Calling GoDaddy support? Expect a cross sell.
I used to work for a Fortune 500 company that serviced millions of customers. Whenever a customer called in for support, our tech support representatives were required to attempt to sell them a product at the end of the call. That can be tough:
“I’m sorry about your service being unavailable for 24 hours and that your bill is inaccurate, and that this has caused you hours of inconvenience. I’m also sorry you were on hold for 20 minutes. Now, I’d like to tell you about our latest offer…”
I came across an article from Emory Rowland, who publishes ClickFire.com. He discusses the inevitable sales pitch at the end of a support call to GoDaddy:
Before engaging GoDaddy customer support with Alexander Graham Bell’s 19th century technology, I often feel a twinge of adrenalin flowing in my veins because I know that their ultimate goal is to get me to renew my domains. It doesn’t matter if I have autorenew turned on. It doesn’t matter if I don’t care and my house is on fire, the question always comes. And it always begins with:
“I see you have some domains here that are coming up for renewal”
The article discusses how a GoDaddy rep talked him into buying express appraisals for his domains (and the results).
It’s nice that GoDaddy offers 24×7 support, even though the answers you get may not be spot on every time. A colleague recently contacted GoDaddy prior to switching his webhosting to them. He said the support rep was very helpful and knowledgeable, which he said was a far cry from the service he was used to getting from Time Warner’s Road Runner.
But when you think about it, GoDaddy’s phone support is an ingenious marketing tool. GoDaddy doesn’t offer a toll free number, so GoDaddy customers are paying the company to be marketed to. Let’s assume the typical GoDaddy support rep gets paid $20/hour, fully loaded. That’s 33 cents per minute. If an average support call lasts about 5 minutes, then GoDaddy is paying only $1.65 for the chance to sell a product to its customers. Even if the true cost is several dollars, that’s not much. And it doesn’t even pick up the long distance.
Whether or not you think Bob Parson’s marketing antics (girls, Super Bowl) are brilliant or not, you have to give him a pat on the back for this one.
Justin says
GoDaddy support reps start off at $13.50 per hour plus “bonus” on what they sell. They are required to pitch on every call. If there is a quality assurance rep listening on the call and no pitch is made, they subtract 15 points from a possible 100 score. These are called QA’s. A rep will get 5 of these period (2 weeks) and if they score below 85% total, they will not recieve their bonus.