Wednesday Q&A :: DoubleHorn Communications

Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Tab Schadt, the founder and CEO of DoubleHorn Communications (www.doublehorncommunications.com/).

Q:   What commitments or beliefs drive DoubleHorn Communications on a daily basis?

1)      We remind ourselves daily that we are Texas Owned, Texas Operated, Texas Focused.  In other words, we avoid casting a wide net and not delivering on fundamental expectations of small business customers.

2)      We maintain an excellent and unwavering approach to customer service.  Period.

3)      We own and constantly develop our technology platform only while maintaining a high level of quality live support.

4)      We subsidize required capital to enable customer adoption and satisfaction. The main objective is to ensure quality and save customer from having a cash outlay.  Depending on each customer’s unique service needs they may receive IP-phones, routers and switches at no charge as part of our managed service portfolio.

Q:   What are the market focus areas and key services for DoubleHorn Communications?

DoubleHorn Communications focuses on the Texas small business market, or as we have coined: “DASH” markets (Dallas Austin San Antonio Houston).  Our service delivery model, applications and network architecture were built from ground-up with specific focus on Texas based small businesses.  While our footprint is national and strategic partnerships are with Regional and Fortune 500 companies, we maintain a disciplined focus on the Texas small business market.

We provide IP based managed and hosted communications services including:  High Speed Internet, VoIP, Hosted PBX, Metro Ethernet, SIP Trunking, Hosted Exchange Email w/ Mobile sync, Data Backup & Recovery and Business Continuity to name a few.  In addition, we are consistently activating our specialty add-on services like Conferencing, Mobile Office and Contac Center.   We include all IP phones and hardware at no charge as part of our managed service offering.

Q:   How has customer adoption and retention been over last several years?

DoubleHorn Communications has experienced tremendous growth over last four years.  We literally earned our first small business customer in 2005 and presently have thousands of managed IP-phones, routers and switches placed amongst hundreds of different types of small businesses all over Texas.  More amazingly is the consistency in which we have grown across multiple cities within Texas.  Our growth and repeat success in fundamental areas underlines the need to have a consistent market focus in good or bad economic times.  We believe this discipline and loyalty towards the small business market in Texas is beginning to ignite our growth in a whole new way.

Fortunately, our customer churn rate has been very low.  This does not surprise us from an operational or service confidence standpoint, but, we do feel fortunate that the recent economic times have not caused more loss.  We believe that working with customers and providing as much assistance as possible has and will continue to produce returns and hopefully enable them to prosper, which is good for everyone.  We have also found that without upfront and constant communication this approach is not effective.   Luckily, the frequent communication needed for financial controls ties in to our overall customer service model.

Q:           What separates DoubleHorn from your competitors?

This answer is pretty straightforward and may seem trite or cliché, but it is true.  DoubleHorn’s customer service and focused product set is second to none within the ISP, Telecom or general small business services arena.  We truly acknowledge that we are only as good as our valued customers believe we are.  The fact we are technically inclined as an organization and are active with network management and application development takes a back-seat to producing a loyal customer base.

An example of our customer service dedication would be our ‘Guarantee that a live person will answer the phone during business hours, within four rings’!  When a small business owner knows we will do whatever it takes, not just words, this makes us different.  Fortunately these acts of commitment are not expensive or complicated, they just takes ownership and daily focus.  This is not easy, but does separate us from the pack.  We also have a ninety-day guarantee and ongoing service level commitment.

In addition, our training and installations are conducted by cross trained full-time employees.  We manage down to the second and millisecond in some cases all provided equipment and network connectivity.  We also assign Divisional VP’s to make unique customer introductions followed-up by an assigned Service Delivery Manager.  The list goes on and on, the main point is these are daily high-touch habits that support our own technology platform.

Posted by Amit Kooner I'm a recent MBA graduate and I'm passionate about startups - from the financing, to operations, to strategy, and to marketing. I have a background working as a consultant to startups or starting my own, and I hope to eventually get into business incubation or venture capital work. To read more posts click here.