According to the Wikipedia community Customer service (also known as Client Service) is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. Seems simple enough. The basis of the phrase is serve. The act of serving is laced in the very fibers of our human history. From great servants come great leaders says the old adage. But what has happened to our society so that the term serve has taken on a negative connotation? Since when did serving someone become something bad? Sure, we can point to times in our world history where servanthood was forced on a people and great sacrifice was made to battle such injustice. But when the servant is paid well and is hired specifically for that job then the proverbial playing field should be leveled to the point where serving is as important as what is being served. That brings me to MinuteFix.

Since Diego, MinuteFix CEO, has been in Savannah we have had many conversations about the importance of customer service. In fact, I even said last night that I would rather teach computer tech skills to a top-notch customer service technician than try and teach basic etiquette to the next Bill Gates. You simply cannot put a price on good customer service. Case in point:

My good buddy Eric goes to install a new operating system on his computer two days ago. The install crashes midway. He decides to try again. This time it installs but only after wiping his hard drive completely clean. He calls the tech support and, without ever speaking with a human being, is put on hold. He is informed he is in Tier 1 of the holding network and that his wait could be up to thirty minutes. Well, an hour later he had advanced to Tier 2 and 3 but been bumped back down to Tier 1. At this point he has still NOT hear a human voice on the other end. Almost two hours into his cell phone usage time he was connected only to have the customer service person tell him there wasn’t much he could do over the phone. The agent suggested he visit the local retail store and have them take a look. Because of the product type the local retail outlet was a two hour drive. Eric did it though all the while maintaining a positive outlook. Long story short…………multiple phone calls, a day trip plus gas and several reinstalls later the computer is pretty much working. Here is the problem. All Eric can think about is the fact that he spent all that time on the phone, all those cell phone minutes and a whole day of work to get this computer serviced. He has long forgotten about the actual issue; the install failure.

Quality customer service has the ability to transform a customers experience with or without ever truly fixing the issue. We are all aware that as human beings we can’t do everything and that sometimes computers just get the best of us. However, there is never an excuse to not act with civility and courtesy to see that each experience for each customer is as fresh and as pleasant as can be.

I’ve always admired leaders who come forward with honesty in times of adversity. History repeats itself, and it takes smart men and women to realize that the truth will always surface. It would seem that these simple concepts are obvious, unfortunately more often than not, they obviously aren’t. Companies have to grow aware of the power of online communications these days, and the strength of the online community. Modern companies must act quickly when things go wrong.

Crisis management has always fascinated me. I think that great leaders show their true colors in times of trouble, not in times of bliss. It takes true character to say I’m sorry; and have always admired people who are capable of a seemingly simple gesture.

Today, at MinuteFix, we partnered with the Cadillac of Managed Hosting providers. We take our technology decisions very seriously, and often times, base our selections on less ordinary characteristics. We’re like that. We like to make logical decisions without feeling the pressure of what classic startups should do. That is why our business model is so unique. We like to focus on what we do best, and hand off crucial, but non-central pieces of our technology to those who are the best at what they do. We’re proud to say that our soon-to-launch production environment is now in the hands of the great people at RackSpace.

You might have heard that RackSpace suffered a massive outage on Sunday of this week causing a large number of their customer’s servers to go offline. Why then have we chosen RackSpace as our partner, you may ask? Well, there are four simple reasons.

• First, we’ve become RackSpace customers after the outage, not before. RackSpace has been through the one-in-a-million crisis that managed hosting companies never even plan for, so now that they have been through the worst, we know we’re at an advantage.
• Secondly, we too are a customer service company. We’ve always admired the Fanatical Support promised by RackSpace (I’ve worked with them previously), and it has always been an inspiration to put communication and customer service before technology.
• Third, thanks to Xavier Resendez at RackSpace we have a solid server environment, at a killer price. Always an incentive for early-stage ventures like ours.
• And lastly, I was very impressed by how Lanham Napier, CEO of RackSpace handled their downtime crisis. It displays great character and determination; that is the type of company we want to be associated with.

