“Didn’t the conference already end?” I could hear her thinking over the noise of giant machines that dry, press and fold spa towels in one well choreographed motion. The conference had ended for most who had already headed out for the Denver airport or some other way station en route to resuming normal workweeks, equipped now with some Great Ideas to help their organizations.

Though for me and a handful of others, the Conference made it all the way to the depths of the hotel: the laundry center and boiler room, all part of the grand finale “Broadmoor Behind the Scenes” session led by Kate Manzanares, Assistant Director of Human Resources for the resort. It was one of the best sessions for its insights into the management of a very successful business, both local and global, which has won fifty consecutive years’ worth of Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star and AAA Five-Diamond awards, the only property to ever achieve that status, according to the hotel.

Not only was the glimpse into the resort industry fascinating, but it made me look at the Broadmoor differently. I confess that, like any expensive resort where class differences are large enough to trip over, the Broadmoor had always seemed from a distance to be insular and even presumptuous.

But Kate, followed by one employee after another, filled us in on the implementation of a simple but profound idea: Broadmoor takes care of its staff so that they can take care of their guests. Valuing employees is hardly a new management principle, but I realized I had never heard it formulated as a cause and effect: it wasn’t “train” staff or “equip” staff or “incent” staff, so that they could take care of guests, but it was care for them in tangible, unique and creative ways so that they could extend that care beyond themselves. Expressed as a core competency rather than a benefit, it sounded downright New Testament, and they are on to something.

And I don’t know that I’ve ever seen this idea demonstrated as clearly as I did standing among the laundry team members, as they carefully worked together to feed literally tons of clothing to giant dryers and ironing machines. You expect smiles at the reservation desk because you’re paying for them, and it’s not like the laundry center was bubbling up with laughter. Yet there were lots of smiles there and throughout many back hallways and break rooms, as well as a palpable sense of camaraderie. Admittedly, I only caught a glimpse, but you don’t get to be the longest-running winner of the some of the most coveted customer-service awards in history through just lip service.

“If you can’t remember–I mean instantly recall–the last time you praised an employee, it’s been too long,” Kate explained. And it goes well beyond pats on the back, as she reviewed about a dozen different employee motivation programs simultaneously in operation at the hotel. Recognition is based on both colleagues and a diligent interest in customer feedback all the way up to President Steve Bartolin who, Kate said, regularly meets alone with random samplings of staff members to get unfiltered details and starts each morning by reading every guest comment card from the 744-room complex.

Guest feedback, too, is surprisingly unfiltered. The only formula used is the percentage of positive verse negative feedback by department. No other statistical distillation takes place; instead, every comment seems to be treated like a simple but important story. She tied these unusual measures of care directly to numerous accounts about how it overflowed into exceptional customer service. She meant the word “exceptional,” and included the poignant memory of the Executive Committee following a line employee’s suggestion to use hotel shuttle buses to return otherwise stranded bankers back to their homes in devastated Manhattan after September 11th, 2001.

Through the session and the tour, with its impromptu interviews with the surprisingly receptive and warm staff, I realized that the smiles I’ve often seen in the lobby were very likely sincere and sometimes even familial. If creating community is what we as well as our association and other customers try to do every day, treating each other and our customers like family is the next step. It was the final Great Idea of a remarkable conference held in a truly exceptional place.

So…it was time for a laptop upgrade.  I had a lot of requirements this time around.  I wanted a desktop replacement on a budget.  I also wanted a good processor, hard drive, and networking performance.  Quality screen, multitouch keypad, good sound were all pluses.  Decided I wanted to use Best Buy, since I have a Silver membership to their Reward Zone.  This meant a few things.  One, I had up to 45 days to return or exchange the product.  With my experience with Windows laptop builds, I figured this would be a great bonus.  Second, I still wanted to be able to physically test the laptop before buying it.  If I was going to get a desktop replacement that I would be using regularly, I wanted something I would be more-than-OK with interacting with physically on an ongoing basis.

By now the question is…where does social media come into all this?  Well, like many online shopping sites, even those that are online versions of brick-and-mortar establishments, bestbuy.com has a customer review section for their products.  The data is overwhelmingly in favor of us “consumers” trusting each other’s experiences far more than most advertising or marketing around a product.  This trend has grown so much that company’s are now wisely diverting large portions of their traditional advertising and marketing budget into Social Media Marketing, using “listening platforms” to understand how and where us “consumers” are talking about their products and brands.  But online customer reviews around products are really where this roller coaster began.

