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The Customer's all you've got
A web company builds its business on service

HostMySite is one of those rare success stories where a small group of friends, frustrated by poor customer service from the "big guys," get together and invents a better mousetrap and stay true to their first principles. Customer service is why the website hosting company started and it remains central to their quick growth both in customers and revenue. From that handful, the company now has more than 250 employees and was purchased in late 2009 by Wachovia Capital Partners - at a time when deals like this just didn't seem doable anymore.

The path to embedding a strong customer service ethic began with the realization they could not "order people to be nice," said Brian Raboin, vice president of operations. The people who take the phone calls and solve the problems of customers have to be a signficant participant in setting the bar, defining the parameters and crafting the plan. Here's what they did, in Brian's words.



By Brian Raboin, vice president of operations, HostMySite.com


Back around 2003, we wanted to come up with something that would become a promise we would make to ourselves. We always felt we were a customer service company even before we were anything else.  We always looked to bring on people that shared that same passion and desire, and often passed on people with a lot of technical talent, but lacked the willingness to talk to customers.  

However, as we got bigger and bigger, customers were telling us that our top notch customer service was showing signs it could be watered down.  Customers were anticipating that as HostMySite.com got bigger, the service would get worse.  And we were growing fast … and it was harder and harder to make sure that the people we were bringing on shared that same passion that we had when it was just a few of us.  

We were unwilling to accept that growing and being successful shouldn't go hand in hand with poor customer service.  And so we started to take steps to "get things right." A big part of that was the Pillars of Customer Service, or as we call them, the Pillars.
 
The leadership group at the time decided that the best way to put together the Pillars was to make it a companywide project.  We broke the company up into cross-departmental committees, we assigned leadership members into those committees, but we made sure that the people in leadership didn't do any leading, just facilitate and ask questions.  We asked people to write down what they thought constituted good customer service and why.  We ended up with around 50 submissions.  They included full-blown Power Point presentations, stories about good and bad customer service, and they included some surprises about how we were becoming a bad customer to ourselves.  
 
We then took all the information, and we looked for patterns, similar sentiment, themes and we were able to boil it down to what became the Pillars.
 
We then sent then presented them to company and asked "is this what you said?"  We got some of it right. Groups went through and offered another revision and edit.  We boiled it down again and came up with the first set of Pillars.
 
Three years later, we had grown even more. It was 2006 and we pretty much revisited the process. We had many more new people and it was good for them to offer suggestions and make changes. Most of the pillars remained and we added two more  - empowerment and communication.
 
Today, our employee review process is completely centered around how well employees live up to the Pillars.  We also design interview questions around them.  Employee recognition is almost always tied back to the Pillars, and when delivering constructive criticism, we also look to focus the discussion around how the Pillars can help employees improve in areas of deficiency.