Archive for category Business
Last Monday, (February 25, 2008) at 435 JST, someone at Bluehost decided to migrate our account to a new server with a different server and with a different configuration. Normally, as a service provider, you would notify your client that you plan to migrate their data and make them aware of the new system. (Matt Heaton,Owner Pictured Left)
In this case, Bluehost did nothing of the sort. They just started migrating a site. At that point, they broke our CMS application which is the backbone of our website. Calling customer support we could get no clear response from Bluehost as to what happened. Just guesses as to what they thought was happening.
Our developer immediately checked the website and the CMS files were all intact. Our system engineer discovered Bluehost had changed the IP address for our server. Our main dot com DNS was pointed at the original IP address. Bluehost’s call center person said that we should just wait for the DNS to update. We waited and waited but the site was broken 24 hours. The next AM, we contacted our local ISP and also asked them to update their DNS. Our dot com was still broken.
Bluehost was saying there was something wrong with our local ISP. We got the local ISP on a conference call with them. Step by step, Bluehost admitted it was not our ISP’s problem. We let the ISP off the call. The website was still broken. (Please keep in mind that every hour that someone works on the site or our engineers are involved costs us money).
On Tuesday night, we called in the original developer (about midnight) as our site was still down. He got on it and fixed it that night. We were without a website for 31 hours. His summary was the following
—–Original Message—–
From: L S[mailto:name@design.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 9:18 AM
Subject: Site problems resolved
Hi there,
I had another look last night after some digging around and was able
to add back in index.php to the URL’s so the site (and sub pages)
were working again as of last night. I spent a couple of hours
digging around some more this morning and discovered that Bluehost
had apparently upgraded their Apache installation and changed the way
a certain function in PHP is handled. That in turn affected how URL’s
were working on the company, which is why you would get the
front page but none of the others. They appeared to try and add a
server rule to fix this, but that completely broke how the files were
being served. Anyway, I commented that out, and found a fix for the
URL’s problem so they should be acting normally now and you should be
able to browse around the sites as normal. Pretty amazing they would
change something like that and either not notify you, or notify their
techs that it might be an issue, but there you go!
So after all that it looks like it wasn’t a DNS issue after all (at
least as far as I could see, though it might have been a problem
earlier) – I assumed the domain wasn’t resolving at all, so when I
saw the domain was resolving to the correct location (and was
receiving traffic), I assumed it was fine. But like you mention the
requests for sub pages weren’t working, hence the need for the
solution above for the company site.
I’ll invoice you for the extra hours support if that’s
cool.
LS
______________
After figuring out what happened (nobody at Bluehost seemed to know, or want to tell), I tallied our loses. $2155 of loses that we could count, not sure how much traffic (usually 50-100 visitors per day).
We sent an email on 2/28 at 1215am to Matt Heaton, the Bluehost President, explaining the situation. It is one thing for us to take our site down, it is much worse for the company you’ve entrusted your site to, to take it down for you and not be able to fix it or at least cover the costs they have generated for you.
I have really come to admire what Matt is doing at Bluehost and enjoy reading his blog. However, in my almost two years of experience, I think Bluehost is lacking in two areas
1) They are a bit disorganized and should notify customers of changes. (Ie. an additional paid spam filtering service vanished overnight and we had to call to get our money back).
2) If you fail in serving your customers, you should do something to show them you care.
In this case, you should help pay the costs that were incurred by the customer. If you couldn’t cover all the costs, the least you could do for example is cover X years (or whatever years) hosting (if they are going to stay with you) as that would cost you nothing as you’ve already got 800 users crammed onto those servers. Matt’s blog talks about his trouble with Google and his frustration with Google’s customer service. After resending the email to him on 1 March, I am feeling his “Google” frustration. In this case, it is about him and his team in Utah.
Overall, I have enjoyed my experience with Bluehost. I’ve even written about it. If we are going to raise the level of customer service in the market, then everyone in management needs to do it in our own companies first. If we all do that we would have a better world one company at a time.
