Those who don’t believe in Jesus might smile at the sentiment. Those who are just fans of Jesus might think of some similar event in their lives. Those who are fully committed to Jesus knows this is just the first of many landmarks of a long journey.

Today, I would like to encourage you to put your faith in Christ Jesus into action… into action by how you view customers, how you view work, and how you apply the Bible to your day to day life at work.

Every day you face people who believe faith is something you only “practice” (show, put on, etc.) on Sunday’s or on a Wednesday evening. You are told you should keep “religion” and “politics” out of conversation.

I want to encourage you to understand and live your faith. Faith is not a piece of clothing or jewelry you put on and take off. Neither is it something you brag about or show off as if it is just a piece of eye candy.

It is my firm belief the Bible is more than a x thousand year old book; it is my firm belief we can find practical applications on how to live our day to day lives from the Bible.

Please let me share with you some Bible verses which I hope and pray will encourage you in the areas of being a servant to your customers.

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters,” — Colossians 3:23 NIV

Please let me remind you whether you are a business owner, co-owner, manager, or employee, we are all stewards (God owns everything).

We report to Jesus. All the work we do should be done willingly, cheerfully, with all of our heart with the goal to glorify and please Jesus.

What will our attitude be like if we view every single customer need as being one driven by the desire to lovingly serve Jesus for His Glory, and His Honor?

What will our customers see in us if we make ever effort to do our best for them from our heart?

“You will do all right, if you obey the most important law in the Scriptures. It is the law that commands us to love others as much as we love ourselves. But if you treat some people better than others, you have done wrong, and the Scriptures teach that you have sinned.” — James 2:8-9 CEV

As we serve our customers, we need to do our best to treat each customer equally with the same effort and same heart. While we need to honor all service level agreements, we need to be very careful to have the right attitude and mindset that every single customer from the person paying the least to the person paying the most, from the person who is easiest to work with to the person who is the hardest to work with that all should be treated with love, patience, and care.

Speaking of love, let us be reminded what is love.

“Love is kind and patient, never jealous, boastful, proud, or rude. Love isn’t selfish or quick tempered. It doesn’t keep a record of wrongs that others do. Love rejoices in the truth, but not in evil. Love is always supportive, loyal, hopeful, and trusting. Love never fails!” 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 CEV (1st line of 8)

Followers of Christ Jesus are called to love everyone — yes, everyone. In doing so, we are reminded to be kind. Are you thinking of ways to show kindness to your customers?

Love is patient. When you are on that phone call, are you looking at the clock or wondering about when you can get off the call, or are you focusing on being patient with the customer?

When a customer shares with you about their achievements or if their business is going well, don’t get jealous or feel you have to boast about your own accomplishments. Be humble, and not proud.

Be careful never to be rude with your customers; and be quick to apologize if you have given offense (of critical importance, if your customer or someone else points out you were rude, take their word for it, humble yourself, and apologize without regard to what you believe).

While I do believe there is a time and place to fire customers, you want to be very careful to keep no record of their wrong doings. We all sin and fall short of God’s Glory. It is only by His Grace, and His Mercy we have anything. We can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens us, but this never makes us perfect or better than our customers or anyone else.

Rejoice with your customers over truth and anything they share which is of God (whether or not they believe in God). Do not rejoice in any suffering or wrong.

Always try to be supportive to your customers, loyal to them (without worry or concern as to if they are loyal to you). Trust in God, not in men or women.

“I can endure all these things through the power of the one who gives me strength.” — Philipians 4:13 CEB

Remember, we don’t receive any strength from the world or from earthly things; we can give our very best because Jesus gives us the strength.

Be encouraged today to give your very best to each person you encounter. Be a servant. Love. Encourage. Be of good cheer. Be a light. Show Grace. Show Mercy. Love.

Contact us if you have any questions as to why faith matters in customer service.

One of the challenges we face day to day is maintaining a Biblical view of life.

In a daily perspective, one of the questions we ask ourselves is if we are just going through the motions or are we doing the best we can do, along with looking for areas of improvement.

We try to apply this on a service level not only when our customers call us on the telephone for help or put in support tickets, but in the actual services we provide as well.

Let’s take a deeper look at what this means to our customers and potential customers…

Managed Shared Hosting, Managed VPS Hosting, Managed Reseller Hosting

We’ve been in the managed hosting arena since 1996 (in business since 1995); and on a regular basis we review our network infrastructure, network services, etc. to see what type of add ons and upgrades we can provide to our managed hosting clients — often at zero charge or change of billing.

Since our new site has been live, such changes have been documented in our News section with the latest being an overall increase in bandwidth allocation for our Managed Shared Hosting customers, Managed VPS Hosting customers, and Managed Reseller Hosting customers.

Managed Server Administration, Managed Security, Managed Dedicated Servers (aka MSP customer)

Every MSP customer in good financial standing with us that either has a recurring / subscription-based service or has administration time on file with us receives one to two free hours of administration time in the months of November (for Thanksgiving) and December (for Christmas) as our way of saying thank you for their business.

Sometimes MSP customers have extensive questions which can take an hour or so to answer. While we retain the right to bill for such time, the overwhelming majority of the time, we do it freely as way of saying to our customers “we appreciate your business,” with something to back it up.

Every time we log into a server for security patching, we do a mini security audit to check for root hacks as well as server-based active malware; security patching customers also receive our APF Global Trust Service free of charge.

Security Monitoring customers, in addition to getting our Global Security Service (GSS) included and our APF Global Trust Service included, we notify customers of trending attacks where they can then notify their customer(s) whose trend is in process to dig deeper.

Our GSS customers receive our APF Global Trust Service free of charge. When we see a GSS agent disconnect, if it is due to a server outage, we alert the GSS customer to a down server event.

When we go through a server migration (which can involve multiple servers), we do our best to take a look at the entire picture from start to back. Part of our multiple step process includes a draft migration to ensure our thought process is on key guaranteeing a better end result.

Our Managed Dedicated Server Customers often have a complete package of services from 24 hour care with a guaranteed response time to server administration to various security packages and more. For our managed dedicated server customers, we do our best to be proactive as well as responsive.

While we do believe there are a lot of good companies out there who provide similar services, from talking with our customers, we are held accountable and receive feedback that we are hitting the mark.

If you are not under our care, is your current provider just going through the motions for you? Or are they giving it their all on a regular basis? If the former, we would love to have you under our care. It would be an honor for us to show you our appreciation for your business over time.

Please contact us if you have any questions.