Steve Smith
I had an opportunity to meet Craig Newmark last week – that’s right THE Craig – from Craigs List (www.craigslist.org) . He was speaking at Jewish Family Service Agency (JFSA of Vancouver) luncheon and some of his comments highlighted some philosophical similarities with Webnames.ca.
He said that he is often called a visionary but insisted that he just listens carefully to his customers and tries to provide what they ask for. Webnames.ca does the same thing. We put a high priority on good customer service long before it was fashionable. We not only keep our customers happy (and have a 28 second average phone response time) but we blow many customers away by making system fixes and deploying changes in response to their ideas or suggestions, sometimes within hours of receiving them.
Craig also said that his title is Customer Support Representative and that he spends most of his time responding to customer enquiries. I have to admit that is pretty impressive. And while I can’t claim to spend most of my time with customers, I do try to contact as many new customers as I can every day to thank them for their purchases and to see if there is anything further we can do. I really like this part of my work, as does all our staff. Solving problems and helping businesses gain efficiencies online is gratifying for us. It’s also always interesting to see Webnames.ca – our systems, website, services, support – through the customer’s perspective and incorporate this feedback to create a better online experience. While the word-of-mouth that made Craigslist is unique, it’s been gratifying to see something smaller in scale develop for Webnames.ca over the years. It all comes back to what Craig said – ‘listen to your customers’.
You can find more of Craig Newmarks’s thoughts on his blog.