What customer service skills translate from the hotel business to serving Web customers?
In the hotel business [unlike social media], there isn’t a tool that connects you. People are telling you right to your face what is good and what is not good. It also gives you a lot of human characteristics that are very important, like patience, the ability to keep smiling no matter what, the ability to serve your customers well. Translated into technology, those human elements are still key in being able to serve your customers. When you have to explain what Network Solutions does to a non-techie, what do you say? We enable small businesses to succeed using Web-based tools, domain names, Web hosting, if they want to sell online. It’s almost an entire bundle of tools. If a business is not already online — I think 47 percent of businesses are not — that’s a huge opportunity. What have you learned since donning the swami title? Communicating with customers is no longer just about e-mail or marketing messages that you lob across a high wall and forget about. Soon you’re going to be abl
