Nov 15 2007
Nov 13 2007
Nov 13 2007
Though the incidents themselves were very different, their impact on each company's relationship with its customers was nearly identical - in a nutshell "my website is down and I want it back up."
Outrage is an interesting thing. It sometimes seems that a certain percentage of people are inclined to be outraged about just about anything. And I have no doubt that a certain percentage of the customers a Web host deals with in a given day is going to be angry, regardless of how good the company's service is.
This hardly falls into that category, however. In each of these cases, messageboards, blogs and - most interestingly, from a publishing-a-website perspective - the comment sections of the stories we've run on both issues have been spilling over with customers venting their frustration and recounting their own personal tales of lost service, lost business or unresponsive hosts.
And in both cases, the complaints seem to have a lot to do with the confusion surrounding the problems. Customers of both companies - in some cases, people whose sites had been offline for as much as a week - seem most concerned with the fact that they're not getting the kind of explanation they want from their service providers.
There are two sides to this kind of situation (or maybe there are more than two, but lets say for the sake of the next couple paragraphs that there are two).
On the one hand, obviously neither of these companies wanted their services to go down. Obviously, both companies want to get those customers back online as fast as possible. I can only imagine that in both cases, the company threw everything it had at the problem of getting things back online (we can probably all agree - priority number one for a Web host).
And yes, that's priority number one for customers too. But customers also want to know they're being treated honestly.
The other side of these situations is that hosts too often seem to want to cover up or downplay the mistakes they might have made. I wouldn't implicate any host in particular here. It seems that almost every time there's an outage, customers report having to fight to get the cause of the disruption out of their hosts. Sometimes they point to explanations they believe to be outright lies. Those claims may or may not be true, but they illustrate the point - confusion is a problem.
A major outage isn't exactly a find-the-silver-lining sort of situation. You'd probably spend a lot of time looking for it and not come up with much. But a problem is always, at least, an opportunity for a company to demonstrate to customers that it's ready to handle a problem.
In a conversation with theWHIR, C I Host's chief corporate counsel James Eckles said "we're just as victimized as our customers."
NaviSite's chief marketing officer Rathin Sinha said "If we look at this issue as something where unanticipated things happened and the company did everything it could to resolve that and restore services, I think that is where the focus ought to be. And that's where most of our customers focused."
Neither of these is an outright offensive point of view, or blatant buck-passing per se, but I'd bet neither one is exactly what their customers are waiting to hear.
A little free PR advice from somebody who sees a lot of PR: if it sounds like spin, it's not very good spin.
Better than any spin, in my opinion, is transparency.
A great example of that is the major outage DreamHost suffered about 16 months ago (you can read our article about it here). The company used its blog to keep customers appraised of the situation at every turn, and assure them that it was doing everything it could to fix things. It left posts and comments up, creating a forum for customers to discuss things. And it took responsibility for the mistake.
Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of customers who offered up opinions on the incident were understanding and even grateful.
At the time, Seth Godin summed it up really well by writing:
"Lesson one: when things get messed up, being clear, self-critical and apologetic is really the only way to deal with customers if you expect them to give you another chance."
It's important to understand that if you fail to deliver on your services, you could end up backing up your relationships with customers to the point where you're basically selling them on your services again. A good start would be giving them a reason to trust you.
This past Sunday and Monday, separate incidents at Rackspace caused significant outages. Now, Rackspace is quite a bit bigger than DreamHost, but it took much the same tack, keeping customers appraised of its repair process, and most importantly, remaining accountable.
In one of its posts (which are still up on the company's site), the company said another thing I'd like to borrow to help make my point:
"We cannot promise that hardware won't break, that software won't fail or that we will always be perfect. What we can promise is that if something goes wrong we will rise to the occasion, take action, resolve the issue and accept responsibility. If you are a Rackspace customer and don't think we've lived up to this promise at anytime during the outage, please let your Account Manager know."
I'm not really interested in making any distinctions between the quality of the services Rackspace provides and those provided by C I Host or NaviSite, or any other host for that matter.
But I do think that even though the company is living through a very comparable situation, I'd be surprised if Rackspace lost many customers over this outage.
