The Planet Blog

#touch support
#ls -al
drwxr-xr-x root root ./
drwxr-xr-x root root ../
-rw-r–r– root root support

Thank you for the introduction, Kevin. What a warm welcome it has been!

If you’ve ever been a manager preparing for an acquisition, then you are well aware of the concerns your customers and your team may have about the upcoming changes. Customers are concerned about service disruptions, the team is concerned about acceptance, and naturally, managers are concerned about everyone else being concerned.

I’ve had a chance to meet and work with several people from The Planet to support this integration, and I couldn’t be more impressed with their helpfulness and professionalism. This cross section of The Planet’s family has made me excited to meet The Planet’s 500 or so other employees in the coming weeks.

Touch Support brings a tremendous support and administration services background to The Planet’s family and a reputation that is second to none. The Planet’s customers are going to be very excited about the new services we can help roll out, and existing Touch Support customers will see the fruits of all the new resources we’ll gain from The Planet, which will help our team provide an even higher quality of service.

Thank you to everyone at The Planet for being so kind and supportive in this on-boarding process.

Thank you to the existing Touch Support customer base for being patient and understanding while we integrate.

We truly believe that this acquisition is the best move for everyone involved, including our valued customers and great employees. You can expect us to do everything in our power to prove it.

-Sean

Pass out the cigars. Raise your champagne glass. Make some room in the car. The Planet’s family just got a little bigger. Today, we’ve announced the addition of Touch Support to our team!

Welcome, Touch Support!

Because this news may be a surprise to some, I thought I’d answer a few of the most common questions we expect to hear.

What is Touch Support?

Touch Support is a leading provider of server administration management services. Those “Advanced Services” perfectly compliment The Planet’s unmanaged dedicated hosting solutions by providing our customers with specific server management options like 24/7 monitoring, managed backups, and outsourced technical support, so the inclusion of Touch Support’s team is a natural progression in The Planet’s evolution as the best, most complete hosting provider in the industry.

Why Touch Support?

We’ve seen an incredible demand for additional hosting services from our customers via our forums, at conferences and in regular ticket/call correspondence. Touch Support’s services are based on proven practices and processes, so their expertise can be leveraged to scale those services to our entire customer base.

The complexity of IT infrastructure continues to grow, as does the cost for small- and medium-sized businesses to use these services to maximize their businesses. With this acquisition, we expect to provide our customers with the ability to select from a comprehensive portfolio of advanced services to help them better manage their dedicated servers.

What’s Next?

We plan to make an announcement about our Advanced Services portfolio during the third quarter of this year. It will take a little time to integrate our two companies, so stay tuned. We’ll let you know when we’re ready to announce these offerings.

One more time … Welcome, Touch Support!

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