Cobweb

Do you get responsive Online Support in the UK?

In these times of belt-tightening, businesses are struggling to capture the attention of their customers. For many, the way to a customer’s wallet is through lower prices and as a result, discounters and utility providers are sustaining revenues and winning in some markets. For others, it isn’t easy to compete on price – but they may be able to get the edge they need with proper customer service.   It’s my view that you should improve what you do, and do it better than the rest.

There’s an interesting study into the performance of customer service from eGain Communications Corporation and although it’s retail based, it provides an international benchmarking report for online customer services. The report benchmarks and compares e-mail customer service and Web self-service offered by leading companies in the US and the UK. According to this research, US retailers performed worse than those in the UK in e-mail response quality, but these North American retailers performed better in Web self-service and the variety of online channels they provide for self-service.  The overall results indicate that there is significant room for improvement in both areas... something I’m certainly taking note of in the current climate.

The key results show that 25% of companies failed to respond to customer e-mails; 65% responded to e-mails within 24 hours, but 55% of them were considered poor or below average in quality.  If a job’s worth doing then surely it’s worth doing well.     This is concerning, especially as purchasing trends and transactions move online.  Robust online customer service needs to develop further to fully support the online consumption of services.   There no point in having great online services without strong and dependable online support behind it.

Companies cannot afford to ignore their customer service initiatives, no matter what segment or sector they serve. Not every customer will be driven by price and even if they are, there is always an alternative. We aim to improve.

Pub club - nov 2008

Cobweb held another successful Pub Club in London last night with a fresh gathering of Cobweb customers and colleagues.

Athens....

Greetings from cloudy Athens. I am in Athens for a couple of days to attend the bi-annual EMEA Hosting Club, run by Microsoft that brings togthers around 90 Partners from 23 countries. The great opportunity for this event is to share and learn about best practice from some of the best hosting companies across Europe.

I have already captured some ideas how we can make our service better for our customers.

Back to the event.....

Mark

ISPs have the power to fight spam

Edited from Microsoft Subnet http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/35178

Earlier this month spam giant McColo Corp. was at least partially taken offline. McColo is a Web hosting service that has been credited with enabling 75 percent of the world's e-mail spam and scams. It had been watched by security experts for years but is one of a handful of hosting services that authorities thought was "bulletproof".

McColo was disconnected by two of it's upstream peers.

MessageLabs reported "a massive drop in spam volume to levels eight times less than typical volumes."