Monthly Archive for September, 2009

Our head of PEER 1 in the UK, Dominic Monkhouse, was interviewed by Growing Business and shares his insight on using service as the weapon in battling for web hosting supremacy. Below is an excerpt:

What many don’t understand is that every instance of human interaction is a moment of truth for a business. It was a lesson Monkhouse first learned in his second job as assistant manager at Marks & Spencer.

“It wasn’t uncommon for men to come in and buy a suit on a Friday, cut all the tags off, wear it to a wedding and then bring it back on Monday claiming it didn’t fit,” Monkhouse says, recalling one incident where the item was so creased it couldn’t be resold. Much to his surprise, his manager agreed to take it back, insisting that it was all part of owning and building the store’s reputation.

Monkhouse is fostering a similar culture, and believes it’s futile to get into a war over who’s to blame. “We’re in the IT game,” he says. “Things do go wrong and customers break their own stuff all the time. Then, if they ring us and say: ‘It’s broken,’ we’ll assume responsibility. In fact, we’ll say it’s our fault, so we’ll also take accountability, because without owning the problem, we can’t fix it. We won’t say: ‘Actually, we’ve looked in the log file and we think you logged in and broke it.’”

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