Personal Service in the Age of the Chatbot
A New Account Manager at hosting.com: First Impressions
In these changing times, it’s quite a surprise when a growing multinational company starts to give you a more personal service. But that’s what has happened with the monolithic “new” hosting company hosting.com, whose Cologne-based parent company World Host Group GmbH has been gobbling up smaller businesses in the last year or so and mostly bringing them into their fold.
inframes.com has been a customer of A2 Hosting for some time and we have a couple of servers with them in an Amsterdam data centre. Last year I was slightly suspicious when A2 announced it was changing its name to hosting.com. A2 was the company’s biggest acquisition and the basis for a new global brand along with companies like Webcentral (Australia), HostingRaja (India), MochaHost (USA), Verpex (UK) and quite a few more, some of which have kept their existing brands and others of which have been absorbed.
I’ve had my gripes with them on occasion but I’ve had mostly very positive experiences with A2 over the years – a solid uptime record (touch wood), competitive pricing and good customer service. And when we had to migrate both servers to upgraded platforms two years ago their migration team was helpful, reactive and reassuring. But contact with A2 has always been at a distance via text chats and support tickets. And of course, with support staff spread across continents, that means in many cases you explain an issue to one person and get a reply from another.
So I was surprised to receive an email the other day introducing our new account manager. His email signature calls him a ‘Customer Success Manager’. Am I the only one to find the term faintly nauseating?
The company had never allocated us an account manager before. But I was invited to have a 30 minute chat with him on Teams and I’m pleased to say that I felt I was actually being listened to. It would be unfair of me to mention him by name, even though I only have positive feedback at this stage, but as someone new to the company he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say about my experience as well as a couple of issues that have been concerning me.
After our conversation via Teams, I received an AI-generated summary of what we had discussed and I’m fine with that, as long as it’s broadly accurate, which it was. Arguably it makes sense for an account manager to spend his time actively communicating with customers and then let AI do the paperwork. But some degree of accountability and a summary of next steps is an important outcome from any meeting.
Bigger Isn’t Better When It Comes to Being Heard
In most cases, the larger the company, the less you feel valued as a customer. Anyone who has had to query a charge on their broadband or mobile phone contract knows the struggle of trying to talk to a real person only to be told repeatedly by a recorded voice that you can find help on their website. In the last couple of years it has become more and more common to explain your problem to an AI chatbot, which has its pros and cons. AI can give quick answers to standard questions but it’s not there to listen to your feedback and pass it on to its line manager for consideration.
What remains to be seen is how long our new hosting.com account manager remains our account manager. I’ve had plenty of experience with Microsoft Advertising and Google Ads where you get a new contact every three months, during which time you might get to speak to them once or twice if you’re very lucky and then you start from scratch with the next person in the queue.
By comparison, a key strength of a small business like ours is genuinely personal service. We really get to know our clients and their customers. And when a client needs something changed or something new on their website, we can hit the ground running because no one has to waste time describing the products they’re selling or the audience they’re targeting.
The value isn’t so much in meeting someone face to face, virtually or otherwise, but in building a relationship over a long period. And that’s where I think inframes.com is especially well qualified, because some of our clients have had a single point of contact for going on 25 years. I’m hugely grateful for that level of loyalty and I hope that we have earned it by consistently getting results, but I still wouldn’t be able to look someone in the eye and tell them my job was “customer success” because that’s right up there with “customer journey” and “product synergy” on Business BS Bingo card.
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