Outside of the Applied Innovations staff, few people know this. One of the reasons I started Applied Innovations was because I had been doing web development for a handful of local companies and understood the frustration these companies were feeling with their hosting providers.
I noticed that the companies these customers of mine were working with often held their customers captive and would demand outrageous fees to help with the simplest tasks. I thought, “C’mon doesn’t anyone offer a hosting service that actually cares about the customers success?” It seemed to me that these businesses didn’t realize that if their customers succeeded and grew that the hosting company would also succeed! It’s a simple business concept, help your customers and your business will grow, but no one was making it happen.
This is the concept that Applied Innovations was founded on. Help your customers grow and succeed and you too will grow and succeed. Every day we build on that concept and today is no exception as we’re launching a Customer Advisory Panel.
What is a Customer Advisory Panel?
Today, we’re taking that caring approach our company was founded on a bit further. We’re organizing a Customer Advisory Panel. This will be a subset of our customers from our various business units helping us to understand their business and their needs and in turn helping to drive the direction our services and product offerings take.
Why Join the Customer Advisory Panel? What’s in it for me?
So let’s cut to the chase, what’s in it for you? Why should you help? It’s simple, Applied Innovations is a customer focused business and as such we listen to our customers and provide the services and products that our customers ask for. By participating in the Customer Advisory Panel, you’ll have a bigger say in the direction these products and services take. You’ll be able to voice your own business needs and that of businesses like yours and make sure the services we provide address your needs!
It’s pretty simple really, you get to tell us what you want. Then you’ll get early access to these new services and products and provide us feedback across topics like: features, functionality and price! You’ll get to make sure we’re meeting the needs of your business and the businesses like you and have a bigger say in what we do.
What’s Required of me on the Customer Advisory Panel?
If you decide to participate, you’ll be asked to take a survey from time to time and we may have you speak with one of our product managers or our executives from time to time. You’ll get early access to new products, services and betas before our other customers do and you’ll have the ability to provide direct feedback in these services ranging from features and functionality to price.
I don’t believe you’ll find it distracting and I think you’ll actually enjoy it. What kind of services? Well this is hard to say but here’s some ideas:
- We’re thinking about launching an online backup service. You’d get free access to the tools and be able to test it out for a few weeks. You’ll ultimately help us decide if this is a service our customers would benefit from and if so what would be a reasonable price for this service.
- Another service we’re talking about launching is email push services to smart phones. This is similar to the features in exchange but without the large price tag! You’ll get this service enabled for free during the beta period and then help us determine if it’s useful to you or just a novelty.
Most importantly though, you’re not required to have web hosting experience! You know your business and you know your business needs and I’m betting there’s plenty of businesses out there just like you with the same needs. That’s what we want, you to be an expert on you!
Why’s Applied Innovations doing this? What’s in it for AppliedI?
It’s this feedback that we hope to receive that will allow us to focus on services that our customers actually want and ultimately are willing to purchase. You’ll gain solutions to your business needs and help us focus exclusively on the services and products that bring value to you and your business! At the end of the day, you’ll be helping us to launch only services that help you and we won’t waste time investigating or bringing services to market that don’t help you or bring value to your business. It’s a win for everyone!
Sounds Great, how do I start?
The first thing you need to do is take our current Customer Survey. This is the type of surveys we’ll be asking you to participate in from time to time.
This current survey is meant to help us better understand our customers and why they opted for the service they’re currently on. It’s segmented based on the type of service you have and if you have more than one of these services with us (for example, if you have shared hosting accounts and a dedicated server) feel free to take each survey that relates to you.
- Shared Hosting Customers: take this survey.
- Shared Hosting Resellers: take this survey.
- VPS Hosting Customers: take this survey.
- Dedicated Hosting Customers: take this survey.
We’ll be closing this round of surveys out in the next week so hurry up before it’s too late. As a thank you for taking this survey, I’ll make sure you get a Free Travel Mug and you’ll be entered into a drawing to receive a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate! It’s a pretty good deal for taking 5 minutes of your time.
If you decide you don’t want to join the Customer Advisory Panel then I hope you’ll still take this survey. It will be a tremendous help to us.
Best Regards – Jess