Snoitulos Ten

I love taking a shower. Not only does the water on my head and body feel good, but it seems to be the ultimate stimulant for getting the brain to think about things I normally do not have time to consider. This morning, I found myself contemplating business relationships. We have spent the last 6 years building a company. Yet many people, who do business with us, consider the person they deal with the company.

A case in point, recently I read a Linked In recommendation from a client of ours who posted a reference for a former employee. When I first read it, my initial reaction was good for the former employee for getting the reference. But the reference included many tasks that were outside the scope of this person’s specific job requirements and abilities. In this case that employee was being lauded for his ability to do things that were done by other employees of the company. And because these employees did not interact directly with the client, they received no credit for the work they had done.

As I pondered, I thought that is really unfair. But unfair or not, that is the way things are. In our marketing efforts, we promote our President as the company spokesperson. And she does a fine job of promoting the company through her involvement in various organizations and community outreach programs. But she is not the company either. People who are the face of the company tend to get credit for the collective work of the employees of the company. Individual rewards are left to the company themselves to dole out to its employees. And this is the way it goes when a company serves it clients well. One or a handful of public facing employees get the lion’s share of the credit.

But what happens when things don’t go right? Then, all of a sudden the person who you deal with is no longer the company. You escalate your issues up the ladder. You demand resolution from the company. You expect the company to step in to make it right. No longer is the individual the center of your attention. That person who in a different situation gets all the credit now takes a backseat to the company’s infrastructure and policies and people. And the funny thing is that the person who gets all the credit when things go well, rarely gets all the blame when things do not go as planned. Why is that?

The reality is that we are humans. Employees are human. Companies are not. We can relate one to one with another human but we cannot relate one to one with a company. In most cases a company is not one. It is many. Doing different things to make sure the company can provide the products and services that warrant a customer’s praise and hopefully, loyalty.

Smart companies empower their employees to make decisions. The more power you give an employee the more human they become and the more a customer can relate to them and identify less with the company. However satisfying this is for the customer, it is a two-edged sword for the company. Empowering employees to keep customers happy is good for immediate business but it may lead to a false sense of security for the customer. In most cases they do not think “Wow! What a great company I am dealing with that cares so much about my well being they allow their employees to make decisions to keep me happy.” But that is really what is happening. What they think is: “Employee X is such a good employee that he goes the extra mile for his clients looking out for their best interests.” Employee X could not do any of these things without the proper company attitude, training and foresight to enable the employee to help in the first place.

When a valued, trusted, empowered employee leaves for whatever reason, customers can become very nervous, in many cases to the point of paranoia. I think that is because as companies, no matter how good we are, fail to communicate all the things the company does to ensure the relationship between the customer and the company remains strong.

In our case few clients know about our Project Management System, our support ticket application, our forum or even our blogs. Most do know how to get in touch with us during business hours on the phone. But many of the issues our clients experience are after normal business hours. So they use the tools they know. They email their primary contact. And then if that goes unanswered for any period of time they phone the next business day. This is a communication problem. A failure of the company to help the client understand all of the support functions it may have instigated to help the client in time of need.

In our case, the same company that has empowered an employee to take care of their clients spends thousands of dollars each year on additional support functions and personnel to monitor these tools – which were put in place not to make life more difficult for our customers but to enhance their relationship and to allow us to improve our ability to serve them better.

An email sent to an employee is read by that employee when s/he gets around to it. No one else has access to that private email. S/he then must decide what to do with it and whom to send the request to if they cannot resolve the issue. Frequently this will entail opening a support ticket on behalf of the customer and assigning the ticket to the appropriate support person to rectify the issue. This can cause delays. Particularly over a weekend or after hours when so many of our clients actually have time to work on their web strategies.

The following scenario is not uncommon: Saturday morning Client “A” gets up to work on their website, email marketing application or blog. They encounter an issue – whether it is a question or an application problem. The pick up the phone and call only to find no one answers. They leave a message to call them back. Then they email their primary contact. Now they are experiencing some frustration as the time they set aside to work on a task has to be put off until they get their question answered. The employee contact is not the company. S/he is an employee who may or may not feel the need to check email on the weekend or while they are away from the office. A couple of days may go by before the employee responds. In some cases, client A cannot even recall what they were working on that they had a question on and by the time we get back to them they no longer have time to work on the task they intended to work on.

So how does Net Solutions North America – the company respond? We have a Project Management System for back-and-forth communications on projects that have not yet gone live. We have a support ticket application that is monitored 24/7 where any number of experts for that particular issue may be assigned the task to respond. And we have a Forum.

Posting a support ticket vs. sending an email means that your problem is likely to be addressed faster. And the issue is captured so that we can monitor whether or not this issue is a problem that needs to be addressed with the application or training or both.
Our Forum can be read by not only NSNA employees but also by users of the Forum. Here you have a chance to review other people’s posts to see if anyone else has had this same issue and how it was resolved. If you do not find your issue you can post it and your chances of getting a response from either a NSNA employee or a knowledgeable user is greatly increased. If you are a visual learner, we have training videos that go over most of the basic functions of our application to answer most questions. And the Ultra IS application has built in Flash video that help users perform tasks that are not done frequently.

Using any or all of these tools will significantly help most of our customers to get quick responses to issues they encounter and will reduce the frustration level of setting time aside to work on a task only to have to set it aside because you cannot get your questions answered.

The point I am trying to make is that our customers are Net Solutions North America customers and not individual employee of Net Solutions customers. It is the company that will support them long after an employee may leave. We should cherish the friendships that employees of companies provide to us, but we should remain aware that it is the company that we actually have the business relationship with. It is the company that will help us solve our problems and resolve our issues. The company is the sum of all of the employees and not just the ones that deal with the public. The company can be rated good or bad based on how it empowers its employees to make decisions that are in its customer’s best interest. Companies are not bad or good. It is the management philosophy, policies and people in the companies that determine whether a company is worth doing business with. If you have had a bad experience with a company, we invite you to give us a try and see what a difference empowered employees and enlightened management can do when coupled with great products.