custom. In spite of the fact that there are a multitude of other rental places closer to home, I always go to their Kings Cross branch, because the manager is friendly & welcoming and because, with no paperwork, they signed me up and gave me a little plastic card, first a gold membership and then a platinum one to reward loyalty and provide better deals. I didn’t ask for this, the card and pertinent membership details just arrived one day in the post. The overall benefit to them is invaluable, and to me, it helps me where it counts, in the wallet.

Alternate tricks for generating loyalty, giving thanks and not devaluing your brand include FREE postage or free postage to specific parts of the world during a specified period of time. eBay used to drive sales by giving super cheap fees or freebies on specific days of the week or month. Charles and Marie have started doing FREE shipping Friday and flaunt it on Facebook and everywhere else. Generosity goes a long way, and Aquarius Records in San Francisco recently started a late night in-store hullabaloo as a way to drive sales aand to reward loyal locals. The shindig basically extended to a longer day and free drinks and food for anyone who came in off the street, and though I don’t know the exact results, I am sure it was appreciated by those who took advantage of it. Similar things have been done for museum visitors with funny notes and FREE chocolate by way of thanks and appreciation at the end of an exhibit. Who says no to chocolate!

In terms of start-ups, Last.fm used to have a pretty loyal fan base, and a great API which meant there were a ton of people creating applications that tapped into it. To reward those hardened fanatics for their good work and helping to promote the service, free subscriptions, which cost nothing, were given to each and every developer on a project and the project featured in a showcase gallery. Needless to say they were happy and banged on about it till the cows came home.

Beyond mere generosity other attributes that are likely to induce loyalty are consistency and reliability. Knowing that you can depend on a business when push comes to shove is critical, and making yourself indispensable is the best way to know you will be the first business to come to mind when they need something in your line of work. By way of example, the datacenter I use has an SLA and although it is expected, they also live up to it, and go above and beyond the call of duty when disaster hits. The downtime over the last 6 years has been negligible and when they suffered an explosion in one of their buildings, the affected servers were up and running again in 24-48 hours.

Staying in touch with customers, talking to them and being a respected and reliable source of information is also key. Back to my favourite record store, their fortnightly New Arrivals lists are invaluable, both in terms of being a source of reviews and being a source of music samples for new music. They make the sometimes painful and drawn out task of new music discovery super simple by bringing all the required information into one place every two weeks. If it wasn’t for all the effort they have made over the years I wouldn’t have bought as many CDs as I have from them, and believe me, it is thousands. Like a friend they have remained relevant to me, and they have reflect upon me the kind of image I wish to portray and that again is key in building relationships and loyalty.

Where To Start

There’s plenty of food for thought here, from generosity, to consistency, reliability and on to pure communication, and there are plenty of resources out there giving yet more details and tips on building customer loyalty, and staying in touch with your clientbase via social media, amongst other things.

Above and beyond all this discussion though, the reality is, it doesn’t matter whether you are an online retailer, a purveyor of information or even a cultural institution with a physical presence, the means and ways of generating customer, visitor, or member loyalty still stands, and, at the end of the day, don’t make the mistakes of some entire industries by taking your entire customer base for granted!