Blue Gecko has been mentioned in a great article on brands.
Sharpen Your Competitive Edge with Tangible Brand
by Mary Weisnewski
Consulting Magazine, October 30, 2008
Brand not only provides guidelines for what you will do, but also what you won’t do. In this way, brand can be a short-term sacrifice.
“Hiring for us is critical, and it can take a long time to find the right people who can really deliver on our brand promise,” says Chuck Edwards, co-founder of Blue Gecko, a database management service provider in Seattle. “Consequently, we’re growing slower than we could. We rely on the judgment of the first person who answers the phone. We rely on customer service skills as much as technical savvy. Technical people have a reputation that they’re not ‘people’ people—that’s not true here. I’ll ask questions about how someone has had to deal with people—their worst customer service experience ever and what they did. I’m looking at how they’re telling me that as much as what they are saying. We’re in a service business, a relationships business. The customer needs to know we’re really listening, they need to trust that we genuinely care.”