Recession, customer service & value for money.

Posted by Eamon in Customer Service, echolibre, industry
Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 17:40

I had lunch with Eoghan and Paul from Contrast earlier today. We had some nice burgers in Bóbó’s — I’m still full. As we were leaving myself and Paul weighed up the pros and cons of tech companies offering that little bit more in recessionary times, and we concluded that companies that do so are likely to fare better in the months ahead. In a recession people expect a bit more value for their money.

OK, so this isn’t rocket science — it’s just a little bit of common sense, and it doesn’t apply solely to the web or tech industry, nor tough economic times for that matter. I think any company that doesn’t try to go that extra mile for their customers are failing to sufficiently differentiate themselves from the competition, and sooner or later that will hurt.

However, if you’re a web company, and you’re either relying on client work or chasing the recurring revenue / subscription models, it is — I’m sorry, retarded — not to consider how easy it can be to offer that extra bit more, to provide better value for money. What might take you or a member of your team an hour to deliver can actually make a big difference to your client or users.

Two weeks ago, one of our clients were experiencing email issues. I mentioned to them that they should consider moving their email over to Google Apps for Enterprises, as it’s fairly robust, has a web interface, large (and expanding) storage space and probably best of all, it supports IMAP (it rocks). Setting this up isn’t normally something we’d offer to clients — we’re more focused on web application architecture & security and API development for web companies, but in this case I thought if it helped to make our client’s life a bit easier then we should do it. At the time, I didn’t even think about how much it would cost the client, and in the end, it was an hour of our time altogether so we told the client it was included in the work we’d already done for them.

It’s a small gesture, but it has had a big impact in the way this client receives emails. Spam is down, they have a remote back up of their email and they can access it from anywhere. I’d call that a positive result.

So, what I’d urge other web companies to do is to consider what you can offer for a client that wont cost the earth for you but have a long term benefit for your clients or users. I believe that actions like this will ultimately benefit the web industry as a whole and help small start-up companies gain much needed credibility in their early days.

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