Great customer service
And why it generally doesn’t happen in the UK
The UK is notoriously bad for customer service. Many high profile companies (NTL, British Gas, PlusNet, and Audi UK to name a few) are held to ridicule over their failing levels of customer service. It seems to be an epidemic in this country for some reason.
This site is hosted in the US, even though I’m UK based. The company that host the site is called Bluehost and today I received an email from the CEO to inform me of some issues they are having with server load and software platforms. Its one of the finest examples of good customer service that I have seen since, well, the last time Bluehost mailed me!
A negative situation for this company has been turned into a positive, as a result of their email, I’m now writing them a positive review (as I’m sure many others are). This has SEO benefits as well as the more obvious ones. The company builds more quality backlinks even when they are having problems!
There are a few different reasons that this message impressed me:
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Its proactive
Bluehost didn’t wait for me to complain before alerting me to the problems (in fact I didn’t even suffer the problems mentioned in the email).
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Its honest
The CEO is honest about their shortcomings, explaining that it was rooted in software that they didn’t build and weren’t directly responsible for, even so, patching the software themselves to alleviate the immediate problems.
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Its personal
You can tell from reading the email that this guy really cares about his company and his customers (not just his immediate profits). He clearly is personally concerned about the customers problems and explains clearly how they will be resolved. No attempt is made to disguise (or put spin) on the situation.
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Its goes beyond solving the problem
Besides offering a clear route to solving the problem, the CEO actually goes on to explain new functionality that will help customers monitor the performance issues themselves - complete transparency.
Dear Bluehost.com Customer,
I am writing today to give you some important information regarding your Bluehost.com account. As many of you know Bluehost.com uses Cpanel, a third party product, as our control panel to allow customers to manage their sites. While this is normally a good thing, it also takes much of the control away from us and sometimes forces us to live with deficiencies that we would normally not tolerate. Lately Cpanel has become so slow and cumbersome that despite buying some of the highest end hardware available some sites are sluggish at best and extremely slow at worst. This was never acceptable to us and we tried to work with Cpanel to resolve our issues, but it is clear to us that our issues will never be at their forefront. So what do we do?
Yesterday was my breaking point. A customer called in to complain of a slow site. I checked it myself and the server load showed it was running fine. Clearly it wasn’t, and I wanted to know what was causing his issues. To make a long story short Cpanel was hitting every server’s hard drive array close to 50,000 times per day more often than it needed to (Based on my rough calculations). Our server monitoring was not doing its job and our customers bore the brunt of these issues. There wasn’t an easy fix and our servers were all grinding to a halt. We had to implement a custom fix and it had to done immediately. The main issue causing these problems was mail related. About 70% of all users had to have their mail moved to a new system and converted to a new storage method. I made the difficult decision to execute these fixes immediately without notifying all our customers first because of a couple of reasons. First, to mail all our users with our current system takes approximately 18 hours (We could do faster, but then many emails would be denied by large ISPs because too many emails come form a single source too quickly), and second because it was causing such a severe problem with all our servers that it simply couldn’t be delayed. It was causing so many sites to run poorly that we acted as fast and effeciently as we could.
This made many users email temporarily unavailable. No emails should have been lost in the transition. It simply wouldn’t allow you to log in while mail was transitioned from one platform to another. Again, we greatly regret having to do this without prior notification, but the benefits were exactly what we hoped for.
While all server issues aren’t immediately resolved, the VAST majority of problems we were seeing on all servers are virtually gone. You should now see a SUBSTANTIAL improvement in almost all areas of your site including mail issues, script execution time, and overall responsiveness of your hosting experience.
Next week we will provide a link to a user monitoring service that will allow you to monitor your server (From our perspective) to see basically what we see, and know if issues you are experiencing originate on our end or if some other factor is involved. We have more speed improvements being worked on aggressively right now and in the near future those details will be made available as well.
I know this email is lengthy, and I congratulate those that made it this far
I just wanted you to know that I care about what happens to your sites, and not just because you pay me to care. I don’t get to be as technically involved as I used to be because of trying to run the company, but I realize now that a change is needed. I may not be the best admin out there, but I care the most and will always be your advocate to making your hosting experience better.
So why not in the UK?
I think there is an imbalance in the number of genuinely medium sized companies.
We have plenty of small businesses that perform really well with customer service (customer retention is important to them).
Large companies (plc’s etc.) seem to be the worst offenders and I suspect it happens because shareholders need to be rewarded, customer service is the first place to feel the pinch when the company has to answer to the stock market before it answers to its customers. Other countries however have these same pressures and don’t seem to suffer the same fate.
Most medium sized companies in the UK are not in fact what they seem, once a small company reaches a certain size and profitability, its snapped up by a big player. The amount of so called medium sized companies that I have dealt recently that turn out (in the small print) to be owned by monster corp. or some such plc. is astounding. All the bad habits about what customer service should be are then forced down on the child company and they suffer the same shortcomings. The corporate attitude/culture is passed down and enforced.
The public are partially responsible as well. There seems to be a real air of apathy about the English in particular and especially when it comes to complaining about things - we just don’t do it! Little wonder then that large corporates see this as an area in which they can ‘cost save’.
Another area in which the UK public are to blame is in our attitude to price. We are price driven to an extreme degree. We want everything at its cheapest possible price - even if this results in the product or service being substandard. Why pay a sensible and fair price for a meal when you can get 2 three course meals for £3.99 at your local pub corp.? We are force fed (and lap up) mobile phone payment structures that ‘look’ cheap. This attitude that we have developed as a nation is affecting our customer service experiences.
Hopefully soon our attitudes will change and force the large and medium sized companies into action but until then shop around and if its possible to ‘go offshore’ for your product or service (as it is with hosting), do so - you’ll probably get better customer service!
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