I've always been impressed with Rimuhosting's service and offerings. Besides having a highly geek friendly product, their service in the past has been really above-and-beyond. No matter the question I pose, I've gotten back a quick, courteous and helpful response.
So it should be of no surprise that they also nail the sign-up process well. Here's the time line of what happened tonight:
| 10pm ish | I sign-up for the cheapest possible plan they offer |
| 12:14am | I get a stock e-mail saying my server is configured and all the interesting details. |
| 12:28am | Alicia mails me - I didn't provide any details about what the server is for. She'd love to know so she can make sure it's properly configured for me. |
| 12:42am | Alicia mails me - she saw the feedback form I submitted that mentioned I might run tomcat and subversion on the server. She gave me useful links into their support documents about both of these packages. |
| 1:30am | I see the notes about the tomcat server, but didn't see the link to the subversion docs. I quickly dash off a note asking her about those details. Whoops, should have read her e-mail more carefully. |
| 1:36am | David mails me - kindly giving me more info on subversion and even including a smiley or two in his message. |
| 1:37am | I'm so impressed I need to post a blog entry on the topic. |
This is remarkable - I've gotten more useful correspondence from these guys between the hours of midnight and 2:00am than some companies will do during our entire relationship.
I could hazard a guess as to how their doing this - they need to have engineers covering the servers 24x7 and so they also respond to questions like mine. But, think about it, how many network engineers do you know work that work the 1:00am shift are also great customer server reps? Maybe they all do.
Rimuhosting is doing something very right here. They have a culture of exceeding customer expectations and it shows. It's simply not an accident that I'm so pleased with them.
Good night Alicia and Dave - you guys have a good one.
They are in New Zealand. Does that mean the time difference is evidence that you weren't dealing with "overnight guys." It was towards the end of the working day over there.
ReplyDeleteBut what this does tell me that if I want a good customer experience I need to deal with more people on the other side of the globe. I am going to begin digging a tunnel straight down in my backyard. If I can get it deep enough perhaps I can just yell technical questions down the hole and get curteous replies.
Good point Ben! Tonight I had a question about my account and actually asked where they are hosted:
ReplyDeleteWe're a New Zealand company, and there are a few us of working from here
(including me). Our timezone is GMT+12 at the moment. So that we have
24/7 cover, we have staff in various other places as well:
http://rimuhosting.com/support/staff.jsp
So there you have it - I'd start digging if I were you.