A House of Mirrors
September 5, 2007 by Kevin Hazard, Web Hosting Evangelist in Evangelist's Corner
If you’ve ever seen Enter The Dragon, you know how dangerous a house of mirrors can be. Last week, our team had a great opportunity to chat with a handful of our customers to hear first-hand what we can do better to deliver a world-class customer experience. We also shared some details about where The Planet is heading in the coming months.
The primary topics of conversation in this self-assessment and evaluation centered on our support structure and performance, product pipeline, customer portal and account management processes. While the breadth and depth of these topics could fill several weeks of discussion, we were able to touch on them all in our focused two-day session.
Our goal? We want to be able to look at ourselves as Ranier Maria Rilke poetically describes in Letters on Cézanne:
He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.
At HostingCon, I noticed a common pulse coursing through the veins of most companies: “Listen to your customers and provide them the services they want and need.” That business mentality is fantastic, especially if you are looking at it from a customer perspective, but the difficulty in approaching that broad goal lies in its immediate practical execution.
While there are hundreds of ways to gather information on those wants and needs virtually, we relished in the opportunity to break the “remote relationship” with a cross-section of customers visiting and brainstorming with us in person (and we could hear the Internet screaming in horror). This group came together with the understanding that we wanted to conduct an open dialogue about where we can improve to deliver a world-class customer experience.
From broad suggestions about adding general server configuration options to specific requests for our future consolidated control panel, we have reams of notes to reference in the continuous pursuit of providing a world-class customer experience, but those notes don’t mean anything until we execute on them.
We created a long list of action items we’ll complete in the coming days, weeks and months. We hope to continue the discussion by culling all of the suggestions and comments YOU can muster.
I am always excited to talk to our customers about what changes we should be making as a company. Does that sound cliché? Send me an email with your thoughts to test whether or not I’m really interested (and/or excited): khazard (at) theplanet (dot) com
-Kevin
P.S. YouTube has the final “House of Mirrors” fight scene from Enter The Dragon if you are in need of your daily Classic Kung Fu fix.