AINEO Networks Rocks!
Feb 14
It is great to be a part of the work at AINEO. We work very hard and do a great job for the smart firms that select AINEO to do their IT.The year 2007 was a great year for us. We delivered product or services in every major city in Japan, and a lot of minor ones to boot. Our weakness has always been that we are an engineering company… our strength is that we are an engineering company.AINEO client satisfaction levels are the highest of our history in 2007. Of course, we are Asia Pacific’s best IT firm. We also continue to be the best Nortel reseller (distributor) in Japan. The number of NEC, Avaya, and Cisco PBX (or IP PBX in many cases), continues to increase.Due to the increase in hardware and software business, we have become the top buyer of HP, Dell, Microsoft, Canon, Polycom, Panduit, Lenel Systems, Rittal, and just about anything IT. With our business volume, we have been able to become the IT purchasing department for many Japanese and Multinational firms. We can get great prices for our clients. We are in the 10 ten shops for business volume in Tokyo now.Probably the most exciting area is a new service we will be launching in April. This product is designed specifically for out customers. We have named it AINEO Secure. Very excited about this as we have many people waiting for its introduction.Many thanks to the great AINEO team, and the AINEO partners. Without are partners and their faith in us in outsourcing their IT departments, entrusting their moves and other projects, and enlisting AINEO consultants to clean up their IT departments, we would not have the success that we have.
Many thanks to everyone involved with AINEO!
7 Ways To Impress Your Boss
May 28
In this world of so many types of business, we see a lot of people moving from job to job. A large percentage of the people changing jobs are the ones who cannot do the job they are leaving. Last year, I remember a president of a large Canadian technology firm saying how appreciative he was that his American competition hired two slackers (employees) that had been in his organization.
Clearly, there are some good folks to hire out there. However, the chances of recruiting ineffective and/or trouble-making employees is a high probability. You never know what you are going to get, especially since you cannot reference the current employer for performance feedback.
If you are working for someone, as most of us are. The true way to success is to be consistent. Consistency is the key to success. If you want to be successful in business you need have to be doing the right things every day. One of the first things you can do is get along with your boss. Learn how to impress him or her so that they know they can trust you. Let us give some suggestions on how to do just that.
1) Demonstrate that you are honorable.
Honor is doing the right thing when no one is looking. There is a saying, ‘when the cat is away the mice play’. There are many offices out there that when the boss is in everyone looks so busy and works so hard. When the boss is out, people start slacking off. Show that you honor the boss’ investment in yourself.
2) If you are asked to do something, do it.
If you don’t agree, a good boss will have an open ear and mind to suggestions. However, keep in mind that in most cases the boss was entrusted with management responsibility because they are competent. Too much questioning is a good way to hurt your standing with the boss.
3) Give the job 110% effort.
So many times we do our jobs halfway and send our resumes out there hoping for another job opportunity with pop up. Managers are not stupid. If they are any good, they are connected to the market and know a lot of people. Before you could imagine, they will know when someone starts putting out that resume (CV) and stop entrusting you with any new things. Work hard. But also, don’t forget to work smart.
4) Be sincere.
Good bosses are always founded on experience. A good technical service manager is good because they know both technology and how to deal with people. If one of their staff is having trouble, there is no doubt they will read that from customer results, other player feedback, or judging other factors that they have been dealing with in the business for years. If you have issues that you are not sure how to deal with, be sincere with your boss. They will respect you for it.
5) Always respect the time of others.
When you are supposed to be at meeting, always be at the site, at least 5 minutes before commencement. Always be to work on time. It is wrong for one person to be habitually late to a 9AM office start when everyone else is there drinking coffee 15 minutes before.
6) Be positive and proactive.
