Nothing should get in the way of providing excellent customer service
When a blizzard closed Web.com’s offices in Yarmouth, our Jacksonville team saved the day!
We live in a day and age where the new business paradigm is intensely customer-focused. Quality products and effective customer-service (i.e. genuine product value) are critical to business success. If a company attempts to market anything less, they are quickly called out for it in public, damaging trust and credibility. At the same time, companies that meet or exceed expectations can be richly rewarded.
Working behind the scenes in social media for one of the world’s largest online marketing companies with almost 3.5 million customers, I understand this as well as anyone. When you serve so many people, even the tiniest fraction of unhappy customers can become a veritable tidal wave. And there’s not a thing you can do about it, but try to be the very best you can be, every single day.
So, I was delighted to hear a story from our CS Team recently that reflects the value we place on effective customer service at Web.com, and the lengths we’ll go to uphold those values. I don’t share it to be self-promotional, but rather because it’s a great example of the type of effort it takes to provide effective customer service at scale. In a large corporate environment, it’s a story I might easily never have heard, myself. And I think it’s worthwhile for consumers to understand what regularly occurs behind the scenes in organizations like ours, perhaps more often than they might realize. It certainly exemplifies how things –and people– work at Web.com with a, “Whatever it Takes” approach to keeping our customers happy.
As most know, the winter of 2014-2015 has been brutally harsh, with the “Siberian Express” regularly driving pounding storms of snow and ice, across the northeast. A particularly severe blizzard hit Web.com’s Yarmouth, Nova Scotia offices last week making it impossible for employees to show up to work on Monday morning. Rather than wringing their hands over it, our Jacksonville, FL-office Tech Support team tackled the problem head on! Calls were rerouted away from Yarmouth and to Jacksonville. Team members there had originally expected to handle several hundred calls that day, but by the end of the afternoon, those numbers would more than double.
So how did the Jax team do it, with nearly twice the normal call volume rolling in? Well, team members took extraordinary efforts on the spur-of-the-moment: Coming in early, staying late, canceling their PTO (paid time off) and coming into the office, and working through their break times. In addition, agents from our “Do-it-Yourself” and “Do-it-for-Me” website teams flexed over from their normal queues in order to help, as did our supervisors, ensuring no resources went under-utilized on this day.
Their efforts paid off. Agents cut down average call times down by more than 40 seconds, minimizing the amount of time waiting clients were on hold. The Jacksonville Tech Support team, supporting agents and management did everything they could to assist our customers and provide the kind of service they expect every day. They exemplified Web.com’s core values of teamwork, respect and unity while also providing the best customer service possible– whatever it took.
We offer a special “thank you” to all of our team members who worked so hard to provide our customers an outstanding experience that day.
Author information
Tim is Director of Social Media at Web.com. A deeply experienced integrated marketing professional, former creative director and writer who operated his own full-service marketing, branding, public relations and design firm for 15 years, Tim provides a wealth of experience in nearly every area of marketing communications encompassing both new and traditional media.
