I’d better start this post with a disclaimer. I’m good friends with Ed Byrne, the Marketing Director in Hosting365, and I’m also on their free blog hosting plan.
I have to highlight Hosting365 though for their enthusiasm which seems to ooze from everything they do these days. Here’s an email I got from them recently:
Hosting365 are growing!! The good news is we’ve increased our Engineering and Support staff, so now we can provide even higher support levels – we’re moving into the ‘obsessive support’ zone – because we believe that is the key differentiator of hosting365 in the market – our great customer experience. The bad news is that we need to upgrade our internal systems to accommodate this growth – and the phone lines will be closed from 4pm to 5.30pm this afternoon – Friday 23rd June. Please accept by way of sincere apology for this inconvenience – free, unlimited, freephone support for ALL our customers, from 6am to10pm, 7 days a week starting from Monday the 26th of June!! There’s an amazing amount of stuff happening in the hosting365 offices at the moment, please take this mail as an invitation to come in and meet our team and tour the data centre at any time.
I normally never pay attention to emails like these and I’ll never end up making use of their freephone support because I never have problems with my hosting, but it caught my attention as it was so passionate. It might come across cheesy to some, but nothing fills customers with confidence quite like a positive attitude from the company they are purchasing a product or service from.
There’s nothing worse than walking into a shop and effectively being treated like a second class citizen. I’m amazed by the amount of companies in Ireland that seem to operate as though they’re doing people a favour by taking their hard earned cash.
Kathy Sierra recently wrote “One way to delight users is with the guy-in-the-unexpected-context phenomenon…Any company with way over the top customer service (for that domain) is giving its users an unexpected, delightful surprise. Something to remember. Something to talk about.“
Organisations often come to PR consultancies in order to get people talking about them, whereas a lot of Public Relations is about communicating what great stuff the organisation is doing in the first place. If you aren’t enthused by what you’re doing, then why would you expect anyone else to be?
Technorati Tags: Hosting365, Piaras Kelly
5 Responses to “Where’s the enthusiasm these days?”
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The quality and performance of hosting365 has really upped a few notches in the past few months, Politics.ie is happy to be hosted by them, and whenever there’s an issue, they’re quick to reply – this used to not be the case, my server was done for an entire weekend once, cos basically I couldn’t find someone on call over the weekend.
So, horrah for hosting365. (They should update their blog more tho!)
)
Thanks for the plug guys … and I agree … must get back blogging !!
First off, will agree this is a nice email, makes common sense. Basically shows someone is switched on and knows how to treat a customer.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the people behind the nice friendly email/clever ad/pr piece/whatever are going to be so switched on and ‘passionate’ (a word that bugs me when used in a business context) when dealing with a customer. Let’s face it, what a company promotes itself as and what a customer experiences can quite often be worlds apart.
Taking the example of an email and then contrasting it with a retail experience isn’t really quite hitting the mark. ‘Passion’ can be faked in an email. In 30 seconds talking to someone you will actually know whether there is passion in their voice.
How to instill passion in someone working for under €8 per hour in a spar serving coronary baguettes (jumbo breakfast rolls) at 6 in the morning is a big challenge. I’m sure any halfway decent copywriter could make it all sound rosy for an ad though
Mind you, if you read Jim Collins Good to Great there is a very interesting chapter about getting the right people on the bus to make a truly great company.
Hmmm, must look at that book.
Just reading these posts on the enthusiasm of Hosting365. In the past 6 months they have had 2 major outages and now there is the announcement that they are withdrawing freephone support as of 18th March, 2008 and instigating a premium number instead which is to cost a euro per minute.
If you are disappointed by the move you may sign the petition at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/h365/index.html