By Carl Burnham

This is an excerpt from Web Hosting: A Complete Strategy for Delivering High-Quality Web Hosting Services (Osborne/McGraw-Hill).

It is customer-centric, with the focus on servicing the customer in tangible and intangible ways that make their experiences memorable. How can you emulate this with your range of hosting services? We’ll discuss the essentials Web hosts need to provide exceptional customer service.

Basic customer support
Keeping customers loyal depends on your integrity. Only make promises that you can deliver on in your Web hosting business. Without integrity, you are treading water unless you provide a unique product or service that has a monopoly on the market. Some prospects will be on the hosting rebound and are seeking a responsible Web host that they can rely on for faster answers to their problems and concerns -- one that will respond to an e-mail or telephone call with relevant answers without waiting one day, much less two to three days; a host that will not continually go down for mysterious reasons, and then deny that anything occurred when questioned.

Your customer's previous host might have had a network that was unbearably slow, or had servers that were being used to capacity, which resulted in reduced Web site performance. Others are seeking more value-added perks and expanded services than their existing Web host can provide, whether it is being able to use a new server-side technology, access to 24/7 support, enabling their site for e-commerce, or outsource applications. Whatever the reason, by offering quality hosting services for what is promised at a reasonable price, you are likely to attract new customers and keep existing ones for the long term.

Think like the customers. They are looking for the best Web hosting value from a business that is credible and trustworthy. Listen to what they are trying to tell you. Some analysts estimate that it costs five times more in advertising, promotion, and personnel expenses to get new customers than to satisfy the existing ones. According to Albert Delorenzi, CTO with Nortel Networks, “Businesses (online) are starting to compete on the basis of their customer relationships -- in terms of how well they know each customer. By building strong bonds with their customers, businesses can differentiate themselves and earn customer loyalty.”

Web hosts need to be mindful of having a creative work environment, where employees are allowed to learn and experience career growth. Too many organizations stifle their employees within narrowly structured job assignments, which always leads to high turnover, low morale -- and marginal customer service. This can lead to employee turf protection as an attempt at added job security, especially within larger organizations. The other extreme is assigning tasks to employees that are vague and lacking performance incentive. As the Web hosting industry evolves, the problems described are not as common as within more traditional industries. Stock options are fine, but don't use it as the only incentive for working for a company. Stock options also are too unpredictable a reward in today's economic climate -- a fact that professionals increasingly realize.

Employees want to work for an organization that they can believe in; one that understands their mission and makes the employee feel like part of the plan. Think of creative ways to promote a teamwork atmosphere in which employees are rewarded and can make their careers thrive through continuing education and advancement opportunities. One company that has proven success with these concepts is America Online. When Bob Pittman became CEO, he gave each senior executive a copy of “The Nordstrom Way,” a book on the legendary achievement of Nordstrom department stores, which focuses on customer service and team concepts.

Encourage employees to actively offer input on ways to make their jobs more creative and innovative. Where feasible, allow employees to telecommute (work from home). Conduct surveys of your customers to generate valuable feedback on your services, and include a section for the customer to list the key employees or departments that have helped them the most with a problem, complaint, or question.

Customer relationship management
According to Forrester Research, companies give customers an average of 3.5 ways to reach them. In most cases, the information gathered from sales, marketing, and technical support departments is not shared throughout the company. This is especially common as organizations grow and each department keeps its own records. As a result, customers often get the impression that the organization is impersonal and not responsive to their needs once they become a customer.

By organizing customer information into a central customer relationship management (CRM) database that can be accessed by sales, marketing, management, and technical personnel, your company can be more responsive and anticipate where trends and potential follow-up sales can be generated. CRM can be defined as a customer-centric approach to doing business, with all employees a part of the process. Currently, only 5 percent of businesses are running their operations this way. How are you marketing to and servicing your best customers, the top 20 percent that provide the lion's share of your revenues?

The benefits of implementing CRMs are more prompt, personal customer service and improved sales. A CRM includes information garnered from separate sales, marketing, and technical departmental databases. With basic customer account information, employees can conduct a more personal approach to servicing accounts. The additional benefits include an overview of customers' billing history, logs of technical support requests, and Web site traffic levels, which can provide a clearer focus for management to offer products of interest to customers and help acquire new customers.

Imagine being able to track individual Web site performances and to group them together in categories. You can send an incentive e-mail to targeted customers that individually highlights their increased level of site traffic and how much it is projected to increase based on previous performance, and include a special time-limited incentive for them to upgrade their hosting plan. Within the e-mail, you use the customer's contact name to further personalize its delivery. Within a few days after the e-mail, you can make a telephone call to follow up. This is an example of proactive customer service that is positive, personal, and designed to benefit the customer.

A CRM database can be viewed as a slimmed-down version of a data warehouse (a large database of customer- and company-specific information), which allows real-time information to be shared among employees in all departments. Potential problems can be highlighted for improvement, with detailed marketing analysis included. A fully implemented, company-wide CRM can be expensive and requires much planning. Some of the early adopters of CRM include Dell, Earthlink, Cisco, and Staples.com, according to the (now-defunct) Industry Standard magazine.

Staples.com attributes sales of $350 million for 2000 to its move to a CRM system. According to Jackie Shoback, operations vice president of Staples.com, “I can't imagine running the business and doing what we need to do if we didn't have these tools.” Staples.com is one of the top 10 most visited retail Web sites online. Some companies implement in-house CRM solutions, or outsource to third-party call centers and vendors to keep track of customer preferences and profiles to provide more responsive customer telephone and real-time (online) support.

The demand for third-party firms to handle customer service is expanding. By 2004, the world market for CRM-based services is estimated to be $125 billion, according to IDC Research, compared to $23 billion in 2000. Smaller concerns, if they are not outsourcing, many times attempt to modify traditional contact management software to gain a handle on improving customer service. Salesforce.com is an ASP that now enables companies to rent a CRM-based solution that operates online through a standard browser.

Features of the plan include the capability for all company departments to view customer information, track prospects, and make sales forecasts. The plan includes wireless capability and can be geared toward an individual company's unique operations. The pricing model is based at $50 per month, with customers that include Convergent Communications, Siemens, and Time-Warner.

CRM solutions encompass several key components, including the following:

Especially with traditional or large-sized companies, implementing a CRM also might involve a change in corporate culture, which can be very difficult to accomplish as new ways of cooperation are needed to share information effectively among departmental areas in a timely manner. Some companies will find this problem insurmountable, as resistance is too great to change any current systems in place. These types of issues must be addressed before you can implement a CRM solution.

If your organization faces these potential obstacles, you might need to conduct an audit to gauge whether a CRM would benefit your way of operations. Norkom.com, based in Boston, Mass., provides an online resource to allow a company to conduct a free audit, which scores companies on their overall readiness for a CRM solution.

About the Author
Carl Burnham is an IT strategy specialist, author, and former network administrator. His books include Web Hosting, A Complete Strategy (2001, Osborne McGraw-Hill). He has also coauthored the popular Ace the Technical Interview (2000, Osborne McGraw-Hill) and Professional JSP (2000, Wrox). Check out Carl's Website to learn more.

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