Let’s clear the air about this now. I do not like to be put on hold. I don’t like when I am left sitting idle on one end of the phone for a friend, a family member or especially a company. It just isn’t necessary. I called first. Talk to me first. Finish the call. Contact the other person back. So, you can imagine how I felt when I called customer service yesterday of my local ISP to inquire about my ‘No Connection’ screen. I was given no advance notice that work would be done on my cable lines during the business day. It just happened. No explanation. And it never came back on. So I called the company and was put on hold. Not only that but then I was hung up on. So I called a second time and was put on hold until I hung up. 35 minutes. I was appalled. So I called a third time and got through to tech support…but only after being introduced to the best of Muzak. A lineman came out today and fixed the problem. But the whole time he was here I had a bad taste in my mouth for both him and his company because of the customer service I received the day before. I am left with this though. That company may not lose my business yet but I will tell others about my experience and they may end up not getting the business of my friends and colleagues. I asked them only to give me a Minute, hear my problem and offer to fix it. They couldn’t even give me that Minute.

All of Disney World’s employees – even their maintenance department – know the business they are in. Their fifteen word mission statement is quite simply, “We create happiness by providing the finest in entertainment to people of all ages, everywhere.” Every employee from the maid of the Grand Floridian to the CEO knows it. When a decision needs to be made it is tested against how well it creates happiness for Disney’s guests. This is also true in long-term planning and in everyday encounters with guests. All employees are driven to create happiness for their guests, and they do. Their average guest probably have no clue what the mission statement is, nor care. But they feel it and see its results in hundreds of ways.

MinuteFix will adopt this same sort of idea. Although we don’t have Wonderland Tea Cups or rollercoasters per se, we do have a bit of magic that our customers will be looking for. We have the magic to “heal” their computers and get them off on the right track. We want to create happiness for them though. Not just the happiness in having their problem solved but also the happiness of the MinuteFix experience. We want them to know from second one that they are in good, capable hands. Yes, there may be times we don’t know the exact problem and even some times we may not be able to solve it. However, if we provide a happy experience for them they will stick with us.

I do think there is a little bit of Mickey in us all.

It’s been a month now since I arrived in Paris to setup our offices in this great city. At first, I was concerned that spending much time away from Silicon Valley would detach me from the fast-paced, startup incubator that San Jose is. Everyone speaks the language, everyone gets technology—wifi is as available as Coca-Cola, technology events can keep your calendar booked solid if you so choose. It’s a great place to run a startup like MinuteFix. Any Starbucks barista can advise you on how to build a social network and everyone is buzzing to the same tune. People are not sending SMS messages, but rather Twittering, and blogging has become a house-hold term.

How refreshing it has been to come to Europe. And how healthy it has been for our business. When you are in the Silicon Valley, you tend to forget how the real world works. Things are simple, money flows easily, ideas get funded just from blog buzz. Powerful bloggers can make or break a company. People are young and energetic and tides shift with the wind. Revenue is a foreign word, and fads are fundable. We all want to become valley stars such as Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington and Loic Le Meur, who all have a ga-ga fan club maxing out their Facebook friends’ list.

This is not good for business. Entrepreneurs owe it to their investors and customers to not make decisions based on fashion, but must stand on their own two feet and do what’s best for the company’s financial health. Our companies are LLCs, S- and C-corps. They aren’t 501(c)s. In the end, a business must make money, and money is made in two ways: from revenue or through a liquidity event. And unfortunately when liquidity happens in the Valley, it shakes San Francisco harder than the San Andreas Fault. But we forget that to be acquired, it either takes tons of traffic, or the less common—a sound business model.

