Have you ever contacted customer support and felt like the rep was more focused on closing your ticket than solving your problem?
I have, and it was an incredibly frustrating experience that ultimately caused me to ditch the provider.
My experience, which was with a hosted VoIP company, was repeated on multiple calls over six months, and it told me everything I needed to know about the company.
First, it told me that their reps were inconsistently trained and in many cases inexperienced. It was obvious on many calls that the engineer was following a script and figuring things out as they went. It’s clearly not reasonable to expect everyone to always know every answer, but I found it annoying and, after 45 minutes on the phone, offensive, that I was being forced to observe their learning! Especially since I was calling in about the same problem each time.
It also told me that the support technicians were not well-managed. Well-managed support personnel are coached to listen actively and, when appropriate, go beyond the initial incident report to uncover the root cause of the problem. They are empowered to take the necessary time to “get it right.” And they are encouraged to escalate – not punished for it – when they need help.
When it was all said and done, my support experience didn’t make me feel like a valued customer whose needs my provider understood and cared about. Quite the opposite, I felt like a ticket number, a nuisance, that they wanted to “close” as quickly as possible.
Being a Trusted Partner
Tranquil Hosting’s mission – to be our customers’ trusted partner for all things cloud – means that we take a very different approach to support.
Everyone who works the support desk here has years, and in many cases decades, of server, hosting and data center experience. That’s not to say that we always have the answer right away to every question or problem that comes in, but when we don’t, we say so and we go get it. Escalation, research and understanding are an important part of our culture.
For example, several customers host their e-commerce sites with us. E-commerce platforms tend to require significant tuning to run optimally – this can often mean turning off unused features or disabling an unneeded setting. After receiving initial customer tickets regarding their site/cart being slow, and after researching the issue, our team resolved the problems by disabling an unneeded setting, or disabling code for an unused feature. The customers have often seen performance gains of up to 300% in such cases.
One of the newer members of the Tranquil team put it this way: “Nearly every day since starting I’ve left the office feeling I’ve learned something, and I’ve improved some customer’s hosting experience.”
This is echoed by our lead engineer, who says “the vast majority of our customers use us because we’re experts in our field. We treat customer problems like they are our own. And in those instances when we don’t have the answer, we will research it.”
Tranquil customer AuctionBlox.com recently commended our service, saying “Your professional staff is willing to ‘think outside of the box’ to come up with a solution that works for my business.”
Because of this culture of expertise and service, nearly 95% of customers surveyed said their problem had been resolved by Tranquil, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: If you have contacted Tranquil Hosting customer service, have all problems been resolved to your complete satisfaction?
This commitment to getting it right is also a big reason why Tranquil customers give us a Net Promoter Score of 85.
If this sounds like the kind of Hosting Provider relationship you’d appreciate, please contact us. We’d love to learn about your business and discuss how we can help with your cloud needs.
Please share you customer support experience in the comments below.