Stupid Marketing Tricks
Just when I think I’ve seen it all – that we’ve plumbed the depths of marketing stupidity, I read this,
“Rathin Sinha, NaviSite’s chief marketing officer, said the company has legal council prepared to answer any questions of liability.”
Via Mark Cahill at Vario – NaviSite – How to Destroy a Company in One Week. Mark writes,
For those of you who haven’t heard, NaviSite bought Albanza, one of the largest web hosts in the country, in August. They announced in October they would move the majority of their servers to a new hosting facility in Andover, Ma, from the existing Albanza location in Baltimore. After several emails outlining their plans, and serveral delays, they started the move last Friday, with a stated goal of being 100% complete by Sunday…
I have about 15 sites that are hosted there. Most started to come back up on Tuesday. Since then, they’ve been up and down, all around like a ping pong ball. However, my largest site, Reel-Time.com, has been down now for almost a week. And all support requests are met with “We’re looking into it now.â€
So, what’s NaviSite’s brilliant customer retention strategy? They lawyered up. Yeah, that’ll give all their customers the warm fuzzies. I’d say that’s just pig stupid, but that’s an insult to pigs (they’re actually quite smart.) Uh, fellas, there are other hosting companies…Whoo Pig, Sooey! (or in the case, “Sueing!”)
What NaviSite should have done was go into full service recovery mode – with everything from voluntary compensation, extended free hosting service and personal phone calls from the executives to their customers. Instead they get the attorneys involved. And what do you want to bet that when their revenues plummet, NaviSite starts blowing money on big advertising campaigns?
[Sigh.] To cheer myself up, I think I’ll go re-read I Heart Zappo’s. (Now there’s a company that knows how to do the right thing. I don’t even like to buy shoes…and I’ll be spending dinero over at Zappo’s.)
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Mary – I spent 5 years in the web hosting biz (1999-2004), including 1 1/2 years at NaviSite, and I’m stunned from an operational perspective. The folks I knew in the data center and support are mostly gone, but they had some excellent people – and pretty decent processes. What happened? And, as you say, the response from marketing is just underwhelming. I looked on their web site, and there was very little info – very little real estate given over to this issue, which I’m sure is of interest not just to the customers impacted, but to existing customers, prospects, analysts… What a FIASCO. (And, boy, am I glad I’m not in Andover trying to figure this one out.)
I’ve got a site with 15,000 registered users, 1500 active during the course of any given day, and 4+ million pageviews. They have had it down for a full week now. Good thing I don’t have any competitors who will capitalize on this…no wait. I do…
Rot in Hell Navisite…
[...] Navisite responds to customer complaints on datacenter fiasco by directing folks to their Lawyers! [...]