I want to tell you a little story about why I chose Hover as my domain registrar and a lesson I learned about going above and beyond for customers and potential customers. It's going to sound like an ad, but I promise you it's not.

In 2016 I was in the process of evaluating my hosting and domain companies to allow for better management on pricing, privacy and ease of use. I was fed up with the poor customer support I was receiving from a once customer service centric company. Slow, no real answers and unexpected downtime left a bad taste in my mouth. And wondered if I’d ever find trust again.

So I was at a conference in Toronto learning about the future of web. I even watched someone demo a Bluetooth controlled robot through the web (wild). But it was after the conference was over that I got a lot of value. I walked up to a booth that was relatively empty.

The booth was Hover, a local to Toronto company that hosted domains and kept them private by default with no extra charge! At the time, I want to say Godaddy was charging 50 to 100 bucks per year to make a domain private and secure, now it looks like its around $8 to $15 a month. If you don’t know any better, you’ll just skip this step because its an added cost on top of your monthly bill.

The crew working the booth were tired after a long day of pitching the service. They had swag, but were out of a lot of what they allowed for in the first day of the conference. They gave me the pitch, and I loved it. Your domain is yours, we wont get in your way. We stick to what were good at, which is domains and my favorite, if you have a question you should get the answer.

So I told them I loved the service and I was thinking of switching. They told me how easy migrating domains was. Then I asked them about the swag I saw someone have. A pretty cool notebook that I was jealous of. They reached into the box of ”tomorrow’s” swag and gave me a notebook.

I switched that night when I went back to my hotel room.

The lesson for me here is that you should strive to go above and beyond, not just for the customers you have bet for the customers you see coming by too. These nice employees could’ve just as easily shrugged me off at the end of the day and told me tough luck on the notebook. But instead they answered all my questions and got me a notebook even though “they were out”.

Going above and beyond doesn’t stop will sales. Your customer service team has to go above and beyond in every interaction with your consumers. Your product team should strive to go above and beyond with every new addition made to your service. And developers should go above and beyond to ensure high uptime and a seamless experience on the service.

To this day, Hover remains one of those companies that goes above and beyond for their customers and its something I take to my teams and project I work on. How do I make a service that elevates the customers experiences.