Well, we are one of those small ISP's. Our company, over the past 6 years, had an association with a larger ISP. This larger ISP had customers in a Metroplex area as well as customers in South America. If you believe in the old adage, all things are equal, when everyone is running the same two programs (MSIE & Netscape) and same type of equipment, then the percentage of trouble tickets would be the same in a small ISP as it would be in a large one. On one occasion the President of the larger ISP call and ask if I could come down for a meeting. So I did. The main topic of this meeting was, why were we having less customer complaints, than the big boys. Both companies were handling everything the same. My answer was, we started a Help Desk. Everytime something went wrong, I sent out an e-mail. The e-mail detailed the problems and how long I thought it was going to take to fix. If during the repair, we found it was going to be longer, I sent another e-mail to our customers. Upon repair, I sent another e-mail and explained the problems and include, if the repair was a band-aid or a solid repair. I also e-mailed our group about planned outages, C&W problems, etc. Well it have been 6 years and I am still writing the e-mails. But now, we call the "Vidnet -- Alerts" In our last poll, I asked if our customers wanted the "Alerts" stopped. To my surprise, a 100% of the users that replied stated, "No, keep up the good work." So, I don't believe you can go wrong, if you keep your customers informed. It doesn't matter if you are an ISP or a Software Company. The more information you can supply to the customer, the happier the customer. Even if they don't understand everything in the e-mail... Respectfully, Morris Allen President VidcomNet, Inc.
In our last poll, I asked if our customers wanted the "Alerts" stopped. To my >surprise, a 100% of the users that replied stated, "No, keep up the good work." So, I >don't believe you can go wrong, if you keep your customers informed. It doesn't >matter if you are an ISP or a Software Company. The more information you can supply >to the customer,
the happier the customer. Even if they don't understand everything >in the e-mail... I agree that 'real' customers are happy knowing about problems and their state. The unfortunate thing that I have observed over the years is that there is a downward spiral that can occur to many service providers (not just Internet) when they 'mature'. Your marketing-droid decides to appeal to it's peer group in so-called blue-chip companies, so that they can start charging more for the same service, since the other marketing-droid (customer) doesn't care about prices, but about being seen to buy 'the right thing' (whatever the fashion might be in that industry). You grow selling this high value service. Of course, after some time you, the service provider, thinks that this is now your core market - without realising you are mearly a fashion victim - and then style-over-substance sets in. Meanwhile, the original high value customer base is moving on to the next big thing, but you cannot go back to the old ways, that would be 'unprofessional'. 'It has to look right' is the cry, and 'shareholders must not see fault reports' is another. 'Making our faults public will affect the stock price.' La di da... Peter
participants (2)
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Moe Allen -
Peter Galbavy