----- Original Message ----- From: "Elliot Noss" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Robert L Mathews" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 10:07 PM Subject: RE: Tucows survey
> Interesting thread. There are a few points that I want to make here. I note > they are general, not only responding to this post. > > First, in my view you cannot truly differentiate a business with something > (any of the forwardings) that thousands, probably tens of thousands of > people offer and more offer than don't. It is also the case that virtually > every wholesale competitor of ours offers these services such that us > offering them will not limit their availability (although I appreciate your > perception of our market power). > > I would bet that the true differentiation of your business is trust, > reliability and reputation. If you asked your customers "why do you use > Tiger Tech" I would bet that the answer would be "oh that Robert is a good > guy" or "they always help me when I have problems" or "their systems are > very reliable". I doubt it would be "their domain forwarding is awesome". > > Next, it is very possible that you can "run these services better at a lower > cost with a better interface". Our customers are an amazingly heterogenous > group. It will NEVER be the case that we can introduce a service that > everyone will want. This is the nature of a diverse customer group. You are > right that email and DNS are at opposite ends of the spectrum. One (email) > is a service that we think is in the midst of fundamental change and that > the whole industry is missing the opportunity on. The others (forwarding(s), > DNS) are little bits of enabling technology that we may need to introduce > for competitive reasons (most competitors offer them) and to facilitate > email (DNS). > > The most important point that I take away from this thread is that I haven't > done a good enough job of describing what I mean by "innovating at the > edge". I have written a number of times in the past about the smart service > provider focusing on customer service and customer acquisition as core > competencies. Some of you have played that back as "we would just be direct > marketers and answering phones in support" and not doing anything technical. > Let me unpack it a bit. > > Customer service. Do you know why your customers are calling you? What the > top ten reasons are every month? Do you create new faq items monthly to > address these issues? Do you push new self-help tools to your customers > quarterly to address these issues? I could go deeper and deeper, but these > are ALL technical issues and are all, IMHO, examples of winning > differentiation. > > Customer Acquisition. Do you track where your new customers come from? Do > you sell using features or benefits (this is a whole discussion in itself as > I think our WHOLE industry is way off the mark here)? The secret of success IMO is: Product definition Ensuring you are providing a product people are willing to buy. I spend about 33% of my time these days simply looking at what other people are offering and what people are buying and comparing that to what we are doing. Selling on the benefits is a bit of a problem. Thats the way I was trained to sell but as all our competitors sell by features lists and people compare them then its hard to get away from that. The risk is that our site would not make sense compared to tothers and I think users of internet services are more technically interested anyway. Consumers can exhibit very odd behaviour. We increased all the disk soace on ourhosting plans and moved the price points up one notch so the old 50MB plan became the new 100MB one. Sales doubled practically overnight. The average sale value has remained the same. Customer believe they are getting better value but all it is is disk space which costs virtually nothing to provide and they wwont use it anyway. Regards Gordon Hudson Hostroute.com Ltd www.hostroute.net ------------------------------------------------
