Hostgator Turns Up the Heat; Tucows Make News - The Right Customer Service Formula
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“One unhappy customer is worth the weight of 1,000 satisfied customers in terms of how they can affect future business, so we strive to keep as many people happy as we can,” said Oxley. Communication plays a big role in keeping Hostgator’s customers happy. The company offers round-the-clock support for their services seven days a week, through email, instant messaging, live chat, and telephone. Hostgator also provides its customers with support forums.
More importantly, as the company has grown, it has continued to add to its support staff. While Hostgator does contract through a third party liaison for some of its support staff, it continues to boast an in-house support team. To Oxley, the key factor is the ability to provide the level of support his customers expect – and to go the extra mile. For instance, while some companies use only email and web-based support systems, Oxley believes phone support is “imperative in this business. Many people are comforted by the fact that we offer a toll-free number for both sales and support.”
This attention to the phone does not rule out automation where it works; far from it. New clients can sign up quickly, and see their accounts activated within half an hour. Hostgator’s resellers can offer their clients the same experience, because Hostgator provides them with the same software.
Fraud and security are two issues that every web hoster must deal with, and Hostgator is no exception. To deal with potential fraud issues, the company confirms large purchases by phone. In addition, it monitors certain domain names and regions that it knows to be associated with a high level of fraudulent activity. “While we may never prevent 100 percent of the fraud, we will always strive to do what we can to ensure that each transaction placed with us is on the level,” Oxley observed.
Hostgator places its trust in The Planet for security and network integrity. Despite some recent news stories about a security flaw associated with some Cisco products, Oxley speaks in glowing terms about The Planet’s Cisco Network Guard. “When these guards detect a possible DOS [denial of service] attack, they jump into action by diverting traffic destined for a target site, filtering the data stream while checking for anomalies, and performing protocol analysis to identify and block the attack while forwarding valid traffic to the destination site. We have seen this work first hand, and it is a remarkable technological advancement and one we are proud to offer our customers.”
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