Customer Service Done Right...and Wrong
Category: Economy & Business... Local...
Posted Friday, October 06, 2006 at 08:09 AM [GMT-6]

I'm still waiting for someone to fix my garage door. After the spring broke on Wednesday I immediately called one of the two local companies who specialize in overhead doors and got on its schedule for later that afternoon. They didn't show, but I received a call that evening explaining that the installer had gone out of town for a job and was late in returning. The lady was quite apologetic and asked if they could come out on Thursday afternoon, say, around 2:00? I told her that 4:00 would work better for me, and she said something to the effect, "we'll do whatever you want, since we want to accommodate your schedule."

Well, apparently, "accommodating my schedule" and "actually doing the work" are mutually exclusive, because I received neither a service call nor an explanation for the second no-show. So, this morning I called the other company and set up an appointment for later this morning. We'll see how that works out. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to getting a call from the first company so that I can explain why they lost my business to their competitor. [I really don't expect to get that call, however.]

Contrast that with the strange phone call that came during dinner last night. As it came on my business line, I did jump up to listen to the message and once I confirmed it wasn't from a client I let the machine handle it. I listened to the whole message this morning and it began something like this: "Hello. I'm [so-and-so] with GoDaddy.com's customer appreciation group, and I'm just calling to thank you for your business. I also wanted to remind you that you have a domain name -- [so-and-so] -- that's not set up for automatice renewal and will expire on October 12. If you'd like to renew it, please feel free to call me at [such-and-such] or email me at [such-and-such] and I'll be happy to personally take care of this for you."

According to GoDaddy's About Us page, it currently has 15.7 million domain names in its registration database. I have 26 of them, amounting to -- well, let's just round it off to 0.0% of the total. And yet they're calling -- using a real person, not a recording -- about the upcoming expiration of one $9.95/year product. Now, if I was a stockholder, I might question whether this was truly a good use of company assets, but there's no denying that this is impressive attention to detail and customer service. Domain name registration is essentially a commodity, meaning (among other things) that sellers have very little ability to distinguish their product from that of their competitors. Customer service is one way to set your product apart from the others.

I'll be the first to admit that there are a number of reasons I don't like doing business with Go Daddy, starting with its slightly creepy founder and CEO. But the company is doing something right, and some of our local businesses could learn some lessons from it.

Update: The second company's repair guy showed up on time, and did the job quickly and expertly (well, as far as I know, anyway). He even gave me a tip for extending the life of my garage door opener. That's the kind of service that generates repeat customers.

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Comments

Bummer on the garage door repair. You gotta love waiting on them to get there and they never show!

Posted by: Janie at October 7, 2006 06:44 PM

What, do I have to be a Fire Ant Gold member to get the tip on extending the life of my garage door opener? Spill the beans!

Posted by: Bret at October 7, 2006 09:24 PM

Janie, I guess the mitigating factor was that since I work at home, it wasn't quite as annoying as if I'd left the office to sit and wait for them. But, almost...

Bret, I'm not sure this is helpful to most people, but the guy said that if you have a fairly old opener (which I do), they've noticed that tightening the drive chain to the tension specified in the owner's guide will actually hasten the demise of the unit. He said it's better to leave some slack in the drive chain. Now, how they know this I couldn't say. But he seemed pretty certain.

Posted by: Eric at October 7, 2006 09:53 PM

I can't see why people don't click on that it's so important to follow up and turn up when you say your going to. You lose so much business if you don't - people will go elsewhere!

Posted by: Rachel at October 7, 2006 10:15 PM

Rachel, it is amazing, isn't it? It's like an intelligence test, and not a very difficult one at that. For the record, I never did hear from the first company.

Posted by: Eric at October 7, 2006 10:26 PM

It seems that certain industries simply have more work than they want and they lose sight of customer service. The fact that you're limited to 2 providers in Midland is at the root of the problem. We've been trying to get a roofer out to our house for months now. And a foundation speciali$t. And a refrigerator repairman (okay this one is weeks, not months, but still).

Heh. I can't believe I just had to edit the word, "speciali$t." Your comment filter a little moody today? ;-)

Posted by: gwynne at October 7, 2006 11:20 PM

That IS amazing. Service like that is extremely rare.

Posted by: Stephen Shores at October 8, 2006 09:39 AM

Glad you got it fixed, but yeah - customer service, well, good customer service, is often hard to come by. That said, however, I switched all my domains out of godaddy after his last superbowl commercial and the preceeding comments by the creepy CEO along the lines of if women don't want to be objectified they should get over it and then he went on to say some really horrible things about Christianity. I don't only drink milk from a Christian cow (to quote Steve Taylor, ah how I miss his music) but at the same time, when someone professes in-your-face anti-Christanity, I can't bring myself to continue to give them my money, even if it's only 0% of their business.

Posted by: beth at October 8, 2006 02:17 PM

It won't take "speçialist"? Odd. Oh, I see...it's flagging the embedded "cïalis," which, of course, is the frequent subject of spammers. I don't know how to tell it to check only for the whole word; I'm sure there's a regular expression that does this, but I don't know what it is. I'll have to look into that. In the meantime, "speciali$t" seems really applicable. ;-)

Beth, I commend you for "voting" your conscience with respect to Go Daddy, and it raises an interesting question. Most of my domains were registered on behalf of clients who are looking for the least expensive option. Would you have switched their accounts to another registrar (assuming that the new service was more expensive)?

Posted by: Eric at October 8, 2006 06:03 PM

Depends. Most of the folks I've registered on behalf of are, in fact, also Christians, so a quick explanation of my thought process evoked a willingness to pay more if that's what was necessary to no longer support godaddy. That said, there are a few places mostly comparable now (1and1 being a prime examp|e), so in all if it went up, it was only a few bucks at the end of the day. But, had someone been not willing to potentially pay more after I explained why I wanted to move to somewhere else, I would have left them there, because at the end of the day, that's not my money going to support him.

(Heh. It doesn't like examp|e with a lowercase l.)

Posted by: beth at October 9, 2006 08:37 AM

The frustrating thing about your first company is that they're probably too clueless to even notice the loss of your business. I mean, where's the fun in switching companies if you don't get to tell them you've done so? :-)

Posted by: Bret at October 9, 2006 02:14 PM
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