Online backup service provider Carbonite has been in the news for some time now. They were recently in the news for the wrong reasons. Hot on the heels of the Belkin fiasco , “biased reviews without disclosing affiliations” are getting a hard rap on the knuckles!
The objective of this post is not to debate on companies’ marketing tactics (that too from 2 years ago – I’m not sure if that’s really relevant now) but to point your attention to something else that’s indeed relevant.
Sometimes, we have a VAR/MSP who uses StoreGrid to offer online backup services to their clients, ask us how they can compete with the likes of Carbonite & Mozy. We simply tell them: “Don’t even bother trying”. The events that led to the Carbonite story are quite relevant in this context.
A customer (calling himself Bruce Goldensteinberg), signed up for Carbonite after hearing ads for it on the radio. The backing up part went well, but when his computer actually crashed, he was unable to restore it from the online backup. When he called Carbonite’s customer support, they kept him on hold for over an hour. Read those last 8 words again – that’s the crux of the problem! The customer elaborates in his post that through his ‘wait time’ in the call, he was offered the option to avail of premium service and a quicker response – by paying US$ 20 more!
This, to me, is the fundamental point of departure between commodity online backup services and VARs/MSPs offering managed online backup services. Commodity backup services simply cannot afford to service customers paying $4/month – even after you do the math on what % of users actually avail of support!
We keep saying – backups are not like Skype (who don’t offer phone support, and whose email support isn’t too great, by the way). You cannot say your call quality was bad on Wednesday and great over the weekend and move on! You data was either backed up or not – there are no shades of grey here. Couple this with the increasing complexity and heterogeneity in the IT environment and the requirements for specialized backups like Exchange & SQL, and the value added by a VAR/MSP becomes a lot more clearer.
This ‘unaccounted support overhead’ is even more evident when you read blogs describing customer experiences with Carbonite, Mozy and other commodity online backup services. Most of those online rants end with “…the guy on the line offered me a full refund / free year of service”. In effect, the call center executives are empowered to execute a refund/freebie as required! Why? Because it happens quite often. Its simply the nature of the beast.
COMMODITY ONLINE BACKUP SERVICES CANNOT AFFORD TO PROPERLY SUPPORT THEIR CUSTOMERS PERIOD!
So, the next time someone asks you (their IT service provider) why they should use your online backup services over a $4/month ‘all you can eat’ service, ask them how they’d like to be treated when they have an acute stomach ache – by a real doctor or by an unknown guy on the phone who might attend to them after they’ve been kept on hold for an hour? How valuable is their health? How valuable is their data?
