What Customer Service means to HostDime

Guest post by: Dennis Henry
Support Manager

In our industry, everyone talks about “customer service,” but what is it, really? What does true customer service entail? What limits does it have? Where does “good” customer service become “great”? These are questions I have struggled to understand in my years in the field. According to Jamier L. Scott in Electronic Commerce: A Managerial Perspective, “Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.” I feel that HostDime.com has really embraced the concept of customer service and taken it even further. As Support Manager here, I have worked to push the limits of customer service as traditionally defined to higher levels never seen in our industry. Impeccable customer service is my goal here at HostDime and it should be the goal of every Customer Service department at every company.

After taking on my position of Server Analyst I, I quickly learned that HostDime.com has an approach to support which is different than the other companies I had worked for. At other companies, the focus is on quantity and speed, rather then quality. In contrast, the support goals at HostDime are to respond quickly, but not at the expense of quality results. Providing excellent support and pushing oneself to always ensure the customer is satisfied was something that was ingrained into me early on. I moved forward in the company to Server Analyst II, then Support Supervisor, ultimately becoming Support Manager, responsible for managing all 3 levels of support for HostDime and its subsidiaries. Here, I push the importance of providing the best experience possible to every client, no matter what service the client has with us. From the clients who have one small shared hosting package to those with hundreds of dedicated servers, support at HostDime provides the same level of excellence by subscribing to the following tenants:

1. Strive to provide GREAT Support, don’t settle for merely good or average.

Too many hosting providers are content providing “good enough” support and nothing more. As a former client of many different hosting companies myself, I noticed that too often, the support provided was, at best, adequate, designed to placate the user rather than really deal with the problem. At times, I felt the technician providing the support was attempting to work as fast as possible to push the ticket to the next level, so they could keep up their quotas. At HostDime, every technician is pushed to achieve the highest quality possible, never being measured by metrics of quantity or speed until they meet our extremely high quality requirements.

2. Treat every client as a partner.

Even the best maintained service can be problematic at times and there will be instances where the customer is not satisfied with their hosting experience. Some providers may be happy to do just enough to keep the client with the company, but at HostDime, we push to not only ensure the client stays with HostDime, but we find a way to make the client as content as we can. By admitting when things go wrong and explaining the situation clearly and the steps we took to solve the issue, a client can be happy knowing that they were kept in the loop and were viewed truly as a partner in business, rather then simply another source of income.

3. Use every single customer interaction as a opportunity to teach the client something new.

The old saying “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime.” is a quote that I use in every single interview I handle, as well as often in my conversations with employees. This thought drives our Support Department to teach our clients about the issues they experience so the next time a similar issue arises, they can solve it themselves, and get a feeling of accomplishment. Since every client of ours is also a partner, we need to ensure that we are using every interaction to move their business forward, as it is a mutually beneficial venture for us.

By sticking to these 3 tenants of customer service, we at HostDime set ourselves apart from our competition. There are hundreds of thousands of hosting companies in the world today, and with almost all offering similar packages and unlimited resources. What truly separates one company from another is their focus on customer service and how they value their customers. Every day, we attempt to further reshape the definition of customer service, push to break the boundaries previously set, and change the industry, one client at a time.