What 7 calls to GoDaddy can teach you about Innovation

For the last two days I’ve been transferring my blogs/websites from Blue Host to GoDaddy. My blog has been down since Sunday night and I just got it to work 15 minutes ago. Incredible isn’t it?

I’m writing this because I called GoDaddy a grand total of 7 times. And all 7 times I got different reasons as to why my blog wasn’t coming up. Incredibly, everything was resolved in the last two calls. About an hour and a half between them.

Thank GOD!

Anyway, what is incredible about this is that it was a simple problem that I could have resolved myself had I looked at the problem through the eyes of naive techie. Why? Because it was a basic techie issue. One file. That was it. Just one file. Programming 101.

But it wasn’t just me. It was all the other seven people I talked to. It was only until those last calls that they really started digging deeper and started tweaking. It was just so odd that none of ever imagined what it was. Until they started reverse engineering through trial-and-error that they finally figured it out.

Looking back on talking to all the CSR’s, there are two things that come to mind: Empathy and previous experience.

For example, the penultimate CSR I talked to had had the same problem happen to him a few years back. I could even tell in the sound of his voice that he was a little more attentive than the previous CSR’s I talked to. Although his solution didn’t apply here, I kept probing to see what else his thought process might tell me. After much probing, his advice was really what made the problem more obvious to attack.

The next CSR acted as if he had seen it all, that is until my issue came knocking on his door. Of course, he had the notes of all my previous calls so he easily checked them off. Half and hour later of trial-and-error later, we deleted one file on the root folder that was causing the issue and voila! Heck, the guy probably thanked me like 20 minutes for sticking in there, all because it was a scenario they had not encountered before.

It’s safe to say that I was relieved!

So what are the lessons?

Viewpoints matter

Seven set of eyes saw my account. That means seven people with different experiences got a crack at it. At the end, it was an issue none of them had ever encountered. That means they (and me) learned something new.

When all else fails, trial and error is your best friend

Even though the solution was right under our noses, trial-and-erroring your way to a solution is a proven method to solve problems. And most of the time this is how most new products and services are created. They key is to move quickly. If going forwards doesn’t work, go backwards. Sometimes the solution is at the base.

It’s a team effort

Everyone builds on others ideas. This last point embodies the previous two points.

These ideas, of course, are nothing new to you. But as you can see, fixing things and getting down to the root problem is hard work. It takes time.

So now that I have a new hosting, the site is a lot faster than before. Your site experience is important to me, let me know what I can do to improve it 🙂

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Ximena Valero
Also published on Medium.
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