Shopping around, social style

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One of the most difficult forces to fight against in a service-oriented business is commoditization, or the reduction of comparison shopping to price alone. Who’s cheapest is a decision-making process we default to when something is too complex for us to understand. For example, if you know nothing about web hosting, then your decision will likely be swayed by whoever has the lowest price tag.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make a choice based on things that matter to you? For example, in web hosting, server technology is more or less the same across the board. Bandwidth costs are more or less the same, especially when you’re talking about the low end of the market. What really matters to the average small business or personal web site owner? Price is still a factor, of course, but service tops most people’s lists. If my site goes down, what do I do? Who do I call? How can someone help me fix it in a timely manner?

In the days before social media, there was no simple, fast way to do this. You relied solely on word of mouth or reviews written by people you didn’t know or trust. Today, however, you can test this for yourself very quickly, easily, and fairly publicly. Today, in just a few minutes of time and work, you can comparison shop on service and get reliable results using social media.

Here’s an experiment I did as an example. I went around to the various hosting companies I could find on Twitter and gathered up their Twitter handles. Next, I headed over to FutureTweets and scheduled one tweet to each of them asking, “If I were hosting a site with you and had a problem RIGHT now, would you help in the middle of the night?”

Initially, I had thought I scheduled them all for 1:38 AM, but I missed a time zone setting and they fired off at 1:38 AM GMT, or 7:38 PM ET. Still, that’s a period of time when I like someone be listening and fixing my problems.

Our contestants in this little exercise were @westhost, @spiralhosting, @site5, @mediatemple, @justhost, @hostway, @hostgator, @hostdime, @dreamhost, @bluehost, and @asmallorange.

In order of response time:

@mediatemple: 2 minutes.
@dreamhost: 4 minutes.
@hostdime: 15 minutes.
@site5: 17 minutes.
@asmallorange: 74 minutes.
@spiralhosting: 11 hours.

No response from the others yet 12 hours later.

If I were shopping around for web hosting and one of my primary concerns was service and how quickly I could get a response if I was having trouble, I’d have a pretty definitive answer for myself. Are there plenty of good hosting companies that aren’t listening to Twitter? Probably. Is this a fair test of them? To me it is, but only because I invest a lot of time in social media, so it’s one of my preferred methods of communication. I’d rather do business with companies in the same space as me if possible. Most important, I would pay more for great service.

The lesson for companies here is that if you’re going to use social media, it can’t be a half-assed effort. As Yoda quipped, “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Listening to Twitter and responding costs time, employee resources, and a functional Internet connection. If you’re going to be in social media, be here when people need you the most. Food for thought: for the 5 companies that didn’t respond within 12 hours, have they basically wasted all their marketing dollars since, if this were a true purchasing decision, they would no longer be in the running no matter how much they spent on marketing?

The lesson here for everyone isn’t who is the best hosting company in terms of service. If these tweets had gone out as scheduled at 1:38 AM ET, the results probably would be different. The lesson here is that social media provides you with another set of tools you can use to make decisions based on things you actually care about. These tools are available to everyone, to you, and if you make use of them, you’ll get better results than trying to guess what all the features on an endless supply of marketing collateral mean.

What do you think? Was this a fair test to you? Would you have done it differently? Will you try it the next time you’re making a purchase where service is important?

p.s. I’m glad to see that the companies I do business with currently were ones who responded in a timely manner. Thanks @mediatemple and @asmallorange!

Comments

8 responses to “Shopping around, social style”

January 14, 2011

Jim Willis

Although an interesting test Chris, I’m not sure it’s a “fair” test. As a user of web hosting services for my company, and my personal websites, my test of what makes a good customer service response is not how quickly they respond on Twitter. I wouldn’t even think to approach them that way, unless all other avenues (namely email) have failed. Using Twitter and going “public” with a problem or issue is sort of a way of shaming an ISP into action.

So I start off with an email. And my measurement of success is how quickly they respond to that. Case in point: I have used A Small Orange for several years now, and have always found their customer/technical support to be top notch. Just yesterday I had a situation where a portion of my site had problems due to a recent upgrade on the ASO network. I sent them an email, and the problem was fixed within 10 minutes. That, to me, is the kind of responsiveness one looks for in an ISP.

