The Planet Blog

In “The Art of the Start,” Guy Kawasaki references the importance of operating under mantra rather than a mission statement. He argues that there’s no need to loquaciously explain your goals and practices to others (and yourself) if you instead pinpoint the key driving force behind your business and make it self-evident and unifying in everything you do.

Guy cites the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator as one of the best resources in creating a meaningless, buzzword-filled mission statement to rival those created by teams of consultants. The tool (now offline) allowed you to enter a few key phrases and select your favorite fancy words to create a mission statement like one he included in his “The Art of the Start” session at the Houston Technology Center:

We exist to professionally build long-term high-impact sources so that we may endeavor to synergistically leverage existing effective deliverables to stay competitive in tomorrow’s world.

The mission statement medium almost begs for $10 words when you really need to express a simple thought.

Take a look at The Planet’s Mission Statement … Notice anything interesting about it? Take a look at the heading:

Our Mission: Be the Best Host for You.

You don’t have to read beyond the first line of the page to know what we’re about. The sentiment might not be revolutionary, but what it loses in originality, it makes up for in sincerity:

To be the best host for you, we need to keep your business online and your Web sites fast. To be the best host for you, if you ever need to get in touch with us, we need to be available, friendly, honest, open and helpful. To be the best host for you, we need to have affordable prices and flexible solutions to fit your business.

The cynics in the audience are probably waiting for someone to break out a guitar to lead a sing-along at this point, but that’s not where we’re headed.

This post is a challenge to everyone reading it: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to reach out to us any time that mantra does not permeate your experience as a customer of The Planet.

Will you take us up on the challenge?

-Kevin

A couple of weeks ago, Flora posted a few questions in the comments section of our Call Calibration blog and asked for more information on our call-monitoring process: “I’m interested to know more about calibration and call monitoring. When representatives are appraised by different appraisers, how to ensure fairness? How to eliminate the effect of subjectiveness [sic] in call monitoring?”

As the Contact Center QA manager, fairness is always a main concern for me, so I’d like to take a few minutes to share a little more about how we’ve set up our system.

In the Call Calibration blog, you got a glimpse of what happens during our weekly calibration meetings: The management staff, supervisors, team leads and randomly selected agents monitor and review a sample selection of calls. We discuss the call, and each team member shares their view on how they interpreted the customer-agent interaction. The call is reviewed from a process-and-procedure viewpoint, measuring how it impacts customer satisfaction.

Subjectivity in call monitoring takes two distinct forms: the subjective goals when working with each customer and the subjectivity inherent in peer reviews of performance. The question of the qualitative or subjective aspects in each call is very important: An agent can hit all the points on the evaluation form and the customer’s needs may still not be fully met. Our goal is to satisfy our customers, and if we aren’t hitting that goal with these objective metrics, these sessions are counterproductive. As such, our call calibration grading sheets have evolved over the course of our reviews, acknowledging the importance of — and the subjectivity inherent in — one-on-one interaction.

For instance, empathy is probably the most subjective quality of a call, so we needed to learn the best ways to “grade” when is a call truly sincere and when it sounds forced and unattached. Is there an objective way to ensure this subjective goal is met? We want to move beyond responses such as, “I’m sorry to hear that,” to responses like, “I’m very sorry to hear that you are experiencing X issue. Let me see what I can do to help.” We work with all of our agents to get their input on the most organic, genuine ways to communicate help to our customers, and as we create these hosting call-center best practices, we get additional feedback that helps us build and shape the way we run our organization.

We know that it’s impossible to separate reviewers from their relationships with the agents being graded, so subjectivity will always be an implicit part of the review process. We’ve made the environment very positive, and we follow up with each individual reviewer after our calibration sessions if his or her perception of the call differs from others. Even on the calls scored very poorly, the agents being reviewed should never feel like they are being picked on or talked down to … Every review offers an opportunity to learn how to perform better — it’s not intended to harp on what was done wrong.

When we first introduced the calibration program, there were supervisors who did not want their teams monitored. The fingers always pointed to someone else’s team, and no one really wanted to hear what they did wrong on a given call. By making these calibration sessions much more casual and positive, the tide turned, and agents are now anxious to be selected for review. We made sure to establish the underlying objective of how our interactions affect The Planet’s overall customer experience, and that team-centric goal goes a long way in opening everyone to feedback and criticism.

Calibration is fun now. It’s an engaging process showing us how we did from the customer’s standpoint at the end of the day. If you have any additional questions about the call calibration process, please let us know!

-Arthur

Do you know the way to San Jose? Well, if you do, you should hustle this direction for ISPCON. This week, we’ve got a few people here for the conference where “the service provider industry goes to GET REAL about the future of their businesses,” and I wanted to post a quick blog with a couple of the highlights from Day 1.

