The Wonsys Blog

We build Web services, but before that we use a lot of services around the Web.
And while we believe the service itself is certainly the most important aspect, there is another critical factor: customer service.

Customer service isn’t a real feature until you absolutely need it.
We can take as an example a hosting service’s customer service: when you signup you hope you’ll never use their customer service, but when you have to, you want it to be speedy, efficient and honest.

First of all speed.
A customer service to be useful has to be really fast, I don’t care what your problems are to maintain a good customer service, but if I pay for a service I need to know you are going to look into any issue the second after I send an email.

It also needs to be efficient.
You know what the problem is, now you have to solve it forever. Don’t aim at an easy fix which is going to cause another problem in a few days.
You need to find a way to permanently fix the issue: it might take a bit more, but it’s definitely worth it.

Last, but not the least, customer service need be honest.
When something goes wrong, and is definitely not the user’s fault, don’t try to blame her for it.
Or maybe, you know what the problem is and it’s going to take a couple of days to fix: tell it, don’t just fix it and then say everything is fine.
To err is human, so be honest and your users will understand it.

I must say I’m happy to pay a bit more if I know customer service is really good.
For example, I have a hosting plan which is a bit more expensive than the average, but I never have to wait more than 10 minutes to get an answer, even if I don’t set my ticket to priority help i’m dying! ;)

Customer service is important as the service itself and sometimes I changed service provider just because of bad customer service.

As a service provider ourselves, we understand managing a good customer service isn’t easy.
We pride our customer service to be very efficient and are always more than open to communicate with our clients using every channel we have — email, IM, voip, and so on.
Sometimes, especially when you have a lot of clients, you’ll find the having too many channels open for communication is counterproductive, so you need to find out what works for you.
But keep in mind one more thing: quickness is important, but quality is even more important.

To sum it up, make sure you plan for great customer service in advance, because there’s no worst way to ruin a great service than having bad customer service.

This post was written by Simone D. 1 year ago on August 20th, 2007 late morning.