Responsiveness to Twitter is fine and testing it interesting, but the acid test is how quickly does your problem get fixed, no matter how you contact the ISP.

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January 14, 2011

Dave Sabol

Great informal study Chris! Some of the best customer support interactions that I’ve had with companies like Dell and MediaTemple have come through Twitter! I think it’s a logical extension to more traditional support channels and a terrific value add, especially for tech/web companies, to let your users know that you are listening and sincerely care. Those that choose to ignore blogs, twitter and facebook are doing so to their own detriment!

I piggy-backed on your experiment and reached out to two other hosts (KnownHost and Superb) shortly after you did and have yet to hear from either. It’s making me reconsider who I host my personal stuff with.

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January 14, 2011

DeborahEdwards-Onoro

Hi Chris,

I have to agree with Jim. I would not use Twitter as my first step in getting support from my web host.

Like Jim, I’ve been A Small Orange customer for years. I have received prompt service from their support at 1:38am in the morning as well as 8:15am and 4:21pm. I know to use their online ticketing system, and like that I can follow the history of the request online.

Having said that, if for some reason I haven’t received a response from A Small Orange, despite numerous follow up requests through their ticketing system, I would use Twitter as my second support method.

With a 140 character limit in Twitter, there’s no way I could explain my web hosting issue in a tweet.

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1. January 18, 2011
  
  Jen Lepp
  
  Thanks for the overview of your experience with us, Deborah!
  
  I remember coming back to @cspenn’s tweet and thinking “Oh, no, why’d the test come when I ran to dinner! Eek!”. I knew when I responded the response wasn’t as fast as I wanted it to be.
  
  On Wednesday January 12th 2011, A Small Orange added a new management position to the company specifically to focus on Customer Experience, and I’m the lucky girl that gets to have a full time job focusing on ways to make our customers happy. While ASO’s social media has been “catch as catch can”, as Customer Experience Manager one of my primary focuses will be social media communications with our customers.
  
  The test tweet came in on my second day on the job, and the first 48 hours that we had anything akin to a social media manager – nothing like a trial by fire and a blog post reviewing you to spur you to action. 🙂
  
  Social media communication is becoming indispensable, and our goal is to always be there when you need us. We’ve already accomplish that on the help desk, but we definitely want to branch out and be as responsive anywhere our customers need us to be.
  
  Reply
  1. January 18, 2011
    
    Christopher S. Penn
    
    Glad to give you the baptism by fire, Jen, before the really grouchy people in social media do 🙂 And you’ll note, by the way, that this blog is hosted at… A Small Orange.
    
    Reply
January 15, 2011

Ian M Rountree

You know what? I friggin love Mediatemple. Having come to them from an independent who spent a lot of his visible effort on being accessible – the things they’ve done for me in short order have always been impressive.

No, I don’t think your test was unfair – for you. For someone who’s not on twitter in any meaningful way, perhaps MT’s responsiveness wouldn’t matter, and the marketing dollars would have counted in someone else’s favour. But, in this case, yes – fair needs measurement based on what’s being considered.

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January 15, 2011

Travis Oberlander

Hey Chris! This is a great experiment to test the responsiveness. Obviously, like you said, you would value responsiveness on Twitter but a true test of quality customer support would fall under all contact channels. I think it comes down to personal preference, like you said. You’re invested into Social Media, for those who aren’t, Twitter responsiveness might not be of high value.

I manage the Social Media Customer Support team at (mt) Media Temple and we emphasize speedy, helpful response. We have people keeping an eye on our Twitter feed 24/7. While the responsiveness might not be 2 minutes during “off-peak hours,” from 7am-7pm Monday – Friday, we have a team whose sole duty is to respond to customers online, be it through Twitter, Facebook, forums or any other channel. (We’re starting to explore the possibilities of Quora now and they’re pretty exciting)

Thanks again for the awesome experiment and for sharing something that we’re all quite proud of here.

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January 15, 2011

Amanda Pingel

I don’t think it matters whether I would use Twitter or not. The point of the exercise is that you can try before you buy: reach out to your top candidates in the way YOU would, and see what kind of response you get.

I can even imagine situations (not for webhosting) where not being on twitter would be a competitive advantage: my grandmother would totally buy a service with the tagline “We can only be contacted by phone … But we answer the phone”. The point is that, before she signs up, she should call and see if they really DO answer the phone.

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