March 2007

If you haven’t read the post earlier this week about Godaddy’s customer service, you really didn’t miss much…other than a rant from me about how bad their service is.

I have made the move to Superb Servers. In addition to being $15 per month cheaper than GoDaddy for a similar dedicated server, Superb Servers had my new server up and running within 4 hours of my order being accepted.

Their Customer Service has been outstanding so far . I had a question so I thought I’d give them a call to test out their service…and was amazed to be talking to a live person within a few short seconds of placing the call.

In addition to better customer service than Godaddy, the Super Server network seems to have much less latency than Godaddy. My ping times for my domains on Godaddy were ~84 ms and on Superb Servers I’m seeing ~41ms…..this seems to have translated into a much faster load time for the websites on the server.

If anyone out there is looking for a dedicated server, you should definitely check out Superb Servers.

[tags] Godaddy, Suberb Servers, Dedicated Server, Good Customer Service [/tags]

This story has been around for a week or so but it was interesting enough (to me at least) to share.

The 27B Stroke 6 blog over at Wired.com has an interesting story about a web-based ‘expert-system’ that has been ordered shut down by the California Court system because it was practicing law without a license. According to the story (see the story here), a lawsuit that was brought about by one of the users of the web-based system forced the owner of the system to shut it down. The article describes the judge’s ruling as the following:

A bankruptcy judge ruled that Ihejirika had committed fraudulent, unfair, or deceptive conduct through his computer program, and had engaged in the unauthorized practice of law.

Ihejirika was fined, enjoined from offering the same service in the future, and ordered to give up the fees he’d collected from nine customers in Northern California. He appealed, and last week the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling.

[tags] Law, Information Technology [/tags]

I’m not sure if anyone has noticed recently, but my blog (and a few other websites I have on the same server) has been running slowly…so I decided to change from a virtual dedicated server (VDS) to my own dedicated server with the same hosting company. The company, Godaddy.com, prides itself on providing ‘excellent customer service‘ but I think they are confused as to what the word ‘excellent’ means.

I’ve been using Godaddy as a domain registrar for more then 3 years and as the host to my VDS for a little over a year without any real problems…other than some speed issues. After seeing my blog running slowly, I took a look at the statistics and decided that it made sense to upgrade to my very own dedicated server. The cost of the dedicated server is roughly twice the VDS, but I figured it would be worth the money since I’d have my own server with only my websites loading it…plus I’d have some bragging rights with some of my friends
I placed the order for the dedicated server and expected the migration from the VDS to the dedicated machine to be painless both were using Plesk 8.x and I could take advantage of the Migration Manager to move all of my websites over to the new server. If everything had been painless I wouldn’t be writing this blog post.

After the new server had been setup (12 hours later) and I was able to login, I started the Plesk Migration Manager only to find that I didn’t have the necessary permissions on my old virtual server to run the migration. I decided to contact the the company’s technical support group for help. Big mistake.

After surfing over to their Tech Support page, I realize that they don’t provide a toll-free number for their clients. This isn’t that big of an issue for me, but should have been a sign of things to come. (Note to Godaddy - Toll-Free #’s are CHEAP these days). After calling the long-distance number I waited for about 15 minutes (even though the automated attendant told me that it would only be six minutes) before anyone came on the line. Once connected, to a helpdesk representative, I was immediately disconnected before I was able to say ‘hello’. Strike one.

After the connection was lost, I decided to email their support group using the email provided on their website. I put together a nicely worded email with my account # and pertinent information and then stepped away from the computer for a few hours to do a few other things around the house. After approximately 4 hours, I checked my email and found a response from Goaddy Tech Support. Good News? Nope. The email was an automated response saying that they had received my email query and that it had been assigned a help desk ticket #. 4 hours to get a ‘thanks for your email’. At this point, I decide to relax and hope to have a response the following morning from the tech support team. The next morning I check my email and see nothing from Godaddy Tech Support. 14 hours have passed with no response. Strike two.

At this point, I decide that perhaps there are other, more important issues affecting GoDaddy clients and my issue may not be considered ‘critical’ to them. If that was the case, fair enough…but an email to state that would have helped calm my rising annoyance with them.

So…I started to brush off my old Unix skills and start playing around my old VDS to change permissions to allow me to run the migration. After a few hours of trying to remember VI and how to change passwords and permissions and how to change user groups and other forgotten Unix commands, I finally figured out what needed to be done to allow me to run the migration manager and began to migrate my data to the new server.

The final straw for me (and strike for Godaddy) came at 9:33PM on March 12 2007….32 hours after I tried to contact Godaddy Tech Support. I received an email from their tech support group asking for root access to my VDS so that they could ‘log-on to the server and troubleshoot the issue’. Now, if this had been their response after a few hours, I’d be happy…but after 32 hours…I wasn’t happy. Strike three.

I am now looking for another dedicated server (I think I’m going to go with Superb Servers). I’ve looked at A-Plus, OLM, Superb Servers and a few others…if anyone has any other ideas, let me know.

What could Godaddy have done differently? I have a few suggestions:

1. Provide a toll-free number. I know this is petty, but some people really don’t want to (or can’t) use their own dime to get help from a tech support group.
2. Answer the call within the timeframe that is provided by the automated attendant. If you say it will be ’six minutes’ then answer the phone within that timeframe.
3. Respond quicker than 32 hours. This is a no-brainer.
4. Update client on status regularly. If my issue was a non-critical issue and Godaddy had many more critical customer issues in front of me, a simple email (or phone call) stating this would have made me less anxious.
5. Provide Self-Help guides - An FAQ or other self-help system at Godaddy might have helped. They do have FAQ’s, but none that provide detailed outlines like I needed to solve this problem.