The conference is built around eight specific areas of interest to service providers: Wireless, Hosting, Technology, VOIP, Applications, Customers, Facilities and General Business. Attendees can select the most relevant topics to their business and join in the “Conference Breakout” sessions they find the most interesting. This conference structure allows for a great deal of customization, but the unfortunate trade-off lies in the fact that one might want to attend several of the concurrent sessions. To poetically paraphrase Robert Frost:

Several “Conference Breakout” sessions diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not attend all
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked at one session as close as I could
To where I could its topic call …

I won’t make you endure the rest of that silliness. I can tell you which topics I checked out this morning sans rhyme: “Using Social Networking and Web 2.0 to Market Your Business,” “Choosing to be Great Instead of Big,” “Strategies for Growing Your Hosted Business,” and the Day 1 Keynote session, “Neutrality’s Linchpin, is Bandwidth a Commodity?”

My Key Takeaways

From the “Web 2.0 to Market Your Business” session: the hosting marketplace is evolving as the digital world is evolving, so marketing departments have got to dynamically adjust to be most effective: blogging, social networking, social bookmarking, creating videos, etc. To illustrate the shift from Web 1.0 to 2.0, check out the YouTube video used in the presentation.

From the “Choosing to be Great” session: It’s very difficult to be “Great” and “Big.” A “Great” company is defined as “great in customers’ eyes, great in quality, great in the community, and a great place to work,” and a “Big” company often struggles to meet all of those requirements. A company must devote all of its focus to its customer experience, social impact and employee environment or it will fall short of “Great”ness.

From the “Strategies for Growing” session: A host has to provide value, a great customer experience, and sticky products. Value and customer experience are pretty self-explanatory, but the sticky product term may need a little clarification: A sticky product is one that inherently generates loyalty or “gets customers to stick.” A great indicator for your product’s stickiness? Churn.

The keynote session: Cogent’s Founder and CEO Dave Schaeffer explained his perspective on Net Neutrality. In a nutshell, he would like to see the Internet entirely “open, fair and accessible to everyone.” Because this is such a hot-button issue, there was an active Q&A session to wrap up the keynote. The most interesting question I heard was “Shouldn’t there be some kind of file priority in the event of a bandwidth shortage … or to put it more succinctly, is every packet of information equal?” Dave didn’t skip a beat when he responded, “I do believe that some traffic deserves a higher priority, but file priority should be a moot point. Instead of worrying about a theoretical limit bogging down bandwidth, we should overbuild our widespread network infrastructure to provide more than enough capacity for all traffic to be delivered at high priority.”

This afternoon, I’ll head into the Expo hall and find some good swag to bring home and show off. Look forward to another blog post soon about Day 2 which will include Doug’s headlining keynote!

-Kevin

I’m Kevin, and I’m the “new guy” at The Planet with the peculiar “Web Hosting Evangelist” job title. This customer evangelist role is a new one at our company, so it’s likely to change a bit as I jump into the job. I can give you a quick run-down of what I’ll be doing, and you can decide if you want to create a “Kevin Hazard Is Amazing Fan Club” or just not read my blog posts. As Chevy Chase explains in Caddyshack, “In one physical model of the universe, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line … in the opposite direction,” so the best way to approach “what” I will be doing is to back into it from the other direction: Why am I doing it?

The “Why”

As you probably know if you have read any press releases, articles, or interviews about/by anyone The Planet,

“The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 22,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 2.8 million Web sites worldwide. By offering the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class support, backed by state-of-the-art facilities and unmatched network connectivity, The Planet helps turn information technology into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to successfully grow their businesses.”

While that description accurately and succinctly summarizes a great deal of information about our company, it doesn’t tell much about “who” the company is, and it is certainly not blog fodder. I was hired by The Planet to use a bit of my uncanny wit and debonair charm to provide a little more “corporate transparency” for you. We are not reinventing the wheel by having a blog, but it is one of the “best practices” for beginning the move toward transparency on the large scale.

My goal is to provide a bit more insight into The Planet’s day-to-day business. I may snap some pictures of day-to-day life around the office or interview (read: question mercilessly) some unknowing Planet employee. Do a quick search for “company evangelist” or “corporate evangelist,” and more often than not, you’ll see the word “listen” at least a dozen times. In a word, I’ll be a “listener,” proactively maintaining great communication in the provider-customer relationship.

The “What”

1. Improve the User Experience.
2. Refer to Responsibility #1
3. Refer to Responsibility #1

Those extensive responsibilities are fairly broad and quite general, but entirely accurate. In addition to making some magic happen here through our blog, I will work with our Web development team to improve the user experience on our corporate site and in our order process, from your first click to your server’s provisioning … and even through the “eternal life” of your account (sorry, a little “evangelist” humor). We’ve already got a solid plan of attack to begin some of these experience improvements, and we will tap the advice of you, our customer (or prospective customer, wink-wink) to ensure we continue on the right track to provide the best hosting experience in the industry.

I have already seen a few blog content suggestions in the comment sections of other posts, but if you have any other content requests, drop them in a comment on this post or send me an email at khazard (at) theplanet (dot) com.

- Kevin