Robert Cichon

Common and Top Tier Accountability

My customer acquisition strategy includes a couple of key points as I have stated in the past.  First and foremost is integrity.  Next and maybe closely related is accountability. 

Check out the article on accountability by Douglas Hanna:  http://www.thewhir.com/features/101107_Accountability_in_Customer_Service.cfm

I think this sums it up pretty well. 

So, what do I struggle with?  Well… how can I state our goals of being accountable to customers?  Really, I want to attract customers with more than just allocations as a sales model.  I want to “show off” how well we do.  So what is common and how to we factor in true accountability?

Common should include support staff that can handle your issues within a normal time frame, 24X7X365.  Common should include quick call answering, fast email response in less than 30 minutes and chat ready and online for most services.  Common is nominal downtime at a rate exceeding 99.9%.  Common is security architecture and firewall protection, maybe IDS. 

So if all of this is common, what differentiates common from better or best service?  Rack Space has the catch phrase “Fanatical Support”.  How is it fanatical?  Or are most of us becoming “Common Support” in what we do?

I want to take a stab at understanding what “Top Tier” support means and try to “eat my own dog food” a bit over the next few weeks.   I do think top tier support and service is the way we are going to rise above everyone in this hosting market.

SMB Cornerstones: Part 2: The Truth

Let me start this thought out by being bold and stating the truth. I have been slacking on getting my blog entries written. There are several excuses I could use, but the truth is based more around just being lazy. Can I write this? Can I stomach your opinion for telling the truth? The answer is "YES" of course.

I think many of us mistakenly underestimate the power of the truth. I demand this as a cornerstone for business. Sometimes it really hurts. Last year I can remember 2 situations occurring to both Crystaltech and HostMySite. Crystaltech suffered a strong DDOS on Cyber Monday and it took us 4 hours to contain. On all available forums and phone support, we kept our customers up to date as much as possible and told them the truth. Yep, I had news media calling me, blogs elsewhere talking about it and several customers with concerns. HostMySite suffered a fiber cut to a main feeder. They also publicly let everyone know what was happening and faced the truth. We both professional handled the issue, did what we could to get all systems back up as soon as possible and met the challenge head on. Maybe this type of professionalism gives us more power to be truthful.

Sure there are times when security sensitive information cannot be given out to the masses. I think this is a naturally accepted, as long as it is not used as a shield to lie about what is really happening.

OK, so how do we measure this? How can you tell if your company, employees and customers are being truthful and can you metric this notion? The "truth" is I don't know. I think the tactics I use is to stop any conversations about altering or changing perception during an issue. I always revert back to the truth with all staff. Then we monitor our phone and email support to see if quality is there, also looking for the truth in statements.

I guess lastly, I would not be truthful unless I stated I hope everyone else does not live by this. I would like nothing more than to have this as a well known cornerstone for us and captivate our customers.

Cornerstones: Customer Service and the Truth. Don't want to live by these? Good, I will take every one of the customers who also see this as an important fact.

SMB Cornerstones: Part 1: Customer Service Metrics

First, sorry for the delay of this entry. I know all of you reading missed me last week! (Oh come on... give me a little boost here!) We moved our business center (not data center) and it did take up a fair amount of time.

So... I have had a lot of impressions coming in lately about the hosting industry and how some of our brethren treat their customers, so I have to get on my soap box a bit. Bear with me, because I think this is ultra important.

I think there are 2 main cornerstones I follow in business to the extreme degree.

1. Honesty: This is not to be treated lightly to me in any way. I demand it from everyone I deal with. And try to deliver back the same in everything I do. (I will talk more about this in later blogs)

2. Customer Service: Without making this a top priority, I feel there is no strategy for long term success in the hosting industry.

I feel very strongly that the SMB market is asking, crying and demanding this. They need all the help they can get and are willing to give up something for it. So how do the big players get all the customers with terrible customer support? I think the truth is because even most of the small players are still not seeing this support as a true requirement and have driven a large amount of customers to be just price sensitive. Look, if we, the smaller hosting players, are going to make it against the big players, then one of the differentiations needs to be customer support.

Actually, I like Lou Honick's comment "but I also thought "What if it breaks in 6 months?" Would they stand behind it? What about after a year?"

Who are our Customers?

Boldly I ask: Do we really know who our customers are? Isabel's recent blog on

Building a VPS solution

We have spent the last few months getting ready to startup VPS and learned a bunch. There are a few things that are ringing in my head as we push forward into this marketplace. Are we making the best choice for what the customers will want? I mean it's pretty obvious why some would want to buy VPS; for the value of course compared to true dedicated server offerings. It's just a perfect next step from shared without having to incur all the expense of a dedicated.

Well.. the big players are Microsoft Virtual Server, Virtuozzo, VMware and freeVPS. I know, there are at least 6 or so more you might like and please feel free to comment on them.

In all it's easy to see the high level differences, advantages and disadvantages. VMware being more a true virtual server setup, but weighing heavy on resource consumption. Virtuozzo tending more towards a lighter virtual server and allowing a lower dollar/higher density plan type offerings. FreeVPS being good but maybe harder to support. Microsoft limiting the amount of instances to 4, I believe. We also had to consider APIs to the solutions. How do you automate management? We are still learning about the full automation and I will add more later to what we know.

All good solutions; all have their ups and downs. I think it's just what fits your needs better.

If market trends continue, more and more low dollar, less secure "garage style" hosts will be entering the market. Also, the big players will offer more and freer hosting for this same market segment. Competition for this space will be tough for higher volume VPS instance per server offerings.

I would see most small business clients heading towards a smaller / true VPS model with a fair amount of resources available. This will benefit them the most.