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.

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.

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?" in the recent entry about Customer Service. It is a simple thought, but rings true over and over again! I could not be bolder than to say, everyone of us has a favorite business that offers us best service and we would not switch even for a pretty good discount. I can think of 10 right now just off the top of my head.

Ok, so how many of you are now saying, "yeah, we give great customer service"? And I understand that everyone has 24X7X365 support.

So let me ask you this: How do you measure it?

How many times a day do you get customer testimonials about how good your support staff, billing group, customer service or sales teams did? Yes, I said "day". Let me be bold to say, if it's not 1 at least a day then you're not making the cut. Not a verbal good job, but an actual written note. You should have a tracking board on your wall or electronically to reflect on this metric.

How many of your customers are referred to you just simply because of Customer Service? Are you asking this question of your new customers? I feel it should be at least 50% of your total customer base comes organically from referral based on service quality.

If you have a forum up, how many times do your customers back you there from a quality and customer service perspective? Forums are an easy place to complain by a potentially disgruntled customer, but if in most cases it is quickly addressed, not by staff, but by other customers, then you should feel good about what you are doing. Truly, take a look at these three metrics. If you are saying to yourself that you just don't need it and who cares about these, then you will be gobbled up my the big players who feel the same way and eternally fighting for just price and offering resources to bring in your customers.

I will continue to fight to have great customer service. Can we make every customer happy? I'm gonna shoot for it. I want it, you want it and so do all of our customers.

"In other words, it seems web hosting services are typically marketed with the assumption that customers differ only in their bandwidth/storage/monthly fee preferences. But based on my experience, website owners are a diverse crowd. Some are sophisticated developers, others don't even know HTML. Some hope their websites will attract as much traffic as possible, others use their hosting accounts to store private documents."

This statement rings true through on a daily basis. What are the true marketing channels needed for targeting customer acquisition strategies? If my only strategy is allocations, then survival will be brutal, marketing impossible and customer acquisition badly flawed.

A great friend and professional spent some time with us recently and helped me quickly understand "we have no idea who our customers are". And he is right. We target the ultra intelligent developer and tech savvy SMB owner primarily. All others are assumed to just understand what they are buying.

So here is my next question: How many turn away because they don't understand what they are reading?

Target marketing is a science that starts with understanding who is looking in your store window. I vow that it is time to start channel marketing our services to who is looking, not a select crowd that understands what they are reading.

Some steps to getting there I think will help: 1. Learn who your current customers are. Just simply ask. Not with some cheesy email survey, but call them and ask them what they do, want, need, like, don't like and wish. 2. Learn your customers some more. I cannot stress how critical this is. 3. Understand your know segmentations in the market. Are you driving to developers primarily? 4. Get honest opinions from relationships in channels not attached to your know markets. No, not high dollar focus groups, but friends and well, anyone who will give you an honest opinion.

After collection of the actual data, I think most teams will see direction on what channels are being missed. It's not who we get, it's who we don't get.

Hopefully this is a good step in helping strategize what you will need to do. Changes to your website? I'd bet. Order process? Maybe.

Its not easy... but we are just not going to make it without good market intelligence.