Of Power and Customer Service

Greetings from the beautiful Los Angeles… and my insomnia.

I’ve never met a power grid that could support me. From the early ISP days all the way to Infomart, I’ve tripped, blown, spiked and had every other inappropriate jargon you can imagine used in conjunction with my ability to overload the grid. Here are a few of the choice quotes from my past:

“Vlad, you know anything about wiring?”

“Vlad, can you please go downstairs to check on the generator?”

“Vlad, how big of a gas canister can you fit in your trunk?”

I got my first lesson on what its like running a data center from Albert. He ran a DC on a FPL grid from the top of his garage. Needless to say that as we grew cooling and powering all the systems became a challenge. Plantation’s daily 3PM thunderstorms didn’t help much either. And even though my ops have moved from a over-garage-study to a state of the art data center I still feel uncomfortable about the brownouts.

Customer Service

So what do brownouts have to do with customer service? Well, yesterday we got on a rollercoaster at the Six Flags Magic Mountain north of LA and the power went out. There is something slightly uncomfortable watching a man that was just about to give all clear bang his mic against steel to make it work. Kind of diminishes the confidence I have in the assembly of steel thats about to flip me upsite down and accelerate me at 3Gs straight into the cement base. This is how you troubleshoot things? Monkey bang mic on the steel rail?

Anyhow – Magic Mountain ran out of power. They had to unhook us manually and send us back. The staff was very courteous, very nice and they kept us informed at all times. Living in Disney World, this is quite a departure. Disney is all about deception and lies – for example, nobody ever dies in Disney World – even if you got cut into 8 pieces on the Splash Mountain they would scrap you together, transfer you off property to the hospital and pronounce you dead there.

When there is a problem – good luck finding out. You never will. The best they’ll do is ship you off to Customer Service where the newest batch of slaves.. I mean, foreign exchange students, will try to learn English along the way to frustrating you out of the park.

Magic Mountain did something Disney never would. They went up the line of people waiting for Customer Service and simply handed out complimentary passes to everyone there. No questions, no discussion, just… “How many in your party”

Then on the way out, another non-Disney thing: They had staff wait there with complimentary passes – as you walked through the door you were invited back, for free? Whaaa? Disney not only would have had you break out the balance sheets to prove your material loss but likely wouldn’t have given you even a discount. They would stick one foreigner to extend the line from the main gate all the way to Universal Studios in hopes that they could stave off giving away free passes.

Magic Mountain – “here you go, so sorry about the technical difficulties”

It would seem Disney needs to learn a little about customer service from their competitors.

So What?

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, find your nearest competitors and outdo them. Although our SLA has a fairly complex way of issuing credits (lawyers & customer service do not mix) I outright refund the months service on our dedicated servers and web hosting when we down our customers. The sad thing about expectations is that people never even ask for it – 99% of the time they are just happy to be back online. Half the time they even fight with me over whether thats neccessary or not. I always give the exact same talk:

“You trust us with your infrastructure and you should expect to be up 100% of the time. This is a business, not a best effort clinic. I expect you to be up 100% of the time, I expect my staff to put in 100% of the effort into making it happen. I appologize for the inconvenience.”

I believe thats where we win. No, we’re not fanatical, but we get a bunch of their customers every single day.