The time I spent reading the experiences of other users with their laptop purchases became rather addictive.  I changed my mind at least 5 times based on the experience of other customers, and ended up choosing a laptop brand I never would have believed I would selected otherwise: Samsung!  Even though I had follow-up experiences involving the return of my initial purchase and 4 subsequent exchanges and second-guesses (hence, the value of the Silver Reward Zone Membership), I ended up a very happy camper with a laptop chosen in large part because of the high marks given by other consumers, and less because of any advertising, marketing, or brand loyalty.  And it may be my most favorite portable computing device yet!

Moral of the story:  all else being equal, it really pays for technology manufacturers, distributors, and even retail point-of-sale facilities to include social media as a centralized portion of the buying process.  Now, I’ll find it hard to consider buying technology elsewhere for all these reasons.

Well, maybe not a no-brainer in the customer service carnival of telecommunications churn, which apparently costs $10 billion per year, according to CGI–so much, it’s developed a “Churn Management” program. That’s where “Customer Justice”–that is Customer Service from a macroeconomic point of view–comes in. When things get so bad that you need “churn management,” it becomes a matter of justice.

Going on 30 years now, I have taken an interest in Customer Justice because it’s one of the greatest marketing levers that far too many businesses fail to value. It’s actually a comparative advantage in international trade and will be a major factor as services continue to be globally outsourced.

“But, look–it gets a whole department in our org chart,” I’m told. Yes, but it’s rarely a rung in the corporate ladder’s fast track or among the required classes in business school. It seems too simple to warrant being considered a “discipline,” like the more sexy Finance or Business Development. And Stanford or Wharton grads don’t ”study” Customer Service–it’s too vocational.

Of course, one Harvard Business School grad, Fred Reichheld, did. In 1989 he pioneered Loyalty Marketing at Bain and developed the statistic that the cost of acquiring new customers was five times the cost of servicing established ones. First widely published in 1996′s The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits and Lasting Value, it’s quoted every recession when customers get hard to find. In fact, it’s been elevated to a mantra so often that it rarely includes a citation, and it’s now been inflation-adjusted to six or seven times depending on who’s doing the chanting.

But many businesses don’t believe it. They think customer service boils down to how well you write your call script and how many calls need to be escalated to Supervisor “Bill,” part of the staff of our former telecommunications vendor who was unwilling to provide me with his last name, even though he had all my information. I told Bill that if that Early Termination Fee did in fact appear on our final bill, I’d have to recoup our losses by developing this incident into a case study.

We have a lot of great vendors — how would they have treated this? Why do telecommunications and financial services come up in churn discussions more than, say, manufacturing? (Regulation, anyone?) How often is churn associated with this particular vendor, who, out of fairness, shall remain nameless pending that final bill? If, however, that bill reflects Bill’s heightened emotional state during our call, then this will be a matter for Customer Justice, and I can share with you what I learn. After all, if you have to pay a fee, you should get something in return, don’t you think?

Just a few minutes after last being on our website, I tried to access it and found it was down.  I tried our host provider’s site-Host Gator-and was stunned to find that it too was down.  Just as I was going to call our hosting administrator and pass this problem over to him, it dawned on me: what does the twitstream have to say about Host Gator being down? I opened Twitter and ran a search on hostgator.  Apparently the outage had just happened, as there were a handful of tweets in the prior few minutes (and hundreds to follow) that answered many questions.  Several were directed to the Host Gator twitter account @hostgator, but were still in the public twitstream:

@ibusinesstalk hostgator down?  anyone have same issue who using Hostgator?

@JackLeblond @hostgator – we may have a serious problem

@Zombie_Plan Is anyone else getting that HostGator is down?

@JonDBishop @hostgator what’s going on …. all of our sites are down, and so is hostgator.com

Within a few minutes hostgator tweeted an update:

@hostgator Network issues at our datacenter. We’re working on it now. Things should be back to normal shortly.

Tweets from other users continued to flow, and those of us already monitoring the situation re-tweeted Hostgator’s responses as they continued to come:

@hostgator Looking into the causes now. Looks like it is datacenter wide

@hostgator We heard back from The Planet (our dc). They are definitely having widespread issues, but details are few atm. More details as we have ‘em

@hostgator Our CEO was just told “it’s a router that’s not ‘advertising’ a route. We’re awaiting further updates from them in a few minutes.

@hostgator Our site is back up now at http://www.hostgator.com.