[tags] Bad Customer Service, Godaddy.com, Poor Service [/tags]

When I first heard of participative management, I thought that it must be some ‘new fad’ (which isn’t true at all) and after reading a few things about this management model, I decided to dive a little deeper.

Participative management has been defined by Barron’s as:

An open form of management where employees have a strong decision-making role. Participative management is developed by managers who actively seek a strong cooperative relationship with their employees. The advantages of participative management include increased productivity, improved quality, and reduced costs

To get a good look at this type of management style, all you need to do is read the book Maverick by Ricardo Semler. The book has been around for quite some time…it was originally published in 1988 as Turning the Tables and republished in 1993 as Maverick. The book does a good job of explaining the transformation of Semco into a large, profitable conglomerate. The key to Semco’s success, according to Semler, is their implementation of participative management.

There are other examples of companies who have been successful using this type of organizational mentality are. The most well known is probably W.L. Gore & Associates (makers of Gore-Tex), who have embraced participative management methods for many years.

The W.L. Gore website provides the following as an example of their corporate culture:

Our founder, Bill Gore created a flat lattice organization. There are no chains of command nor pre-determined channels of communication. Instead, we communicate directly with each other and are accountable to fellow members of our multi-disciplined teams.

How does all this happen? Associates (not employees) are hired for general work areas. With the guidance of their sponsors (not bosses) and a growing understanding of opportunities and team objectives, associates commit to projects that match their skills. All of this takes place in an environment that combines freedom with cooperation and autonomy with synergy.

The ideas behind participative management are fairly straightforward and something that I agree with. I’ve always believed in open and honest communications, freedom and transparency.

I’m sure that there are people out there that look at this type of management model as being ’soft’, but I look at it and see some things that I like. Namely:

• Transparency of business operations
• Employee growth through job rotation
• Open & Honest Communications
• Employee involvement in their career

There are some things that I don’t like (or perhaps I just don’t understand them) about the Semco version of participative management though. Some of the things described in Maverick are hard for me to swallow…especially the fact that the employees have the ability to set their own salaries. Somehow this just doesn’t sit well with me.

But who am I to argue…it seems to have worked for Semco and W.L. Gore and possibly other organizations. If you know of any other organizations that have succeeded using a participative management model, I’d love to hear about them.

[tags] W.L. Gore, Semco, Participative Management, Ricardo Semler, Maverick [/tags]

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There are many books, articles and blog posts about improving Customer Service. For example, a Google search for “Improve Customer Service” results in over 1 million hits….easy to see that there are plenty of people interested in customer service improvements. It seems that a great deal of the results from the above Google search are links to organizations wishing to help you improve service within your organization. In addition to consulting companies trying to market their services to help you improve your customer service, there are many other people writing articles and blog posts trying to tell you what steps to take to improve services….and with this post, I plan to add one more page to those search results.
For five years I worked within the customer services group of a fairly large company. The group was responsible for technical support, training, implementation, project management and small programming projects. During this time, I read quite a few books on improving customer service but I was usually underwhelmed by what these books had to say. Looking through the results of the google search above, I realize that I’m still underwhelmed by most of what I found.

A few of the better articles and blog postings about the topic are found below.

• Joel Spolsky understands Customer Service. Read what he has to say in his post titled “Seven steps to remarkable customer service“
• Kevin Eikenberry gets it too. Read his post titled “Customer Service Made Simple“
• Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba understand Customer Service. Read anything that they have written.
• Mike Schaffner at Beyond Blinking Lights and Acronyms has quite a few posts about Customer Service but one of my favorites is Creating Customer Loyalty.

Closing thoughts:
Customer Service within any organization should have one goal: Service the customer in a way that provides value to the customer and to the organization. By creating value for your clients through your customer service, you are creating fans (and hopefully ‘evangelists‘).

[tags] Customer Service, Customer Evangelists, Improve Service [/tags]

Jack’s Notebook, written by Gregg Fraley, is a business novel in the same vein as those by Patrick Lencioni and Eli Goldratt. This book uses a fictional story to relate the concepts of creativity and how to use brainstorming, lists, reframing and other methods for creative thinking.

The story follows the main character named “Jack” (surprised?) as he realizes that there is something more to life. Jack meets a mentor who explains the concepts of brainstorming and other creative thinking methods and helps Jack understand what it is that he wants to do in life. The major portion of the book follows a few different stories with the major plot finding Jack falling in love and then having to find ways to keep his new-found love alive (literally).

The book has an interesting plot that should keep the reader turning the pages through the book, especially through the first 100 pages. The last half of the book veers slightly off track from the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) process that Fraley is trying to describe, but it is still an interesting read.

I would recommend the book to anyone new to the creative thinking world since it brings the concepts of brainstorming and Creative Problem Solving to the reader in a manner that is easy to read and understand. I would tell people that have had some training in creative thinking to pass on the book if they were looking for deeper understanding of concepts. That said, even if you are knowledgeable in this area, you might still enjoy this book….it does provide a good fictional story that has some intelligence built in.

[tags] Creative Problem Solving, Gregg Fraley, Jack’s Notebook, Critical Thinking [/tags]