Recent Posts
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Go Daddy tech support is a cash cow
Go Daddy’s call center support staff make the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in up-sells, according to documents revealed as part of an employee class-action lawsuit.
I covered the lawsuit (PDF), filed by three former Go Daddy employees, for The Register on Friday.
One of the plaintiffs, Toby Harris, was fired after he leaked “confidential” screenshots of the company’s CRM system to his home email address.
I’m not going to get into the details of the lawsuit, which concerns labor practices, here.
But the screenshots, which offer a bit of insight into how much revenue these front-line call center staff make for Go Daddy, are worth looking at.
According to one, Harris delivered over $10,000 in gross sales for the company over nine working days in January, taking about 5% of that for himself in commission.
Not bad for a rookie $12-an-hour support guy, considering how cheap most Go Daddy products are.
Another CRM screen shows the performance of a couple dozen members of Harris’ team, including how much commission they made over a two-week period and how many customer calls they handled.
These 23 employees made between $1,290 and $255 in commissions over the period, averaging $564 each, dealing with on average 31 calls each per day.
If that’s 5% of the gross, over 10 business days, you could try to extrapolate some company-wide data, but the screenshot probably represents too small a sample to make any precise calculations.
Still, it’s pretty clear that that a substantial chunk of Go Daddy’s revenue is generated by call center staff.
Harris told me he was expected to shift $250 to $450 worth of product every day, the equivalent of selling at least one new $8 domain name to every caller.
Domain Name Wire reported last December that the company had 1,600 support staff. At the low end of $250 a day, that would equate to $400,000 a day or $146 million a year from the phones alone.
I guess I found this a little surprising because while I always knew Go Daddy’s web site was a cash machine, I had assumed its call center spent most of its time providing technical support.
As a customer, I often wondered how the company managed to run such a high-quality support service on such a pitifully low-margin loss-leader.
Now I know. Judging by these leaked numbers, those guys more than pay for themselves.
And GoDaddy makes customers call long-distance for service…and the customer ends up listening to sales pitch after sales pitch…and all the customer wants is a fix for rotten server security.
The company’s run by 5 execs (4 of whom are CPAs) who know how to present the numbers!
Looks like they’re gonna get caught this time.
Jail time, anyone????
They have a toll-free number which they refuse to give out, please use it 1-866-GODADDY
Come get the real story on Scumbob
nodaddy.com
[…] I reported on the filing of the suit for The Register last May, and followed it up with a tangential blog post here. […]
Here’s my token posting, so I can include this in discovery!!! YAY!!!!! BOB!!!! WOOO HOOO!!!
[…] Go Daddy tech support is a cash cow […]
[…] down to whether Go Daddy starts to view its American call centers as a cost center, rather than a profit center, and whether it thinks it can ship the function overseas without sacrificing quality and alienating […]