I was reminded of the power of great customer service, particularly as it relates to small and midsize firms, when I got the following message this morning from the president of JangoMail, our bulk email provider:

Dear Mark,

I want to brief you on the events of the last 22 hours that resulted in some of our clients being unable to access our web site Monday morning. JangoMail's domain name registrar, Register.com, had a problem resulting in the temporary expiration of our domain name. Register.com has so far been unable to explain the cause of the expiration, and while the expiration issue was corrected within 20 minutes of the issue surfacing, due to the caching nature of the Internet's DNS servers, many DNS servers around the world had cached the incorrect "expired" settings for jangomail.com. The following is a general timeline of events:

9/22/08 7:00 AM EST - Register.com expires jangomail.com.

9/22/08 7:20 AM EST - Our system admins are alerted, and we renew the domain within 3 minutes.

9/22/08 8:00 AM EST - A check of random DNS servers around the world reveals that about 50% of DNS servers are correctly resolving jangomail.com while the other 50% are re-directing jangomail.com to Register.com's web site.

Between 8:00 AM EST and 11:00 AM EST, three phone calls are made to Register.com, none of them resulting in any explanation of what happened. The issue seems to center around Register.com's SafeRenew feature. Our domain has the SafeRenew feature activated, which should have forced Register.com to automatically renew the domain without human intervention, but Register.com confirms that this didn't take place.

9/22/08 12:00 PM EST - About 75% of the Internet's DNS servers are correctly resolving our domain.

9/22/08 6:00 PM EST - About 90% of the Internet's DNS servers are correctly resolving our domain.

Currently, about 95% of the Internet's DNS servers are resolving jangomail.com correctly, and it should be 100% at 7:00 AM EST today. ...

We are terribly sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused you. We were answering support tickets as quickly as possible during the course of Monday, providing alternate methods of accessing the application, ...

If you did experience any account issues from Monday, please let me know, and I'll make sure we examine your account and take any necessary corrective actions.

We pride ourselves on having the appropriate processes and redundancies in place to achieve 99.999% system uptime, and we know we've let some of you down. Yesterday's DNS issue plus last week's Hurricane Ike issue interrupted our otherwise smooth processes. We are going to be re-thinking how we handle our domain name registrations and renewals internally and will be modifying our processes to ensure this never happens again.

...

Sincerely,

Ajay Goel
President, JangoMail

This is a great example of quick customer response in and of itself (luckily, their domain was not forwarding for us, so today's note was news to me).  However, as Ajay Goel mentions toward the end of his note, JangoMail was experiencing a different set of problems last week, when the remnants of Hurricane Ike swept through Dayton, Ohio, where the company is based.  I knew about this because our account login page showed a continually changing status update on the damage the storm caused, how it might affect us (again, luckily, it didn't), and their work to restore power and all features.

The way JangoMail has weathered these two big, back-to-back incidents, and their efforts during "normal" times to expand their features and make using their service easier for customers – in the unabridged version of the message above, Ajay gave a heads up of three improvements coming down the pike – underscore how this company of only four employees is using employee engagement with customers to drive business.  In fact, this year they were named for the second time to Inc. magazine's Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies (no. 972 this year).

It's amazing to me how many tech, business service, and other companies miss the boat in not rising to the occasion during an unforeseen event that hinders product or service delivery.  In my mind, these types of events represent the best opportunity to show the value they offer their clients.

How have your vendors or suppliers reacted during an emergency situation?  Did their employee engagement best practices pay dividends?

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons