I've heard this type arguement for years, and I don;t thinl people really
get what its all really about....
In the ISP business there are two type of providers....
1) Ones that take responsibilty and go beyond the call of duty to help their
customers. That is called customers servic, support, and value add..
2) Then there are ones who deny responsibility or defer responsibilty to
someone else. That is called a , "commodity provider".
Whether or not an ISP chooses to host Email or outsource Emal, either way it
has absolutely no bearing on whether an ISP is Type 1 or 2 provider.
In other words, even if you host Email, you don't have to take Grandma's
calls. You can point her to a self help fax, online help, to the paid
support division, otr simply ignore her until she goes away, IF you don;t
want to take the calls
And if you outsource Email, you still ahve the option to accept Granda's
call. Just because she now uses yahoo or google, doesn;t mean you can;t help
her. And I guarantee is you do help her once, the next time she needs help,
she is goign to call you for more help, instead of yahoo or google.
The fact is, subscribers call the people for help, that they feel will most
likely help them, they don;t stop for a second to question who is
"responisble" for supporting them.
There are two answers for this.... 1) You can use that call to your
advantage. or 2) you can turn it away, so that you are no longer the one
that she trusts to call first.
I have a slew of resellers. I'm responisble for supporting the services that
we offer to the customer's of our resellers, if I'm asked. But I'm not
usually the one they ask, because they trust the reseller. Thats why they
ordered from the reseller in the first place.
If you want to outsource, fine. If you want to manage internally fine. There
are cost, time, and feature justifications for that decission.
I don't know about you, but I want my customers calling me. Some of my
customers choose Gmail an Hotmail, and I'm fine with that. But I stil;l help
them with theior Email problems, and it takes me twice as long to help them,
than it does for me to help my custoemrs that use our own Email system.
What I've challenged myself with is.... I need to do a better job using
their call to my advantage. Every time they call, its an opportunity to....
1) verify their billing is current, and collect payment if overdue.
2) To ask them if they have been happy with service, and if they ahve any
feedback.
3) To upsell them an additional add-on service.
What I'm learning is some people aren't looking for it to be free. They just
want it better.
Interestingly, I can;t remember one customer that has cancelled because our
service was to expensive. If it was to expensive they never would ahve
ordered it in the first place.
If they like our service and it is to expensive, they call me to try and
negotiate better terms so that they can keep our service that they love.
I'm finding that there are people that complain about speed and paying
$49/mon, but gladly would ahve been paying $69 for upgraded service, but
never knew the plan existed. Or gladly would have paid an extra $50 for a
better SPAM system.
I can give an example of a business sub that was complaining that our $150
broadband plan was to expensive, and I asked who they used for Email. I
learned they pay $250 per month for Outsourced Exchange Email hosting.
Thats right they wee rwilling to pay twice the cost of our broadband, just
for Email, even when we offered free Email. And our Email service is pretty
darn good. My point is.... Email was a pain point, they saw the value in
paying for a solution that was "supported" at a higher priority.
I can give another example, of a customer that left us, because they were
closing an office, and ordered a competitor's cheaper service at the other
office, because they had to cut back financially. (Duh, they just closed anb
office). BUT, they asked how much it would cost to keep our Email service.
I told them, we only provide Email for our customers, because Email support
cost us more than providing broadband does. So I made a special deal with
him, and he agreed to pay $50/mon to keep our Email. (half his previous
BRoadband fee).
I started thinking, maybe I should get into the Email business, and give
broadband away for Free as a Promo :-) Just kidding.
Anyway, my point is,.providers are throwing away an opportunity, when they
dont take advantage of the opportunity to solve their customer's pain
points.
Rant done.
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc
IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert West" <robert.w...@just-micro.com>
To: "'WISPA General List'" <wireless@wispa.org>
Sent: Friday, June 26, 2009 6:58 PM
Subject: Re: [WISPA] OT, pesky email stuff
> Email? We don't need no stinkin' email!
>
> We gave up email hosting. We were sending invoices via email and lots of
> the customers were never getting them because they never used the email
> address we gave them, they were mostly using Yahoo online! The user
> accounts were jammed packed of just junk mail and such because they never
> grabbed mail from their box. Well! After some thought, we stopped giving
> out email addresses and giving them a list of free email sites such as
> Gmail
> and yahoo. ("In an effort to keep our prices as friendly as we can.....
> blah, blah, blah.....) We grandfathered the existing users and hosted
> them
> but eventually they all moved to the free providers also. So now what?
> No
> more support calls on the email, I can tell ya that! More than half of
> our
> trouble tickets went away. I no longer have to recite to grandma how to
> reenter her user name and password just because the grandkids wiped it out
> of her incredimail. YES!!!
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On
> Behalf Of Marlon K. Schafer
> Sent: Friday, June 26, 2009 11:33 AM
> To: WISPA General List
> Subject: [WISPA] OT, pesky email stuff
>
> Hi All,
>
> What are you guys doing for email these days? I LOVE my setup for it's
> reliability, ease of use etc.
>
> Hacked customer accounts and virus's are killing me though. We don't
> catch
> things until 100,000s of messages go out and we get black listed. This
> has
> now happened 3 or 4 times in the last couple of years.
>
> My server admins aren't coming up with a solution to this other than to
> limit cc's to 25 per message. We did that once before and my phone rang
> off
>
> the hook because people can't send jokes to their friends.....
>
> The other thing that makes it hard is that the log files that I get (up to
> 40 megs per day!) don't list the authenticated sender, only the reply
> address. So I see tens of thousands of messages from a user that's not
> even
>
> mine (faked info). sigh
>
> We use Courier MTA.
>
> My thought is to set the server to allow a max of 1000 messages per day
> per
> user. And to somehow make the log file ONLY send me the number of
> messages
> received per a user, and the number sent, user name and ip addy of all
> those
>
> sending. Twice now I've asked about that idea and gotten no response from
> the server admins.
>
> Suggestions?
>
> laters,
> marlon
>
>
>
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