Getting away from the Valley for a while helps you understand this. Talking with traditional business people—I mean restaurant owners, small retail vendors, and most any entrepreneur who does not know what a blog is—you realize that we don’t run this world, they do. Evan Williams is not God, but the guy down the street sending his kids to school from the profit generated from a restaurant, is. We’re just spoiled and dazzled by the wine that flows at the TechCrunch parties. It’s all in the basics; a business should have more money coming in the door than going out. Venture Capital should not be the ultimate goal, staying away from it, should. Albeit, technology has changed the traditional business model, but at the end, any business runs the same.

Lenn Pryor and I discussed this topic a few months ago over lunch, and his description hit the target: The Valley is like a Vegas casino. Lots of noise, you can hear people winning, but most everyone loses. I do believe that without this type of environment we wouldn’t see the innovation that we do coming out of California. However, if we all thought more about running our startups like real businesses, we’d all be seeing more success.

Conversely, do you know why the French cannot replicate the Silicon Valley environment? Because they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.

It’s just a matter of finding the right balance.

You don’t understand all those 10_ _ forms the IRS makes you fill out each year?
You find and visit a CPA.

The brakes on your car are squeeling?
You find and go to a mechanic.

You don’t know why Windows Vista will not allow you to run Adobe reader 8?
You find and go to MinuteFix.

I like to think that as the Community Manager I am as adept at answering Tech Support questions as the next guy. This is not always the case though. After all, I am only human. I make stupid mistakes and I field questions I just can’t answer. There is nothing worse than going to a friend or colleagues house to “fix” his computer only to find that I can’t. Sometimes it is a hardware issue and I simply don’t have a motherboard in my back pocket. Sometimes it is because I am just stumped. Even worse, sometimes I make stupid mistakes. For days now I have been trying to get Google Talk to play nicely with my Adium setup. Nothing would work though. I kept getting annoying error messages. Come to find out, I was getting those messages and not being able to login because I was entering the wrong password the entire time. I felt so stupid. But the process made me realize something. It isn’t always whether or not we answer the question at hand but moreso how we field it. When we start to get on live chats and actually solve peoples real problems there will need to be a huge emphasis on how we treat them. If I called in with this question and it went unfixed I would be frustrated, yes. However, if the person on the other end treated me with dignity and respect and was professional the entire time, I would turn my focus to the refreshing customer service I had just received. Not only that but I wouldn’t think twice about where to turn when my next problem surfaced.

I LOVE like to read. What else would I do in the bathroom during those unmentionable times? Seriously though. Reading has become something that keeps me on my game. That is why I am on Amazon.com right now purchasing a book by Scott Ginsberg entitled The Power of Approachability. A rather easy read, this book teaches how to become an effective, engaging communicator one conversation at a time. But why do I mention this book? Well, because this guy knows his stuff. He has an insightful blog and an informative website as well that will allow us to breed fans of MinuteFix and not just customers. I hope that we will all focus on not just solving hardware and software issues but really entering into a social interaction in which problems are, in fact, solved. Here’s to becoming a friend to those less savvy than ourselves!

It is obvious at this point that our world has turned into a computer nation. A decade or so ago home computers were billed as “the next best thing since sliced bread.” I think more people have computers than even eat bread. They are rolling off the line with remarkable number. They are everywhere in some form. Newsweek even published the following:

“Three quarters of all Americans have access to the Internet, spending an average of twelve-and-a-half hours a week online…for those between 12 and 18, usage approaches 100 percent. Though e-mail is still the No. 1 activity, the study concludes that the Net has profoundly changed the way we spend money, keep in touch with our friends and get information (Internet users use the medium as their No. 1 source of news, despite worries about credibility).”

Of those numbers it is likely that many will have problems just getting them set up. That is where we come in. I know I can get someone up and running pretty quickly. But how do I get to them? How does the average computer user know to come to me? And once I do speak to them, what compels me to help them. I help them because I am good at it. My talent is computers and my goal is to see that everyone can enjoy their proverbial slice of the 21st century bread.