Corporate Blog

It’s not every day that we receive a testimonial on paper … in the post … in a box! In fact, I think we’ve had two on cards in the sixteen years we’ve been in business (this one included) in addition to the many that adorn our website that we receive via email. And with the card in the box was, not a body part or a bomb, but a jar of home-made, organic orange-kumquat marmalade. I wonder how many jars of home-made marmalade, sent with appreciation for “amazing tech support”, they receive at MegaCrazyHost? Hmm.

Thank-you to Zsuzsi and John (the “Two Gingers”) at GingerMedia for their very kind (and tasty!) gesture. Zsuzsi and John do web design. You should hire them.

Card from GingerMedia

Tasty organic orange-kumquat marmalade

We’re shy here at NinerNet. We don’t like to toot our own horn more than is necessary. This is why we don’t beg our clients to write testimonials for us — either lengthy ones, or short ones loaded with exclamation marks that make the writer sound like he’s on speed, or make us sound like we’re the best thing since sliced bread. (We’re good, but not that good!) We simply do not solicit testimonials. Not only are they easily faked anyway, but … I don’t know … it seems to me to be like going up to the cool kid in the playground and asking if she likes you and if you can be her friend. Not cool.

But you’ll notice that we do have testimonials on our main website, displayed in random order at the foot of every page. They’re usually quite short, some as short as only two words. (“You rock!” comes to mind.) They’re short because we pluck them from actual emails we receive during the course of ordinary business — usually from support emails where we’ve helped a client get something done, and they’re truly appreciative and thankful. (That said, at least one of our testimonials that comes to my mind was received on a handwritten thank-you card, a very nice touch in this day and age.) Sometimes though, we have to censor the occasional over-exuberance. 🙂

Anyway, the point of this post is that we’re going to start posting testimonials on this fledgling blog as they come in, and often add the context behind the testimonial that you don’t get when reading the short quote on our website. I think that adding in the context will show how, every day, we help our clients achieve what they want to achieve using the technology that we provide. It also shows the authenticity of our testimonials.

We’ll start today with our newest testimonial and our oldest. The oldest was received back in our early days, and is the one that we received on a handwritten thank-you card:

Thank-you … for all your kind help. You have made the jump into this unfamiliar territory so much easier.

This was sent to us in the mid-nineties by Avalon Dance Shop of Canada Ltd., who are still a client of ours today. I remember sitting on a bench (or was it a stool?) with the owners of Avalon Dance in the dim light at the back of their shop after hours, explaining the then relatively new technology of the World Wide Web. Evidently they appreciated my help, and hopefully still do today.

Most recently we received the following:

Thanks again for your quick response and willingness to assist as always.

This was from Night Sight Zambia, an outfit that provides IT services to companies in their area. A mutual client was having problems with their in-house mail server (we provide them with a back-up mail server and a relay server), and Night Sight contacted us for some feedback on what might be happening. After checking to make sure that the services that we provide to this client were working, we provided some feedback. That said, the problems had nothing to do with the services we provide, and so any ideas we provided were purely a matter of brainstorming. In the end, the problem with the client’s machine was found and fixed by Night Sight, and we hadn’t really made a concrete contribution to the solution. Nevertheless, as the quote above says, we were willing to help if we could (and we were quick about it), even though the problem had nothing to do with us or our services directly. (Fortunately though, the back-up mail server we provide for this client did its job, storing incoming mail until their in-house mail server was back online.)

If you say something nice in your next support email, you could be featured here too. But please, keep the exclamation marks and sickly sweetness to a minimum, and remember, we don’t solicit. 🙂

Craig