Category Archives: Customer care

Choose your business alliances carefully

Posted on by gianniponzi

As a lot of you will know, I recently became involved in a really exciting new Company called Ad Dynamo. My “job” is to make sure it grows in Ireland and that our clients a amazingly happy with the service.

With this in mind I’m leveraging (sorry, I have to use at least one buzzword per post ;-) ) all of my business contacts and looking for new ones.

In the best possible way for all parties, I hope!

I’ve recently been trying to decide on who I approach and with this in mind I’d like to share a thought I had.

Choose CAREFULLY. Yep, pretty obvious :-)

While a possible partner might look incredibly attractive, never forget what YOUR core values are and make sure you compare them to THEIR values and make sure they share at least some of yours.

In the end they are in business to promote THEIR services so your priorities will always be further down the list.

If you share common values, the risk of your company being incorrectly sold, should be decreased.

Lastly, if you were hoping for some scandalous accusations, sorry to disappoint you. :-)

Customer service – Is it that hard ??

Posted on by gianniponzi

The other day I clicked into a blog post on Customer Service by @patphelan

I don’t know the man personally but I do follow him on Twitter because of the company he started and my natural interest the type of people who start their own companies.

ANYWAY…

His post had to with the lack of Customer Service from a, wait for it,  Service Provider.

I agreed with his sentiment and nodded sagely at all the points he was making but as needs must,  went back to work.

Funny then, that a few minutes later, the ol’ Customer Service skeleton come out of the closet and bite ME in the arse .

Here’s a synopsis;

  • I have a very large and important customer
  • Said customer has lots of users on their website, aka mini-customers. 1500 of them
  • The digital (security) certificate of their website required renewal.
  • Naturally, I did my bit and renewed it.  Simples !
  • No, NOT simples it seems.

The payment to  “the hosting Company that shall not be named”,  was made on the 11th.

After MANY support emails, waiting on the phone and even having to goon Twitter to get attention (that didn’t work either), 5 DAYS later the SSL cert was finally applied.

I am ranting on, so to pick up on Pat’s theme, if they had communicated clearly with me and showed me that they were actually trying to resolve the request, maybe I would have been a little more patient.

Unfortunately, the support person was NOT very helpful with information and in fact blatantly lied when giving me the deadline by which the cert would be installed.

The net effect of all of this is of course that recommending them, WILL be avoided like the plague.

I’m so adamant, that I won’t even put the Company name in this post.

Needles to say it was NOT this crowd, they’re awesome :-)

So the question remains… Customer Service, is it THAT hard ??

Answers on a postcard or just leave a comment.

 

P.s Do NOT use a Hosting Company that ends with 365……

 

The value of offline marketing

Posted on by gianniponzi

While online marketing is all the rage, today’s post brought with it a little surprise, which a) pleased me very much and b) reinforced my thoughts that offline marketing is still VERY important.

Today’s gift from Blacknight is the above keyring, promoting .eu domains.

While I don’t have that many, I was happy to be acknowledged by Blacknight (happy customer) and immediately started wondering which .eu domain I could register (a happy, BUYING customer).

Still think offline marketing isn’t worth it ??