Being Transparent

I am a big fan of HostGator, which is a domain registrar and hosting company.  I’ve been using them for over a year and I am also an affiliate.  So if you get hosting from them I get a piece of the action (hint hint).  Shameless affiliate link  HostGator.

They have great support and good pricing which is why I use them and recommend them.  There is a point here, don’t worry!

A couple of days ago they had a post on Twitter saying they were going to be holding a live webinar dealing with their customer service.  So I tuned in to see what it was about.

Their customer service manager is Douglas Hanna and I swear I have socks older than this guy!  He hosted the webinar and started out by detailing the company size, sales, employees etc. all that corporate stuff. 

Next he started discussing customer service and he outlined all the positive points of their service backed up by various metrics.  And THEN he started detailing what he felt were the ‘bad’ areas of their customer service. I was shocked!  Here is the customer service manager telling, who knows how many people, that their service wasn’t the best in the world! Then I thought, here he is actually being honest with his customers and potential customers.  What a concept!!  “We aren’t perfect but here is what we are going to do about it.” 

Now let’s make a comparison to the business I talked about in a previous post The Power of Social Media and HostGator.  Here is HostGator telling the world that their service isn’t perfect and it needs improving and the other business doesn’t seem to care about their customer service and apparently isn’t doing anything to improve it.

One company is using Social Media in an honest and transparent way to educate and improve their business practices and hopefully their bottom line.  The other probably doesn’t even know they are being talked about in the Social Media space.

And the cool thing is that Social Media puts both of these companies on equal footing.  The small family business and the large multi-million dollar company are given the same power to reach their customers, open lines of communication, educate and counter any negativity.  One uses it to their advantage and the other well…who knows?  Kudos to HostGator and the other company…not so much!

Which company are you going to model yourself after?