I’m going to let you in on a little business secret: customers care about customer service. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Customer support software company Zendesk sponsored a research study in 2013, conducted by independent research outfit Dimensional Research. The findings were based on surveys of 1046 people in response to the customer support they received at midsized businesses.

How do customer support interactions impact customer trust and business revenue?

Here are the key findings of the customer support study that are related to revenue:

  • Survey respondents listed customer support as the factor most influencing their trust in a company.
  • Three out of every five (62%) B2B and two out of every five (42%) B2C customers made additional purchases following a positive support interaction.
  • Two out of every three (66%) of B2B and half (52%) of B2C customers never bought from a company again following a poor support experience.
  • Seven out of every eight (88%) have changed their purchasing behavior after reading customer reviews on the Internet.

It’s clear from the above information that customer support strongly influences how customers feel about companies, which makes sense. It also makes sense that businesses with impressive customer support want to flaunt it, as 37 Signals did when they started publicly posting their customer satisfaction data in real-time (as reported by KISSmetrics in March 2014).

We like to show off our focus on customer support since many hosting companies and those in the tech field, in general, have often suffered in that department. We promote our 24/7 support consultants through our Real World Scenario series, which highlights specific customer/consultant interactions such as the below, in which a customer needs help modernizing the hosting for 100 websites.

Transitioning 100 websites from legacy servers to private cloud hosting servers

Please note that the following transcript is edited for clarity, space, and privacy/anonymity.

Client: Hi, I need a call. We have over 100 sites with 2000 pages on old tech.

Consultant: Thank you for contacting Atlantic.Net. Please call me at your convenience or send me your exact requirements by email. I can also call you if you want to provide me with a number and time to call.

Client: We need to know what would work best. See below details:

  • 300 MB
  • 750 pages in one site
  • 5000 unique hits, maybe 15,000 pages a month
  • large home page, slow now on IPOWER shared.

Which cloud server is best, or should we go with Shared?
We may add 130 mini-sites as well, 1 to 3 pagers.
May have 130 domains.
I may need a few IP addresses.
We are looking at you, Bluehost, HostGator, and Rackspace.
Our developer said iPage, but I noticed bad press.
We also have a separate project doing video conferencing that will potentially need large dedicated processing once [developing business scenario omitted for customer privacy].

Consultant: How many IPs do you require?

Client: Maybe three.

Consultant: We no longer offer shared web hosting, so your only choice with us is our public cloud hosting platform. We recommend you use the medium plan with cPanel/WHM.

  • Linux medium plan – $19.94 per month
  • cPanel/WHM – $14.97 per month.

( 1 ) IP is included
( 2 ) extra IPs – $7.94 per month.

Our public cloud server is an unmanaged platform, and you will have root access to load anything you require. If you would like us to set up a LAMP stack environment on the server for you, we can do it for a one-time charge of $75.

When you’re ready to move forward with the videoconferencing project, we will need details on your hosting requirements. This type of project will require either a virtualized or non-virtualized dedicated server platform.

Client: Sorry, what is a LAMP stack?
I know how to use IPOWER and cPanel myself.
The developers know more.
I’d like it to be easy for me to upload some HTML mini-sites.
Do we have unlimited domains to point at this?
We have 230 in GoDaddy to point.

This seems like a good deal. What else would we miss from Rackspace, or do you have everything they do?
They are trying to sell us cloud.
LAMP is Linux, right?
We run WordPress, by the way.

Consultant: A LAMP stack is the installation of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It’s an incredibly popular open-source system used as a central platform for dynamic websites.
We can install WordPress also for you under the $75 one-time charge.
The cPanel control panel allows for unlimited domains.

Client: All right, this plan sounds excellent. I’m ready to move forward.

Consultant: Great, you can complete the signup process here: SSD Cloud Hosting sign up, and then we can complete your requested work.

Teaming up with strong customer support

As seen in the above interaction, we care about helping our customers find the best solutions, and it doesn’t just apply to sales. Our courteous and reliable 24/7 support consultants are always available so that your Atlantic.Net experience exceeds your expectations. It’s affordable and simple to transition your legacy hosting to ultra-fast, ultra-efficient cloud server hosting.

Atlantic.Net also offers managed and HIPAA WordPress hosting solutions.

By Kent Roberts