Building agility through a service-first mindset
How to differentiate by prioritizing customer needs
From the moment my co-founder and I started BigScoots, our primary focus has been delivering exceptional service to customers. We aim to provide highly responsive, human-to-human interactions that help our clients thrive.
Initially, our core business was infrastructure management. We built an infrastructure-as-a-service platform that served numerous Chicago-land and Fortune 500 companies. And through that experience, we learned how to meet enterprise requirements.
We transitioned to WordPress hosting because we saw an opportunity for delivering enterprise-level service in a fast-growing but commodity market. WordPress hosting was — and is — a very competitive and crowded field. But we knew we could differentiate ourselves through service.
Today, more than 18,000 clients work with us because their internal IT teams cannot deliver the individualized attention that content creators and other business users need. When those organizations have considered other hosting companies, they’ve run into the same issue: Even large, highly visible hosting companies cannot provide the service and site-specific management that we do.
Gaining the agility to handle evolving customer needs
Of course, one of the biggest challenges for a service-forward company like BigScoots is to continue delivering that outstanding experience for customers even as their needs evolve.
When we first started offering WordPress hosting, our customers just wanted to make sure that their sites stayed online. Now, many have more advanced requirements. They want to deliver more robust, reliable, and engaging digital experiences at scale.
Helping customers meet their shifting needs requires agility. But how do you build a more agile business — one that can succeed in a highly competitive marketplace?
Applying four principles for enhancing agility
We’ve found four key principles that can help businesses respond quickly to fast-changing customer requirements and stay ahead in a very competitive field.
Don’t be afraid to resist marketplace trends
In competitive fields, differentiation requires the courage to chart your own course, even if that means refusing to follow some strong currents. For example, at BigScoots, we decided to own and operate our own infrastructure even as more and more hosting companies moved to the cloud. As a result, we’re able to deliver more system resources compared with solely cloud-based hosting services.Similarly, we’ve resisted the “race-to-the-bottom” pricing that’s pervasive in our field. From the beginning, we decided we weren’t going to compete that way. And because physical infrastructure continues to become more efficient, we can achieve a lower overall resource-per-customer price point than other companies.
Augment internal capabilities to meet changing customer needs
To address shifting customer needs, you might need to develop new capabilities internally or enhance existing solutions. In several cases at BigScoots, we’ve augmented our offerings to better serve customers. For example, we monitor over 30,000 websites. Five or six years ago, we were monitoring a single variable. Now we’re up to 30 variables, which helps us provide more proactive management and service to our customers.
At the same time, we’ve had to make sure that as customers become more tech-savvy, our team can handle more sophisticated technical requests and support questions. Continually training our staff is essential for enabling them to best serve customers.Implement new technologies and forge partnerships
Adopting new technology solutions and partnering with technology vendors can also help address shifting customer requirements. For example, in our early days of WordPress hosting, our customers became very focused on uptime and latency. We started using Cloudflare as a content delivery network (CDN) so that our customers could cache content in geographic areas that were close to their users. Those concerns about uptime and latency evaporated.
Using Cloudflare services also enabled us to introduce a Block by Country WordPress feature. Based on a web application firewall rule, the feature allows customers to block site traffic requests from countries they don’t want to serve. It provides a huge benefit for companies that need it.
Cloudflare has also allowed us to solve serious cyber security challenges at the edge, where our customers are, without adding latency. By using Magic Transit, we continuously protect customer sites from DDoS attacks. Five or six years ago, those attacks had become an unavoidable problem, and the attacks were scaling quickly. Today, we can absorb a terabit-per-second attack without even noticing.Make service the constant
Service does not just mean post-sales support. Depending on your business, service might involve everything from identifying requirements and designing solutions through managing those solutions, helping improve performance, and resolving problems. At BigScoots, we still help many customers with the basics of configuring and building WordPress sites: They might need to learn what a domain is and how to buy and register it, how to set up nameservers, or how to install WordPress themes.
Many customers today also have more advanced needs. They might want to optimize particular elements of their site, enhance SEO, improve cache hit ratios, implement geo redundancy with load balancing, or accelerate check-out times on their e-commerce site. Our service team jumps in and provides a tailored experience.
Providing comprehensive and customized services has multiple benefits. In our case, it is a major point of competitive differentiation. Our customers see us as a meaningful partner who cares about helping them achieve their goals.
And importantly, keeping service as a central pillar enables you to be more agile — there’s no doubt it has worked for us at BigScoots. You can often learn about emerging requirements and feature requests through direct, human-to-human interactions. That feedback can then help you create a roadmap for new features and products.
Future-proofing in a continuously changing field
Just like other companies in the tech industry, we experience constant change. To make sure we keep customers happy now and in the future, we need a long-term strategy for remaining agile. We’ve been able to build and implement that strategy at BigScoots by sticking to a few essential principles. Collaborating with partners and tapping into Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud for applying security at the edge, has enabled us to move forward while staying focused on our core business.
Above all else, we go to bed at night and wake up in the morning committed to delivering high-quality service. Even as new technologies appear and customer requirements change, we will continue to create value and stay relevant by offering personalized, around-the-clock support. Our customers — from small businesses to large enterprises — understand that a good managed service provider can ultimately mean the difference between a good year and a great one.
This article is part of a series on the latest trends and topics impacting today’s technology decision-makers.
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Author
Scott Stapley — @scott-stapley
CEO and Co-founder, BigScoots
Key takeaways
After reading this article you will be able to understand:
Four principles for enhancing business agility
How focusing on service can help you navigate change
Why the right technology partnerships are essential
Related resources
BigScoots improves customer site performance and security with Cloudflare
IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Edge Delivery Services 2024 Vendor Assessment