We work in an industry that is completely about service. There are a number of other strategies you can focus on – including price, technology leadership and niche marketing. But the true leaders in hosting focus on service. Price and technology are important too, but easily duplicated by your competitors and in the case of price leadership mutually exclusive from being a great service company. Delivering great service takes great people and lots of them, along with a significant investment in automation. Across every industry, low cost providers are rarely the leaders in service. Today I wanted to explore three traits that all great service companies share.
Common Sense of Mission – In great service companies everyone knows the mission – the end game. Employees and managers know how they and the company are measured; these key metrics are published frequently and impact people’s compensation.
Empowered Employees – These are the people providing your service, they better be smart enough to make the right decision and trusted to do so. If every employee in your organization isn’t empowered to do their job, you will end up doing their jobs for them.
Great Culture– Recession or not great employee are in demand, you need to make your company an employer of choice. There are a number of ways to do this, pick the ones that work best for your organization.
I study great service companies to learn what they do and how I can replicate it at MaximumASP. One of my favorite service companies to follow is Zappos, Tony Hsieh is an inspirational leader who focuses his company on being a world-class service organization. I spent some time at their HQ in Nevada last year; they are incredible (I plan to write more about my visit to Zappos in a future post). Included below are a couple of great videos about their culture – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWWCviRY4S4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQLTQAv5JQA&NR=1&feature=fvwp
About Stacy Griggs
Stacy Griggs is Sr. Director of Customer Experience for Cbeyond Cloud Services , previously Stacy was the Vice President of Sales for MaximumASP which was acquired by Cbeyond in 2011. Cbeyond (NASD-CBEY) is a publicly traded provider of telecommunication and cloud services, which has been recognized by Microsoft at its 2009 Worldwide Hosting Partner of the Year and 2010 Hyper-V Cloud Provider of the Year. Prior to Cbeyond Stacy held a series of positions at Hosting.com including Chief Sales Officer, Chief Service Officer and General Manager for their flagship Delaware data center.
Stacy has led several information technology services companies over the last 15 years. He was a Managing Director for KForce a $1 Billion publicly traded professional services firm. At KForce Stacy managed 5 business units that collectively generated $18 Million in revenue and had 140 employees. Prior to KForce Stacy was a Vice President and part-owner of Diamond Technologies, an 80 employee custom software development firm. Previously Stacy held management positions at TMP Worldwide, the University of Pennsylvania, and Humana.
Through his theWHIR blog, Stacy will touch upon sales and service in the Web hosting space, web hosting events, cloud computing and industry trends.
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