Customers – The Resellers’ Asset
When you are a reseller, you will be challenged everyday in every aspect of your business. The list grows long; spamming, stretched resources, razor-thin profit margins, hackers, phishers, and other competitors. However, the worse can be your very own parent registrar competing against you. They may not be purposely doing so, but they are also selling the same think that you are selling. In fact, the very design of the reseller-registrar relationship leads your registrar to communicate with your end-users.
Taking the necessary steps in protecting your customers from your parent registrar is therefore definitely important.
One competition is in domain selling. Nowadays, registrars sell domains wholesale and in retail, because it is the one hook for selling hosting, emails and other services. Resellers lose out since the registrars can offer it more cheaply. They also have a larger marketing budget, stronger brand awareness and more overall resources. Your customers often also turn to them directly for support, and your registrar routinely contacts your end-users to send domain renewal notices and other legitimate information.
Even then, registrars are not bent on eating up your business on purpose. After all, you are their customers, and if you go bust, they will definitely feel the pinch themselves. If registrars want to steal your business, they could do it long before you can make any real profits. All they need is your customers’ details, which they own it, as a part of the WHOIS process.
As required by ICANN, registrars are entitled to email your customers about domain renewal deadlines and keeping their WHOIS updated. Such contacts will therefore reveal the real registrar, which isn’t you.
Technical support is another way that your customers will find out about your registrar. Since your registrar actually controls the domains of your end-users, the registrar’s information is what your customer sees in the public WHOIS listing. As a result, they routinely call your registrar when they have an issue or question. Since every industry trains its customer service teams to use support calls to sell customers more products and services, registrars could use such calls to up-sell.
Such examples are just some of the ways your registrar can “steal” your customers without them even trying. So help yourself by providing stellar customer support to their end-users, and consistently communicating well with them.
“It is a customer service issue,” states Tanzanica King, Communications and Operations Specialist for ICANN, since neither ICANN, nor any governing body has any relationship with resellers, competitions between registrars and resellers.
Resellers who do not deliver solid support force their customers to seek out their registrar for renewal and DNS assistance. This also makes the end-user aware that they are not dealing with the actual registrar of their domain, but a reseller.
Aid Yourself – Up Your Efforts
Act like you are the registrar for your customers’ domains. Update them on important information. Provide great, responsive support, and keep them turning to you when they need help – and more services.
Get tools to manage large volumes of domains simultaneously to ensure you do not become overwhelmed by the demands of sending and responding to individual communications with hundreds or thousands from your end-users, which can impact the quality and reliability of your customer service. Also consider allowing your customers to renew domains on their own.
Make sure your registrar makes it far more expensive for end-users to register domains directly with them than with one of their resellers. Interview a registrar before becoming a reseller with them. Find out if they undersell their resellers.
See if your registrar offers any tools or makes any effort, via their web site, customer service chat/email or via the phone, to help end-users contact their reseller first about issues.
Custom brand emails you send to your clients, as opposed to forwarding your clients emails from your registrar. This will ensure they open your emails, and reinforce to your customers that they are dealing directly with you and should contact you first when/if they have a question or need.
Do research on a registrar before joining them as a reseller to determine if they mix selling wholesale with retail. See if they put their emphasis in their marketing on users’ retail or on supporting resellers. Choose a registrar with a strong focus on resellers as their bread and butter.
Communicate consistently with your end-users, and update customer contact information frequently.
Act like a registrar, and keep your customers turning to you for support, new products and services.
Ask your registrar if their support staff is trained to up-sell services during customer service calls. Do they ask callers if they registered directly with them or through a reseller? If the caller says they registered with a reseller, is it the registrar’s policy not to up-sell them, but to refer them back to the reseller?
Ask your registrar under what circumstances they are allowed to contact your customers directly, if at all.
Be sure to read your reseller’s agreement before you sign. See if the agreement states that the registrar will not solicit your customers.
Urge your clients to forward you any emails and direct mail they receive about their domains that are not from you.
If you manage a handful of individual domains, be sure to check on how much advance notice your registrar gives you, or your customers, when a name is up for renewal or about to expire. How many times do they state they will try to contact you? How much time do they give domain owners to respond?
Ask your registrar what their policy is if the customer of a reseller asks about switching their registration directly to the registrar?
Should Problems Arise…
Defend yourself by going public. Records of emails and chats between your registrar and you are solid evidences. Tell the ICANN organization or go to forums frequent by resellers. Such publicity will be devastating for the registrar since in an information age, every bit of feedback can be known faster than anything you ever imagine; especially the bad ones.
In Conclusion
It is not about bringing up policies or regulations, but more on the mutual understanding between registrars and resellers. To be beneficial, and nurture that trust, both parties have to work hand-in-hand.
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