In October 2008, when the financial world collapsed and started a deep economic recession, Leaseweb experienced one of its biggest growths measured in turnover per month. This was partly caused by a hosting provider in the United States which went belly up and losing some of its biggest customers to Leaseweb. Our Support department was already under some stress at that time by the growth we had experienced during the months before but the sudden increase in new customers and growing support requests really put a strain on our support engineers.
After consideration we decided it was time to heavily invest in more people. But quantity is nothing without quality. So we also increased our demands for knowledge and customer friendliness. To attract qualified support engineers in turn we raised the salaries. For the short term we hired temporary workers, to motivate the current employees as well as to get rid of the back log. At the same time we separated the provisioning of new orders from the Support department. On top of that our programming department started working on an automated ordering process. Something Leaseweb was actually behind with.
It took some time but in my opinion we really are on the right track. We are starting to see the results of our efforts. Time to reply and time to resolve support issues drastically came down and are monitored constantly and reported on a weekly basis. The provisioning team is working hard to deliver the orders that come in each day as soon as possible to the customers. There is still handwork involved but our core business – colocation and serverhosting – are already highly automated. We have created an automated Operating System install server that at the moment contains more than 5000 physical servers that can be installed with a push of a button – or an xml command coming from the automated ordering system. This has already resulted in customers receiving the login for their servers within 10 minutes after the payment was made via PayPal.
We are happy to get more and more positive comments of our customers about the services we deliver. But we are also reading the negative ones to learn how we can improve our service even more because we realize that completely satisfied customers are the best marketing tool a company can have these days. The happier the customer is the more he/she will communicate this to others on forums, blogs and on Twitter. So please continue to inform us how we can deliver a better service and what you think is missing in our portfolio. We are processing the data of our latest 6-months customer poll and the first results show that we are making good progress.
In the coming time we will continue to focus on more automation especially in the ordering process and the Leaseweb Customer Portal because we know that most of our customers are internet professionals and very capable of doing a lot themselves. If on the other hand you do need personal contact with our people we are ready to help you with your question – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.