Managing expectations or dealing with the "difficult" 2%
Over the years I had many interesting discussions with past and current customers of Globat (and some of my other companies prior to Globat). These mostly very constructive and candid exchanges usually evolved out of some customers who felt neglected, unheard or mistreated in any way by one or more customer service agents. Considering that they took the time and actually went through the trouble of finding a way to contact me directly, it is most appropriate that will give this type of customer communication highest priority. Most of the time, I was able to get their problems resolved by handing their particular issue to a customer service manager in charge. The problem with these types of issues is usually a break-down in the escalation procedure of dealing with a customer problem.
Putting Things in Perspective
It is very important - actually imperative - for the sake of reputation and sanity of our very hard-working team, to put any such problems into perspective. Globat is one of the leading U.S. hosting companies with a pretty substantial customer base; at the time of me writing this we are serving ~80,000 customers in 143 countries on all 5 continents on approximately 50 Terabyte of storage and with approximately 500+mbps in bandwidth consumption. Only a very small percentage of our customers (less than 2%) actually contacts us overall with any kind of problem they might be experiencing. 20% of these problems are in regards to installation problems with third-party applications (i.e. a shopping cart, scripts, tools).
Reality Check
Despite having an aggressive pricing policy, we are not cutting any corners when it comes to customer service. Every year we ask an independent market research firm to conduct a full customer study to get a feel for where we are in our customer’s minds and compare the results of this study to the expectations we have. In our 2005 study, we discovered that 91% of our customers rate their experience with Globat.com’s customer service between “Very Good” to “Outstanding”. In addition, 98%(!) of our customers either have recommended or would recommend Globat.com to someone else. These are results of several thousand of our customers responding to a set of specific questions - a representative enough sample to rely on and draw conclusions.
The 2% Trouble
Now, this is not to say that we do not have customers who we do not serve right. I truly dislike to even think about that after 4 years in business we are just not able to 100% satisfy every last one of the people who trust us with their website, but the reality of the situation is that for various reasons we sometime do fall short in meeting the expectation of absolutely every last customer. I am, however, a “the-glass-is-half-full” person and while we might have problems satisfying 2% of our customer base, it also means that we do meet the expectation of about 98% of our valued customers. These are the customers that stay and renew with us year after year; that send us testimonials and refer new customers to us without any commission being paid to them!
It is the 2% of our customers that we fall short in completely satisfying, however, that we are focusing on the most. These folks and the problems they are throwing at us are the challenge a business like Globat needs to excel and to grow beyond what’s required until we deliver what is desired. We look at these customer’s issues as opportunities to learn and get a step closer to meeting what is expected of us.
Bring It On
I welcome every piece of feedback I receive from our customers and I very much appreciate the time and effort some of these people go through to get in touch with me directly. While I might not have all the answers to every one of their problems, I do have access to a group of tremendously qualified, very smart and truly hard-working people at Globat who will take care of any issue we throw at them. These are the people who will ultimately find ways to get us one step closer to that glorious 100%. I welcome these challenges - Globat is in this for a marathon, not a sprint - and I wouldn’t want it any other way!