The point of Customer support
Customer support.
As a service provider, it’s the one thing that causes the most stress, hassle, grief and pain (both for me, my team and my customers). The old adage ‘Wouldn’t life be great without customers’ rests probably on the lips of many service providers 
Customers who need to be trained or educated; who are not familiar with the systems or processes; who are not happy with perceived or real failings or mistakes; who bemoan the ‘crap’ service on forums, blogs, twitter, etc, etc, etc.
Every service provider has seen it, every provider gets the complaints and suffers the indignant customer on the phone or has to deal with the irate customer on public fora, be it right or wrong.
Personally, I’m ‘happiest’ (and I do use the term loosely ) when I’m getting to hear customer issues.
To use another adage – ‘if you think everything is going well, you clearly haven’t a clue what is going on!’
No one is perfect, certainly not in service industries where even huge companies, devoted to service, can get it wrong and upset the customer or deliver a poor experience. It’s surprisingly easy to screw up, for a system to break or act in an unpredictable way, or, simply, for a customer care agent to ‘have a bad day’ and the customer to experience that.
Not for 1 second do I make excuses for these things. The only way to learn, to grow, to improve, to truly become a great service provider, is to take time and listen. To digest and understand the problem, the failing, the screw up, and work to improve it.
Some concrete examples from hosting365… We suffered a (fairly) high profile power outage in our main facility about two years ago .We analysed, studied, brought in the experts, listened to our customers and spent over 600k in the 8 months that followed building a new Substation, installing new transformers and building a brand new MV Switch Room for our facility. We can now stand up tall and proud and guarantee we’ll never suffer the same issues again. In the same vein, we’ve spent hugely on skilled staff, infrastructure, networks, kit, etc, etc, to ensure our customers get an experience that exceeds their expectations. In fact, as a privately held company, we’ve spent over 4 million euro or so on continuously improving our service and growing our team.
The key issue though, is that unless a customer actually comes here, physically to our datacentre, they don’t see much of this work. Yes, things are stable and reliable and everything stays online, but that’s a given these days. From the outside world’s perspective, the same kind of reliability can ‘appear’ to be provided by hosts with a single server rented from a decent data centre in the USA. Unfortunately, and as I found out about two to three years ago, once you exceed a certain scaling point as a service provider (I believe around 12-15 staff) you can no longer ‘infect’ the customer with your personal passion and enthusiasm. You just can’t meet everyone that sign’s up, discuss everyones requirements and walk them all through the experience. For that you need to depend on building an excellent team and giving them excellent tools to enable them to deliver excellent service. (I know, too many ‘excellents’ )
I remember answering support tickets at 3 in the morning, standing in data centres until my feet were sore and dealing with customer issues on my honeymoon in Mauritius 5 years ago.
I take my business very personally (perhaps sometimes too much so) and believe very firmly in listening carefully to every single customer issue. The customer who takes time out of their day to give you feedback on a failure or problem is the most valuable customer you have, and deserves your time, your patience and your action. This post was prompted by a local provider who did quite the opposite recently on a well known public forum, shutting down a customer site when they expressed dissatisfaction publicly, a move which horrified me personally. The day a provider stops listening to customers and acting on what they hear, is the day they are finished in the service business.