Over the weekend, this site and a group of related sites went through a meltdown that took it offline for a couple of days, and, left it incomplete when it was rebooted.
The simple explanation is that a WordPress plug-in started behaving in a way that triggered the attention of the support team at my server company, BlueHost. They shut the site down and when I went to identify where the problem, I couldn’t find any easy fix and decided to wipe the server clean and do an install with a week-old backup.
Ironically, I back up my SQL databases regularly. That wasn’t doing the trick in terms of getting the site to run right, though. Someone, the plugin that was causing the slow SQL requests had disrupted core scripts in my WordPress engine. Doing a full reinstall of WordPress and reloading the database didn’t have the effect I was looking for.
So, I 
lost a week of posts and development from the root domain. Frustrating. And, given the way that my posts get redistributed around the social Web, I’ve got a week of bad links floating around. Which is not good for my site, and personally somewhat embarassing.
The purpose of this post is to let you all know that I don’t think I’m out of the woods yet. Something has changed with my host company, BlueHost, I think, and I’m going to shift my little network of blogs over to a dedicated server. This will take a little bit of time to set up, and I’m not wholly confident that my installations isn’t going to trip something on the BlueHost servers in the meantime.
According to the folks at BlueHost, I’ve got one strike left. If I use it up, they’ll shut me down for good!
So bear with me over the next week or so as I get my servers, domains and installation issues all ironed out.
Thanks!
A couple of weeks ago I ran a short poll on this blog asking whether our experience with customer service had changed during the economic contraction.
The question was prompted by an experience I had with American Express that seemed very contrary to the brand promise of the company.
The results of this admittedly unscientific poll are below:
Do you feel that major brands (like American Express) are providing customer service consistent with their brand promise during this economic contraction?
- I've never felt like the customer service I experienced was consistent with the brand promise (41%, 12 Votes)
- I have seen a notable fall-off in customer service. (34%, 10 Votes)
- Customer service has actually improved ... I can tell that they want to keep my business. (14%, 4 Votes)
- Customer service is at the same high level I've always experienced (11%, 3 Votes)
Total Voters: 29
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75% of you seem pretty unimpressed with customer service: 34% feel like customer-service has fallen off recently and another 41% feel like customer service has never been consistent with the brand promises.
That’s a pretty unsatisfactory outcome.
In this period of economic challenges, customer service is a powerful point of differentiation that is within your control. So much of customer service is about accessibility, culture and attitude. With all of the communications challenges available to us today, we can create multiple points of contacts with consumers.
Customer service doesn’t mean that you resolve each issue in favor of the person who has reached out. It does mean that every issue is resolved in a timely and personal fashion.
That way, customer service becomes a foundation element of the customer experience.
My orientation of customer service is rooted in my first experiences in business. We had a small boutique newsletter and consulting firm that specialized in the impact of technology on the content business. This is the mid-1980s, after the breakup of AT&T and during a period of innovation and expansion in the microcomputer industry and the business information industry. All the change was driven by harnessing the power of micro-processors and shifting the channels of distribution for information.
Our business depended on high-value interactions: A newsletter subscription was about $400 and a report sale was at least $1500.
Every single phone call mattered.
As a result, everyone answered the phone. Every phone call an opportunity: to learn some bit of information, to handle an order inquiry and, most importantly, to deal with a customer service issue.
If the phone rang more than 3 times and didn’t get picked up, we knew that we were doing something wrong.
Every person was required to get a name, title, company, address and phone number every time the phone rang. We put this information into one single database — a rudimentary Professional Pro spreadsheet — and tracked it against orders and renewals.
The essence of our customer experience was engagement, curiosity and resolution. Every single time.
That’s my expectation from a customer service organization. At our company, with our 35,000+ customer relationships and the millions of pieces of content that we process and distribute every single month, I hope that we’re able to achieve some of that experience of customer service. We believe that our culture gives people the opportunity to resolve issues and to feel satisfied with what they’ve been able to do.
Can I attest that we accomplish that consistently? No. And the very act of writing this post makes me think about ways that we should set out these expectations more clearly and measure more effectively.
That’s how you improve your customer experience.
