CDNvideo - 5 years! Recipes for longevity in business from a successful startup

Fanfare sounds, beat the drums, play the pipes: CDNvideo 5 years! Thanks to all those who have been with us these years: employees - for their dedicated work, customers - for being fed and given interesting tasks, for investors - for their strategic vision, for competitors - for not letting us relax, and everyone else for what watched the video on the popular sites of the Runet, downloading it from our servers!



We were not the first to market. In the first 3 years of existence, we did not have the highest quality services. And now, when quality has become the best possible - dumping competitors have appeared.

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Nevertheless, we are the leader of the Russian market in our segment (CDN services). We feed almost 50 employees and their families. With the help of our CDN broadcast video and speed up the loading of pages of 30 thousand sites.



How did we manage, starting 5 years ago from scratch, to reach such a life?





My version of the answer is this - customers enjoy working with us, and not with competitors. From the very inception of the company, we agreed with the co-founder that the happiness of customers is the main goal of its existence. Of course, this may seem like an empty slogan, but we really strived and still strive to do everything possible to make our customers satisfied.



Below are my 5 recipes for building a quality customer service. Let them seem obvious to many - but, in my opinion, a good customer service, coupled with an understandable and necessary product almost guaranteed to produce results in the form of a successful business, and our company is proof of that.



So, actually recipes:



1. Solving customer technical problems should have absolute priority.



Recently we had such a case. There was a failure in the pre-billing system - the data needed for the subsequent billing for services partially stopped collecting. That is, we began to lose money every minute. When I found out about this, the first thing I made sure was that the customer service didn’t hurt at all - and immediately stopped showing increased interest in the problem: it was solved according to standard procedures. But if some of the clients lost the service, the whole company would stand on their ears until the problem was solved.



2. Always try to enter the position of customers.



I will give you an example. One of our clients could not bring traffic to their site and paid us for services at the minimum rate of 3000 rubles per month. But one day he came up with a good marketing ploy and a half Runet came to his site, and the bill for our services for the current tariff rose to a million rubles. But this client has not yet learned how to monetize its service, so he did not have the money. We decided to post-factum transfer the client to the most profitable tariff, and even give a one-time discount on services - although formally we had every reason to demand payment of the bill under the current contract. As a result, we received a loyal client who has used our services for many years and has long paid back the discount that we once gave him.



3. Employees must be positive towards customers.



In almost all the companies where I used to work, I heard conversations about "fools customers." Typically, such conversations are techies, but I have come across cases where even company executives are discussing it. We have such a fundamentally impossible. It seems that with the co-founder, on a personal example, it was reported to all the employees of the company that we work for the sake of clients. Therefore, helping customers including answers to seemingly stupid questions is our sacred duty. Therefore, our employees are happy to give advice to customers who go beyond talking about our services - for example, they advise you to use this or that equipment, talk about monetization schemes, etc. And when the company grew, we introduced an application processing system and hired an employee who monitors the speed and quality of responses to clients' questions and, if necessary, gives recommendations on how to communicate with them.



4. Be a company with a human voice.



From the first year of the company’s existence, we have a 24/7 technical support telephone — we don’t hide our customers for online chat rooms or collective email addresses, as some companies in our market do. I myself periodically call our technical support at night to check that it is available and that its employees communicate politely with me.



5. Listen carefully to customers and try to solve their problems.



This is perhaps the most important point. We try to understand the problems of clients and help them to solve. Perhaps because of this, we too often get involved in custom development for a client. And while this may not always be economically feasible, in the long run this approach helps to increase customer loyalty. And this means that it makes our business more sustainable and leads to the word of mouth effect when our clients recommend us to their friends.



PS As a bonus, I will bring advice from Anatoly Karpov, which he once gave to novice chess players: before you make a move, put yourself in the place of a partner and calculate his reaction to your turn. That is, in our case - put yourself in the place of a client and think about what kind of service you would like to receive from your supplier.