When you are selling a high-end product, it is easy to carve out a lot of money for customer service and for customer experiences. But when you are selling a commodity product like web hosting for $8/month, it is hard to get really excited about investing in great customer experiences.
So I have come to expect when I call a web hosting company I am going to run through a maze of commands, push one, push two, push buttons till your fingers fall off. I have to be sure to punch in the ridiculously long account number correctly, or I am faced with the penalty of starting over. Voice prompts are even worse, since for some reason, no matter how I say “YES” the computers seem confused by my slightly nasal, female NYC voice and I end up in an endless loop till I hand the phone to someone else.
When I finally get a live human being, it is obvious the person is half way around the world reading from a very structured script. I am already annoyed and the call hasn’t even started. It is no wonder I dread picking up the phone to call any of these companies. That is why I was absolutely blown away by Name.com
It was a little thing, but the cheerful message on their voice mail system made me laugh and put me in a good mood. I didn’t mind waiting the two minutes till I connected with an equally cheerful and helpful support person.