As I mentioned previously, big part of overcoming problems and running a healthy company is admitting that things aren’t perfect. If things seem perfect you should probably count your profits and quit because 1) your feedback loop is broken and the problems you have aren’t reaching you (see Ken Lay, Enron, Financial crisis of 2008-) and 2) you have low standards of excellence.
Our tagline is “Global network infrastructure, security and application management.”
Everyone on the team is aware of our corporate mission, they are reminded of our values and how we go about business. And just as everyone gets a fair review every other quarter, so must the company.
The trick here is that numbers do not tell the whole story. Sure we have key performance indicators to turn to as a quick indicator of how we are doing. # of users is up. Profit margins are higher. We’re growing worldwide, even Canada eh! Support case load is down. Support resolution time is down. Revenues are skyrocketing.
Yay, we kick ass!
Years ago I had a choice of what kind of a business I wanted to run. I had a choice over whether it was my money on the line or not, if I was going to work 7 days a week at 20 hours a day. I had a choice to let go of the creative helm that kept me close to my partners and design of our services. What I have done has been chronicled pretty well on this blog and by many of you that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.
That investment assured that I would always get the honest, kick in the balls, feedback dished out in the same way I was handing it out. I get to eat the humble pie every week and thankfully I work with so many professionals who are connected with just about every organization out there from your biggest to your smallest orgs.
So do we rock? Well, let’s see what our feedback loop says:
Vlad,
I’m writing to let you know I’m not happy with the services we are getting. We currently have about 100 hosted exchange mailboxes and no clue how many on exchange defender accounts my guess is around 250 or so. Some of our issues are as follows:
The good
· Most often your response time on issues is good
· You guys seem to do a great job at blocking viruses
· The features of the new email plugin seem to work well; deployment is another issue
· You have really helped us resolve long time issues with email from/to AOL and others
The not so good
· We are having an enormous amount of spam mail hitting an entire company and until we fill out a ticket nothings seems to help. After the ticket is closed it just says the issue has been resolved. We have no clue what was done.
· Sometimes specific users within a company receive spam mail and others don’t receive the same spam email. I know how this can happen but when we again report it; someone does something and it sometimes clears up and we still have no clue what happened or what corrected it.
· We still don’t have any way to reconcile our monthly bill to our customers. This makes our billing a manual process to reconcile and a real pain in the butt. In fact we have stopped doing it because it takes so much time.
· When we make changes via the new interface; it says it is processing but never changes. Then we open a ticket – again someone does something then it works but the interface still says processing hours later. We really don’t have a clue when things are working and when they are not. This causes us to miss our SLA’s with our customers and we are falling down on setting their expectations. If I could trust what we were seeing we could deal with it; but when a minor change takes days – that’s unacceptable.
· Our customers really want the ability to block spam on keywords. I know this isn’t your policy but there are some words that should just be blocked. These are businesses we run; not porno parlors.
· The new web interface console isn’t very user friendly and reporting is horrid. One customer wanted a list of all their accounts. We found no way of creating this list besides creating the list for our entire customer base in the system, copying the information out, stripping out all the HTML, sorting then creating a report. The entire process took about an hour. We should not have to do this just to get a report for one customer.
· Just a perspective but at times things seem to fall between the cracks; we both know this is usually due to an overworked staff.
This is just an FYI – I’m not asking you do to anything, this is just feedback from a frustrated client. I am always looking for feedback (positive and negative) from my clients and thought you would like to know. We are going to start a project to determine what direction to take the hosted email, spam/anti-virus filtering and remote backup.
Thanks for listening,
So, how do you think the next staff meeting went? 🙂
The point here is that had we not worked as hard and as closely with our partners we never would have had these issues brought up to us. Had we not shown that we actually care about what we do as passionately as we do our customers would just switch to another provider and that would have been the end of it.
