16 Things We’ve Learned Through 16 Years of Heroic Support

With the year coming to an end, we’re taking a look back at our history of Heroic Support. Our November Support Statistics were just released and we are once again on target with our goal of keeping our Heroic Promise to our customers. Our SLA guarantees every Help Desk Ticket will be responded to within 30 minutes, and every phone call and live chat within 59 seconds. In November, we exceeded our goal with initial response times of 14 minutes and 36 seconds, as well as an overall response time of 27 minutes and 2 seconds.

In light of these statistics, we asked key managers and supervisors around the company to reflect on what they’ve learned about customer support over the last 16 years. Their answers came in droves:

1. “Earn the customer’s trust.” – Liquid Web Founder and CEO
   In the hosting industry, users trust us with critical and, often, private data. We listen to our customers and have ensured peace-of-mind by employing the standards of business integrity and fidelity that are necessary to keep this data safe.
2. “Always look for ways you can improve.” – Support Manager
   No matter how great our customer support is, there is always room for improvement. We pride ourselves on doing everything we can to make sure the customer is taken care of, including high quality and timely responses. We regularly review our customer interactions and provide ways for each of our technicians to be better for the customer.
3. “Top notch customer service + technical capability is KING.” – Support Manager
   Customer service is the foundation of our company, but it is useless if we don’t pair it with top notch products and technical knowledge. A focus on learning and growing in our technical knowledge for each employee ensures that we stay competitive.
4. “Always have a mindset of: What more can I do for our customer?” – Support Manager
   We will try to solve any problem you have with your server, software, or hardware – even if it’s something not traditionally covered in our managed support. What ever the customer needs, we make sure to go above and beyond to help.
5. “Slow down, listen and ask the right questions.” – Sales Department Head
   Our diversity of customers is so great that we need to be able to ask the right questions to determine each customer’s specific needs. Slowing down and listening to the customer’s particular problems not only builds better relationships with our customers but also allows us to provide even better service.
6. “Think ahead.” – Sales Department Head
   Planning ahead is key when hosting a website. It’s important to consider the possibility of a website growing or having an influx of traffic when designing a server architecture. Scalability and flexibility can be important assets down the line.
7. “Put yourself in the customer’s shoes.” – Sales Department Head
   Looking at our customer interactions from the customer’s point of view helps us stay on our toes. When we consider the customer at every touch point, it helps us improve the level of service in every conversation.
8. “Small changes can have a big impact.” – Development Administrator
   Improving our software and systems so a process that takes 3 minutes can now happen in 1 minute can collectively save our customers hundreds of hours.
9. “Expect the unexpected.” – Development Administrator
   We work hard to make our platform work in ways that we expect it to, but customers often get more creative than we plan and stretch the system in new ways.
10. “We’re responsible for our customers’ success.” – Development Administrator
    Whether that’s through answering phone calls and emails, providing the right tools and data in our Management interface, or making functionality available in our API, our aim is to help customers make the most out of our hosting products and services.
11. “Be a customer advocate.” – Marketing Department Head
    When a customer calls in, emails, or even tweets out an issue, it is important that our first instinct is to be on the customer’s side. We always want to go to bat for our customers and work together with technicians to find a solution.
12. “Go above and beyond.” – Marketing Department Head
    It’s the little things that grow loyal customers. Instead of only taking care of your one need now, we strive to look into the future as well and keep an eye out for potential problems. Going above and beyond, even in small ways, can create a customer that will advocate for you.
13. “Be Remarkable.” – Marketing Department Head
    Our business has grown by leaps and bounds these last 16 years – and that is mainly due to word of mouth from our customers. Referrals are how we grow. With this in mind, we urge each and every employee to be remarkable. It is important to us that every interaction should be so great that customers choose to remark on it on social media or in person to their family and friends.
14. “Evolution is a requirement for technology.” -Training Department Head
    The tech industry, and specifically the Internet, is an extremely quickly-evolving beast. Because of this, we must not become too comfortable in our current settings and must instead challenge ourselves to grow and evolve over time.
15. “The world is a smaller place.” – Training Department Head
    It takes seconds, sometimes less than that, to read the current news as posted in a country on the opposite side of the planet. Everything we do as a company has a global impact – especially given the large percentage of customers we have that are overseas. Not only does this encourage us to improve our offerings around the world, but our awareness of how our actions as a company, and as individual employees, are seen across the world provides necessary perspective every day.
16. “Inspiration is everywhere.” – Training Department Head
    Developing tech solutions isn’t just a case of sitting down in front of a computer, hunkering over the keyboard, and rolling your face across the keys until a working solution appears on the screen. It is easy to get caught up in the daily grind, but we work hard to keep our employees inspired through a variety of activities. This helps our employees challenge themselves to remain open and receptive to outside stimuli and will keep us advancing and growing.

At Liquid Web, we work hard everyday to provide the best possible solutions to our customers, and we rely on our years of experience as we constantly strive to improve. We’ve had a great year at Liquid Web, but none of it would be possible without all of you, our customers. Thanks for a wonderful 2013!