“Oh, that customer is this, that supplier is that. Why do you want me to do that? The boss is not a good such and such. I don’t want to learn about that.” No one likes to be around pessimists. The world is full of critics and no office needs negative voices. You were hired to do a job. No matter what happens, see ‘trouble’ as challenges. See ‘change’s as opportunities. As things happen throughout the week, be always open-minded. Bring ideas not dark words to a situation. If you help your boss resolve issues (especially ones that he has no exact experience or time to handle), you will prove your contribution to the team. Positive people are winners. Everyone loves to be around winners, not losers and quitters.
7) Be a good communicator.
It sounds amazing, but wars can be started by not communicating well with others. Good communicators are lacking in pretty much every company.
- People show up to do work and can be frustrated by sales people who haven’t told them the whole story about the site.
- Someone goes on vacation and neglects to give their manager or coworker information on what the consumer wanted from the shop. Both coworker and consumer get frustrated when the consumer comes back into the store.
- The logistics person ignores the email and sends the site foreman the wrong building materials in spite of the request. The customer care representative receives no new product information for something that was hit the retailers’ shelves a few days ago.
At AINEO, in our new player indoctrination (employee orientations) we always teach our incoming new team members to ‘set expectations’. If you are asked to do something, let people know when you anticipate you will be done. Think ahead. If you can’t do something, let the boss know and get some additional help.
In Closing
These seven steps are the most important ways to impress your boss. We’ve found if you can work well with people at the office, chances are you are going to be getting along well with people at home as well. Most divorces are caused by financial worries but more often than not, miscommunication. If you make an effort to apply these words of wisdom to your corporate life, you will find that these good things will spill over into your personal live as well. Life will be so much easier because you will be easier to work with, and even easier to live with.
(c)2007, Patrick Wolfe
Originally posted at
http://www.aineo.com/insights/entry/seven-ways-to-impress-your-boss/
Dell Computer’s direct sales model destroyed many computer sales stores locally in the US. The model was ground breaking. However, when you are doing business you have to be thinking ahead and thinking about the possible results of your actions. With the failure of many businesses due to Dell’s cheap, direct sales model Dell was very successful in building its business. Unfortunately, while Dell was selling direct, HP, eMachines, and many other firms were still taking care of their sales channels. That has paid off. HP has recently surpassed Dell in market share. Dell is struggling. Dell is beginning to rethink their sales model according to an article in the New York times.
Is this the end of Dell? Probably not. However it is a strong reminder that we should always make an effort to do business with others with win-win in mind. Dell upset a lot of business people on the retail level. On the enterprize level, I know our company prefers to avoid the use of Dell servers just because HP makes them so much better.
-Our engineers have commented that they don’t like Dell’s hardware because you can see “cheap” in the manufacturing.
-The mother boards are sub-standard and flimsy.
-Even the number of screws are barely enough to mount servers in their Dell OEM racks, while other manufacturers give you plenty to spare.
-Sales staff (account managers) change quicker than the weather in Seattle.
It looks like Dell has hit its plateau. Will they actually provide better service to woo back the people that they alienated by undercutting and skimping on the parts? We’ll see. In Japan, once you burn your bridge in business it is pretty hard to rebuild it. Tumbleweed is working to do that right now in a market they abandoned with the dot com bubble bursting. In Japan, Dell Computer lost a number of their staff to work at Lenovo Japan in recent months. It seems to be a coup of sorts.
As for Dell, I think it really comes down to what you do when no one is looking. Many retailers don’t want to stock Dell products on their shelves because they feel that Dell was busy stealing business instead of helping their shops sell computers and peripherials. Dell has proven to be competitor in business and not a partner as the other computer companies have been. Congratulations to HP who has made an effort to do win-win business all around. They have won the marketshare wars for now. Good business is win-win business. What you do behind the scenes is just as important as what you do in front of everyone.
Let’s watch and see how things turn out. However, this is a clear example of short-sighted, sales number focused, American company. This is a good model to avoid. These days, technology and communications have made things so transparent that we need to be thinking long-term about the consequences of our actions. You can’t slap the person by selling direct to the customer and then go back expecting him or her to receive you with open arms.