Getting it Right – Again

Sadly every now and then a company owner comes to the conclusion that things are not what they used to be.  This is what has happened at Apollo Hosting.  When we built this company back in 1999, we strived to answer phone calls, chats, and Help Desk tickets in the most timely manner possible.  Beating our competition most of the time. Our customers loved us. But over the past year or so the upper management that we trusted somehow let things go.  I as the owner and Martin Field the CEO are now busy getting back to our ‘roots’. We are ‘cleaning shop’ and getting things back to where they used to be – award winning customer support!

CIDB – Great Idea Just Taken Too Far!

We have always had a good CRM program (written mostly in-house) to track our customer’s history.  But, we never have had a distinct code to use for each customer (many accounts have more than one domain name so we couldn’t use that). So one of our managers came up with the CIDB which stands for Customer Information DataBase. It is a great idea and is helping our customers get help faster and with more accuracy. The reason is that if a customer calls in that that phone call or chat or HD ticket should be kept as a record for future discussions with Customer Support. It helps Tech Support put the puzzle together faster so to speak and help the customer faster. The CIDB helps make this cross reference happen.

We are happy to say that the CIDB is still alive and well and working better everyday. Unfortunately we made a bad decision about a month and a half ago to use the CIDB to limit the amount of phone calls each account was allowed. For example if you have a Value Plan you are allowed fewer calls than say a VPS customer. It sounded great in theory in practice it really was not a good idea at all. I had a bad taste in my mouth about the whole implementation of the CIDB in this manner. It’s sad to hear customers say that they need to get everything in on this phone conversation since they aren’t allowed any more phone calls this month based on their plan allotment!

I’m happy to announce that our policy of using a customers CIDB number to limit support calls was short lived. We are now back to the old days when a customer no matter how large or how small is allowed equal support. Sometimes innovation doesn’t really mean it makes the most sense.

Yes owner’s do make mistakes. I went along with using the CIDB to limit phone calls because I thought in the long run it would benefit all our customers. Fewer phone calls, most issues resolved faster. But it just wasn’t right and like I said before left a bad taste in my mouth. Well, trust your first instincts owners! 

To our customers:

I sincerely apologize going along with using the CIDB to limit customer phone call allotments. It was a bad idea and one that I would never have gone along with had I stuck to the origins of Apollo Hosting and it’s vision of putting the customer first. The good news is you will see a dramatic turn around in our customer support. We are already seeing a dramatic drop in the time Help Desk tickets are resolved (I am hoping for an average 2 hour turn around and we’re almost there). And the wait times on the phones are much, much better. Like I mentioned in an earlier blog I noticed that the time-out on our online chat was set to 1.5 minutes (outrageous really). That is fixed now and you should be able to get through via chat much more quickly now without being sent to an online form.

Keep this in mind:

This is not meant to tout our strengths but I just want to remind our customers of one thing. Many other hosting companies don’t have a live chat on their site at all. They have focused more on Help Desk tickets and phone calls. We are not going to remove our live chat. We have too many overseas customers who depend on the live support they get via our chat. So if you enjoy having the option to chat live with customer support without having to call (during business hours only for most companies) then stick with Apollo! You probably won’t get that option with one of the other guys.

Tamara Field
President
Apollo Hosting, Inc.