Truth is, most organizations simply don’t care or don’t want to change. Did you know that Microsoft Hotmail has a 50% churn ratio, on an annual basis? Have you ever worked at anyone from Microsoft Hotmail? Have you ever even heard of anyone that worked “at” Microsoft hotmail? As closely as we work with Microsoft I have never met a Microsoft Hotmail or Microsoft Online person, ever.
What most companies miss out on is that working in technology means working with people whose job it is to integrate technology in the workplace or lifestyle. It’s not a grunt monkey job.
Does it change the fact that we suck, at least for this customer? Not at all. But does it uncover a serious problem that needs to be addressed, pronto? Oh yeah. And in the last quarter we have addressed just about all the complaints brought up here. The staff was just thrilled to work on these issues because nobody wants to see their work criticized. Critical part of driving the organization down the right path is establishing that connectivity between the clients needs, partners promises and what we deliver.
The Scorecard
You start at 100%. People pay for 100%. But in the real world things are hardly at 100% and consistency is what matters most. People that give you the negative feedback are the people you need to work on the hardest because they are the ones that actually care and share your 100% belief. I’m sure nobody here would be surprised that 99.9% of people simply don’t care.
So here are my objectives for 2008 and how I think Own Web Now did as an organization. These are grades I give myself relative to my expectations for my organization.
Globalization – B+ – In 2008 we’ve taken our Exchange and SharePoint hosting, web hosting and email to Canada, Europe, Middle East and Australia. We have taken the offsite backup product to Canada and Europe. The only reason this isn’t an A is because ExchangeDefender LiveArchive did not get to Europe in time.
Communication – B – One of the biggest issues in prior years has been that of communication. Frankly, we sucked at it. In 2008 we rolled out our blog, our realtime network operations site, extended our personal reach via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. This would be an A had we taken better care of the following bullet point:
Release Schedule – F – Now F is perhaps a high mark to give in this area, we’ve pretty much operated in the dark in 2008. We blew deadlines, we blew bug fix reports, it’s just been a disappointing year in that area but we did turn it around towards the end of the year.
Support – A+ – While I can be critical of my guys and things do fall between the cracks, every time I ask anyone (who brings me negative feedback) why they work with us it is always the same response: “I can always count on OWN to back me up”. The reality of this business is that we work on some very high end, very complex very “state of the art” stuff. We support people who at times don’t watch the videos, don’t read the manuals, don’t do any troubleshooting – they just bring it to us.
Financials / Accounting – D – I had really hoped that 2008 would be the year we finally fixed the issue with the accounting, reporting and collecting funds. We did, I just wish it didn’t take all the way up to November/December to get it in order. This is something I’m glad has finally been fixed.
Staffing – I – I am going to give myself an incomplete on this one because I honestly don’t know where we are on this. You have to understand that for years now we’ve had a four-figure-percent-growth in revenues year over year and we just haven’t kept up the staffing as we should have. In 2008 we really broke the bank on building up bigger teams to address the sudden growth in the services and contracts business. I think we’re good now but I always think that and get the rude awakening.
Products – A+ – We build stuff people want. Simple as that. While there are tweaks that are needed here and there and stuff is far from perfect, our feature set differentiates us from just about anything else on the market. This is the first year that I can honestly say that all the deals I have been personally been involved in have closed in our favor. We didn’t lose to Postini, we didn’t lose to Microsoft, we didn’t lose to EDS or IBM.
In Closing
As you can tell, I have clear areas of focus for the first quarter of 2009.
The other day I was talking to one of my monkeys that came to OWN from the retail sector. We were discussing the “attrition factor” (partners that are simply closing up shop) and I noted that:
“Hey, it’s a tough economy out there, everything takes a hit”
and the response that I got is something I really want you to think about:
“In retail you don’t close stores that can’t make money in bad times. You close stores that can’t make money in good times.”
Think about that one in your services, products and lines of business.
As you can tell, I’ve got a lot on my mind. Running business really is an art.
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