Nov 13 2007
The first was a post on Isabel’s blog in which she evangelizes the business utility of facebook and twitter. My thought about twitter has been “you’ve got to be kidding me? What are you doing? I’ve had more insightful conversations with a carrot! Besides, I can just see someone in tech support posting: ‘patching X customer’s server.’” The second is a debate on FlyerTalk in which members of the Continental board mused about the potential legal issues associated with flight crews buying pizza for stranded passengers. Many people took the position that if a passenger got sick from eating the pizza, Continental would be sued. Finally, I’ve spent some time this week figuring out how to IM with my clients during contract negotiations since so many of them have walled off IM devices. The most frequent reason I hear for doing this is that someone read somewhere that there were liability issues associated with giving employees unfettered access to IM.
It’s that issue, fear, that I think drives most lawyers to recommend to their clients to kill or significantly rein in technology. Let’s look at my last anecdote – that IM may lead to accidental disclosure of confidential information. I’ve heard many attorneys spout this rationale for advising their clients to wall off IM. But how true is it? I’ve used IM for over 7 years to communicate with my clients, often with several different conversations going at once, and maybe one or two with friends chirping away as well. Not once have I told client X what client Y was doing, or one of my friends that the other hated his guts.
Fear that causes lawyers to avoid, or kill, new uses of technology. First, we’re trained (and like it or not, paid) to spot all the possible problems that issues may present our clients. In the case of new technology, that may result in one of two outcomes: the number of problem issues spotted by the attorney becomes so overwhelming, that the client simply abandons the technology fearing that any potential upside will be overtaken by liability issues; second, the lawyer fails to identify ways that the client may mitigate any liability, or work around it. This second reason seems to stall or kill many projects.
So how does a host, who would like to use many different and potentially untested products deal with this? The first is to recognize that there is no such thing as a litigation proof strategy or product. People sue for many reasons, and occasionally for no reason. You need to be comfortable with the fact that, particularly with new technology, your lawyer isn’t going to be able to assure you that there is no, or even little, risk with a new product. Second, it’s going to be impossible for your lawyer to quantify every element of risk. This is particularly true with uses of new technology: there’s simply nothing to benchmark your risk against. Also, pressed to the wall, your lawyer is likely to become very conservative.
Finally, you may need to press your lawyer to identify solutions. Don’t simply engage your lawyer to issue spot for you, engage him as a full member of your team. If your lawyer sees the full picture, it’s more likely that he’ll be able to identify solutions to the issues he’s raised. You may also need to encourage him to find new solutions. Many lawyers are used to being simply asked to issue spot, not help with solving the issues. However, most lawyers will leap at the opportunity to help make things work – it’s simply more fun.
Nov 13 2007
Being a product management professional at hosting companies for eight years now, I have had the opportunity to listen to a lot of "pitches" - for services ranging from web design tools to intrusion detection systems. I am always amazed that many of these companies do not know how to "talk to me" and have not "done research" on our industry.
In reviewing opportunities and preparing business cases I keep the following points in mind:
-Choosing a vendor with a service/product that customers want and an experience that customers will find intuitive and elegant
-Choosing a vendors that understands our business model
-Choosing vendors that have a long term strategy
-Choosing a vendor that can support these services over time
The business opportunity for these vendors looking for growth and market share in our industry often find two results: little or a lot. The companies that are successful in the middle have a habit of disappearing or becoming a commodity.
Often times these days it comes down to business model. Hosting margins can be high and hosting companies expect the same high margins on the add-on services we are bundling. The problem is many of the vendors in our space are moving off perpetual licensing business models to monthly services/licensing revenue models. Having not experienced 30 or more months of recurring revenue from a customer, like hosting companies do, these vendors do not know how to license and price their service.
On the other end of the spectrum are companies that aggressively sign-up hosting companies only to have a wavering interest in our space or a short term strategy. That leaves hosting companies customers with a bad experience, especially when you have to retire the offering. A good example from my distant past was PowerMailbox. They signed up over 50 hosting companies, only to have been sold and shut down less than 1 year from launching. Another example is a famous Anti-Spam vendor, who, after being acquired by a famous software company seemed to have stopped updating their platform.
In the end, it's about choosing services that your customers want from vendors that understand your business model and are in it for the long run.