Change
As most of you are aware by now, Chombo was recently acquired off its previous owner (Curtis Bayne), who had decided he’d like to focus on the other sides of his business and let Chombo go on its own and continue to evolve. To be honest, I think this was a brave and responsible decision. No one wants to let their baby grow up and leave home, but at the same time I think Curtis knew Chombo had a lot of potential and he felt he didn’t have the time resources to put into its continued growth.
When I took over Chombo, we installed a couple of new servers, we upgraded a few things, and what seems to be most important to the customers we spoke to… we kept the support manager, Andrew Gould and I’ve appointed him as the new General Manager of Chombo. Andrew has helped build Chombo’s reputation to what it is today, and to let such a key person leave the company would be massively disappointing. He has worked tirelessly for Chombo for the past year and I’m sure he’ll continue to work hard. Most importantly, as Chombo grows and we inevitably take on more staff, he’s the kind of person I want training those staff. If everyone had his work ethic there certainly wouldn’t be all the slurs about Generation Y that are around!
I promised I wouldn’t let things change for the worse, and I’ve kept my promise so far, and in fact I feel I’ve done the opposite. Which brings us to the next point…
Competition
When Chombo first launched, it was launched to provide customers with large bandwidth limits at affordable prices without sacrificing customer service. Now, there’s been a problem in all of this. There’s a certain competitor who has, and let’s be honest, a large chunk of the hosting market in Australia, and I commend them for being able to build the business they have. We felt we could “beat them” on a few aspects, but price probably wasn’t one of them previously.
So, I took a drastic step in reducing our plan costs to start at $3.95 and a few people took notice, including this company, who obviously felt it was directed at them. Well guess what, it sure was! But it’s targetting customers who, to use their own analogy, are after a “Virgin Blue” type provider with low prices but a good level of customer service. As far as a recent promotion goes, they seem to want to position themselves with “Tiger Airways” and offer no frills for cheap on this particular product. That’s cool, all we’re trying to give people the chance to do is try things out at a comparable price and see if they notice the difference. If they prefer the no frills option, they can go for that. If you want get excellent customer service and telephone support, and other little tidbits as free inclusions, they can come with us. It’s about providing choice.
Even QANTAS has sales and responds to market forces. To get people to see that they’re “better than the rest” they routinely run promotions and slash prices to get people on board and then come back later. This is what we’re doing for the first 500 new customers, and we’ll let them keep that price on an ongoing basis. (As a sidenote, whilst I understand the analogy with Tiger Airways, it isn’t a company I’d want to draw a comparison with. They get you there, for sure. But they have the lowest satisfaction rates in the industry, charge more for any extras you want. They do it at a very cheap price though – it’s all a case of what you want from your service).
Finally, I want to make a quick comment about this supposed hatred and animosity between the most popularly mentioned shared hosting providers (particularly on Whirlpool, when someone asks who to go with 3 options as usually given. One is us.), there’s this idea floating around that these three providers all hate each other, the owners are at war and we would never speak to each other if our lives depended on it. This is all just rubbish – I’ve just come off the phone to the CEO of the company we basically “targetted” with our campaign, we had a polite and pleasant conversation. We’re certainly not going to start giving each other business secrets, but we don’t mind having a chat – we’re all in business for the same reason and there’s just no benefit to being aggressive to one another or causing issues for one another.
We will provide the service we always have, and we’ll provide the customer service that makes us a hit with our customers for all our new customers regardless of what they’re paying. We’ll let our customers speak for themselves with regards to the service. In short, we want to play the ball, not the player.
Michael