It isn’t a war for talent. It’s a war for Attitude. Just ask Seth Godin.

Attitude trumps most Talent. A grumpy CCNA isn’t an asset buta liability.

Take a hotel chain. They have spent billions on property, amenities, advertising, sales incentives to get you to the hotel, only to leave the whole thing up to a poorly paid clerk. The first impression at the hotel is the doorman, then the lobby, then check-in. Three low wage workers are responsible for your entire experience. Hopefully, the manager isn’t stuck looking at a dashboard, but manages by walking around.

We all have horror stories about customer service. The bar is set so low. It doesn’t take much to knock it out of the park with your customers. It isn’t necessarily talent, as much as it is Attitude. Tony Hsieh built Zappos to a billion dollar business on attitude in hiring or as he writes it Delivering Happiness.

Customer Experience is a huge factor in churn, repeat business, referrals, reviews (think Yelp), word-of-mouth and sales.

15 Stats on why Customer Experience is Vital to your business:

1. Price is not the main reason for customer churn, it is actually due to the overall poor quality of customer service – Accenture global customer satisfaction report 2008.

2. A customer is 4 times more likely to defect to a competitor if the problem is service-related than price- or product-related – Bain & Company.

3. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20% – Marketing Metrics.

4. For every customer complaint there are 26 other unhappy customers who have remained silent –Lee Resource.

50 facts about Customer Experience from 2011. I doubt many have changed.

If you have a lousy customer service reputation, how can you hire good people? Top Talent (often labeled A Players) want to work at top companies, organizations with a culture of success and customer experience. So UX (user experience) does translate into hiring. And skills are important, but not as much as Attitude is. Skills can be learned. Attitude notsomuch.

EarthLink launched 4G Wireless Internet-at-Home service, utilizing the Clearwire (Sprint/Softbank now) network. 5G cap for $30/mo.

“EarthLink will offer two packages ideal for wireless Internet access for the home in over 80 cities nationwide. Starting at $29.95 a month, the At Home service delivers wireless Internet on up to 8 Wi-Fi enabled devices including smartphones, tablets and laptops and does not require a term commitment. This launch follows EarthLink’s June 2013 launch of its new 4G Internet-on-the-Go wireless mobile Internet plans.”

Sprint is really pushing the data MVNO system. Unfortunately, as a long time owner of a Sprint Mi-Fi device, service is spotty at best and is NOT a replacement for fixed service.

It is a way for ELNK to take some business and brand one more common service (mobile Internet).

The stats on customer service in this infographic are eye opening about customer service.

89% of consumers stop doing business with bad customer service.

42% of employees have no idea how to solve a customer’s problem due to broken processes or disconnected systems.

More than half – 55% – of customers would pay MORE for a better customer experience.

We see this in video conferencing, managed IT and other areas, where customers pay for white glove service.

What do I mean by White Glove service? You make the technology invisible to the end user. Not nearly enough service providers can do that – or even focus on that.

Original article on TMC.

We live in a world that is NOT five nines. The SLA is catch me if you can. But outages happen a lot. VZ, ATT, C-Link, Sprint, Rackspace, Amazon, Netflix and so on. What do you do when you have an outage?

Use social media to update your customers – frequently!

Fix it!

Apologize. Intermedia.net had a recent outage and the CEO blogged his apology.

Call your biggest customers!

Aftermath: put a plan in place to try to prevent a future outage (and share it with your customers).

If you have heard me talk, you have probably heard me mention the Tribe of 1000. It means that for most ISPs, WISPs and other service providers, 1000 profitable customers is a good business model. The key is Profitable. The other factor is that you aren’t aiming for a million. You are building for 1000 or 2000 or 5000.

Here is a blog post explaining it.