The Planet Blog

a night doesn’t go by that I don’t find myself thinking about the planet’s current and future customers … about their business needs … their suggestions and comments … and how they rely on the planet to supply their IT solutions … it’s one of the things that keeps me up at night … i’ve spent a lot of time in the past few months … talking to lots of folks and asking questions … anytime I could corner some of our employees, customers or industry folks … picking up bits and pieces on what we can do better …

i’m very lucky to have a great group of folks at the planet and incredible customers … all willing to talk to us … in fact, we feature a number of our customer success stories on our web site … dickson supply, bigstockphoto.com and auto lead exchange to name just a few … these companies come to the planet for help in managing their hosting operations … they don’t want to manage server farms or internet providers … and don’t want to run their own data centers and man them 24×7x365 or worry about negotiating the best hardware deal … they’ve asked the planet to take on that responsibility …

no matter what business you’re in … to serve your customers you need to talk to them and really understand their business needs … there’s an old, old, old sales saying, “to sell john brown what john brown buys, you must learn to see through john brown’s eyes,” … don’t remember the author but I picked it up during ibm sales training … a couple of weeks ago we had a company meeting and talked about some of our customers … I talked with employees about customer success stories … about how companies rely on us to run their business … which is why we’ve got to be at the top of our game … i talked about ownership and follow through … about customer satisfaction and how we all work to support their needs …

i wanted all my employees to hear from a customer first-hand so they can continue to learn what “johnny” needs … so i invited a customer to come and speak to the company and tell them first-hand about why they picked us and what they expect from the planet in regards to support and service … this customer also happened to be one of our newer accounts that’s moving their entire server inventory to the planet from two other providers … the speaker did a super job … at the end of the meeting I heard several folks talking about the impact he made and how it really crystallized our responsibility to customers … we’re going to do more talking and listening to our customers … I know we can never talk to all 22,000 of you, but we can try … over the next quarter we’ll be launching several programs toward this end …

we have a great group of employees at the planet … and we’re continuing to invest in them with training and tools … and along the way we’ll bring talent in to fill certain needs … speaking of which … the latest addition to the senior management team is steve reichert … steve joins us as vice president of information technology and operations … he’ll be running the IT organization, software development and operations of our data centers in both cities …

steve comes to the planet with more than 27 years of experience in running IT organizations and data centers … most recently from infocrossing in omaha … in college he did his fortran and cobol programming on a 029 key punch that he lugged around in his backpack … just kidding … he’s trading in the corn fields and moving to dallas, where he lived for more than 16 years earlier in his career … you can read more about him on our web site … we’re thrilled to have him join the team … we’re working really hard to supply you with great products, excellent service and great results … we know we have more to do … in fact we’ll never totally be satisfied because excellence in never truly achieved … the yard sticks keeps moving …

thanks for your notes … all the input helps me learn … and even sleep better at night … be careful … it’s a jungle out there.

- Doug

I find myself in unfamiliar waters with the launch of our new corporate blog today … this is new to me and very uncomfortable … I am used to dealing with customers, face-to-face and one-on-one … or making speeches to large audiences … i have never liked communicating through the written word … this new world of the masses and forums and blogs is strange … I do not like “hanging out there” … control freak I guess … but also because it takes me so much time to put my thoughts down on paper … a very very big time consumer … of which like you … there never seems to be enough time … (in my next life I want to come back and study the sciences so I can work on slowing down the rotation of the earth, therefore giving people 28 or 30 hours in the day) … oh well … my marketing team has told me I must join the 21^st century and get on with it … don’t get me wrong … I love talking to anyone who will listen about our company and what we’re doing … i will talk for hours about our plans and dreams and progress here at The Planet … but as I have already said … it has usually been through speeches and personal meetings with customers … but … here goes …

Anytime you merge two large companies there are going to be challenges … and we’ve made no secret that we’ve had a few … simply said … we’re trying to take the best of the two, compare it with anything on the outside and pick the best of breed in all we implement … we knew making these changes would not be easy but ultimately it would allow us to deliver better products and services to our customers …

we are driven to become the best at what we do … we realize that we need the best trained employees and tools to accomplish this … we are willing to spend the money to do this … and we’re already spending a chunk of dough on training our teams and buying tools that a world-class company must have …

we’re attacking the customer support and technical support areas first … we went out and hired a top-notch industry expert who has built many large, highly efficient world-class customer support centers for Fortune 500 companies … Jim Picone is the guy … the support centers he has built are easily 10’s of times larger then our needs … so we gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse and had him pick his family up and move them to Houston … we are thrilled to have him and as a lot of you have already mentioned in the forums and notes to me … there is already a difference … and we have just begun …

we have consolidated the dallas and houston call centers into one … we have invested in a system that now allows us to record and monitor the quality of our responses to the service calls so we can evaluate the rep’s performance and provide on-the-spot coaching and training … we are buying an entirely new phone system that lets us collect and review stats for the first time … it is hard to deliver world-class services if you don’t know how many calls you are getting and what hold times customers are experiencing … (hopefully that phone system will be installed within the next 8 to 10 weeks) … we are also evaluating a crm system … more work to do here … should be making the decision shortly … all of this is part of the millions of dollars we told you we are going to spend in order to build a world-class experience for our customers … you will see great strides with customer service each and every day … we are moving as fast as we can …

we are in the process of increasing our wages so we can keep and attract top talent … we are implementing a program to test our current and future technicians allowing us to have three levels … we will have criteria for them to work toward and goals they need to accomplish before we promote them … we are putting this in so our employees will view working at the planet as a place they can grow and have long term careers … in the past we paid poorly and taught them the basics and then they left for more pay … churn hurts and we want to keep our good employees … we will help by paying for them to get certifications … we will provide tuition reimbursements … and we will create a culture that rewards good work and customer focus …

Throughout the company we’re creating a culture that focuses on customers, ownership, integrity, trust and passion … a lot of powerful words but it is our rallying cry … we will prove it to you day by day … baby steps first and then great strides …

We have a lot to do … but we’re moving and we’re headed in the right direction …

so wrapping up my first entry (and it only took 2-½ hours) … let me thank you for your business … we all appreciate your business … we realize that you pay our salaries … thanks for the feedback you give us … keep it coming … it makes us work harder and run faster …

thanks for reading …

“Be careful … it’s a jungle out there …”

- Doug