What is customer service?    Is it making sure that your own application works?  or is it something more?

What is customer service?  For some it is allowing the company to “prove” that the product works…

What is Customer Service?  This is the foundational issue that must be addressed by CEO’s and Marketing Executives, as well as those on the front lines answering customers.

As the Network Architect of one of the largest Not-For-Profit hosting organizations, one that serves a niche industry, the Christian Church, we like many other providers, require support from time to time from the Vendors we have chosen to partner with.   I once heard it said that a business man is only as wise as the partner he chooses… Today I feel like King Solomon – a man many believe is the wisest person who ever lived.

After having dealings with many of the Top Tier companies like Cisco, 3Com, Vyatta, The Planet, CIHost and others – I have to tell you about an experience I had just this past weekend.    WebEmpoweredChurch & VineHosting provide a free content management system based on the Typo3 Enterprise CMS to a large amount of churches – many of which host with us.   From time to time – a restoration of a clients account is needed.   For a few years we have depended upon the Backup system from R1Soft called CDP (Continuous Data Protection) to perform the snapshots in time.    We take a snapshot of every clients account every 4 hours…  Restorations normally take just a few minutes… however this past weekend things went completely sideways.

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any will find my other writings – in such Magazines like Net Results, or on blogs like ChurchMedic – and will hear me say “Dependent is something intelligent people must become.”  Simply put – we cannot do all things- be all things…  and after taking over 40 hours to figure out why something did not work – I finally took my own advice – and opened a ticket with R1soft.

In 1972 Bill Withers had the hit song “Lean On Me” – and this is exactly the level of support I have come to expect from R1Soft.   Although the offices are technically closed – I opened the ticket at 13:37 Hrs – and received a response at 13:58 hrs on Sunday afternoon.

The Server we are using runs on the OpenSource project called “ProxMox VE” and OpenVZ – and R1Soft investigated the issue completely.   They found the issue and in just a few minutes created a resolution.   What our network staff found as a challenge – they met with a solution.  Furthermore they investigated our environment to ensure we were able to provide the timely restorations our clients were used to…   They went well above the call of duty.  R1Soft provides what we have found to be the Best Bare Metal Recovery – and MySQL Backup & Recovery for our InnoDB & MyISAM Databases !

Dependent, Competent, Understanding, Fast and Pro-Active:    These are the benchmarks of Great Customer Service -  to date I have only found three companies out of all the others we deal with that even come close to these benchmarks -   R1Soft, cPanel and one of our Bandwidth providers – Country Connections.   This brings up another problem for us to solve however internally -  How can our customer service emulate these great companies?