@hostgator Hearing lots of reports that everything is back up now.

Hostgator didn’t stop tweeting with the news that everything was back up, but continued to stay in touch and reassure customers:

@hostgator We will fully honor our uptime guarantee if downtime for the month exceeded 45 minutes. Looks like about 25 minutes of downtime.

@hostgator Writing a forum post now with additional details now. Should be ready in 10 minutes or so.

@hostgator Exactly 10 minutes. Here it is: http://bit.ly/18uWP2

@hostgator Clarification for those asking about email: No email should be lost. It may be delayed slightly, but definitely not lost.

@hostgator Support Update: Phones, ticket system, and chat are completely back to normal levels.

And finally, an exhausted Customer Service Manager left us with a couple of laughs, beginning with his reply to this query about whether the outage was a marketing ploy to get more mentions:

@nstockard @hostgaor looks like you guys gained a lot of followers during the downtime… was that a marketing ploy?

@hostgator @nstockard Come by and help us answer the phones and deal with live chats. Then I’ll let you know if it was a marketing ploy. :p

@hostgator *tap* Is this thing still on? Almost 900 mentions and like 300 followers in past hour. One way to do some Twitter marketing. </sarcasm>

Hostgator did a great job not only of keeping us informed, but of keeping a lot of us out of their way!  As more and more clients join Twitter and think to look to the twitstream during problems like this, Hostgator  and other customer service operations  that employ twitter will be able to minimize the time they spend handling clients individually on the telephone or in chat sessions.  The subject of twitter as customer service came up directly in the following exchange:

@CatsEyeDesign @hostgator  Twitter, the new customer service?

@hostgator @CatsEyeDesign We’ve had an active presence on Twitter for awhile now and have been able to help a lot of customers on Twitter.

Apart from providing efficient customer service, though, how important was it for Host Gator to be on Twitter?  Extremely!  The outage, caused not by Host Gator but by data center The Planet, took down so many sites-including Host Gator’s own site-that there was a huge spike in search traffic related to Host Gator, which was picked up by competitors.  This brought in the vultures:

@Limespace @seanbajuice Yep.. All Hostgator sites are down.. Its a MEGA FAIL! Try us http://limespace.net

@ Ryan_Orrico nice..  @Limespace is hitting all the people who are bitching about @hostgator with an offer.  good call!

Hostgator’s presence on twitter during this time bought them a great deal of good will:

@steveendow @hostgator LOL, I just got a follower update from another hosting co, apparently harvesting followers from your list…

@Ray_Cunningham this is the first time hostgator have let me down so I won’t be going to lemmingspice or whatever it’s called

@foodeater @Limespace the problem is not w/ my hosting company, its w/ The Planet’s servers. Very happy w/ @hostgator & won’t switch!

@JonDBishop it is nice to at least have @hostgator on Twitter to handle the massive problem

@garymccaffrey a lot of my sites are down.  @Hostgator are on to it (although they are having issues now, they are an excellent host, highly recommended)

@sugardayfox Even great services fail at times > @hostgator is down , at least their twitter account is here to keep the fait Get going guys!

@JennieArmato @hostgator- just want to say we appreciate your updates, you guys do an awesome job. thanks from Management & Staff at Web Business Academy

And for many of us, Hostgator’s deployment of twitter during this massive outage led to a big “aha!” moment for understanding Twitter’s particular usefulness in any multi-platform communications effort:

@TerryGronenthal all info. services become useless, except Twitter, when something is happening so quickly i.e. @hostgator being down

@RylanH Waiting for hostgator to get its datacenter back up. Twitter is great for knowing things like this.

@pbarnhart Learn a lesson from the #hostgator outage – twitter is a good back channel to keep folks updated – turning this into a *teaching moment* lol

@ericfarewell As annoyed as I get at technical issues it really is cool to see companies like @HostGator communicating their problems on Twitter…

@sugarandsalt actually somewhat fascinated by usefulness of twitter in the hostgator outage.

@paulinetrabert Tracking the HostGator problem on Twitter was fun!

I have to agree with all those comments, especially with @sugarandsalt and @paulinetrabert: not only was it efficient to get information about the outage from Twitter, it was fun and fascinating too! As one tweeter noted in the midst of all this: it’s a good idea to follow your hosting provider on Twitter, whoever that might be!  You’ll be fortunate if you find your service provider to be as engaged on Twitter as Hostgator already was before today’s crisis! Nice job, @hostgator!