The customer of my customer is annoying

Posted on | July 14, 2011 | No Comments

This is my first blog post, an overdue one, using my new hosting service. Why did I switch? Funny you should ask.

I’m all about supporting local businesses, and some time ago, I have a friend who is a very good, and quite successful graphic designer create the identity for SMC. He set me up with hosting, he was re-selling hosting from a local provider, ZingServe. Times have changed, of course, but at the time it was not all that inexpensive; but it was easy, I appreciated the work he did for me, and so . . . .

For a long time, there were few problems with the service. Then, though, email went down on June 28th, just a couple of weeks ago. It went out later in the evening, and then it was not up the next morning. I can live without the other stuff, but email down for that long just does not work.

I tried to call them – and it was pretty much next to impossible to find a phone number. They provide a PO Box on their website, and a trouble ticket system. I did manage to dig up a phone number, and called to be automatically dumped into a voice mail saying they knew and were working on the problem, but with no indication when it might be resolved. I submitted a trouble ticket. I took them nearly three hours to respond with a bit of explanation, after the service had been down for quite some time. No indication at all when things would be fixed.

The next morning, 12 hours later, they sent another update. Still no timeline.

They finally did get things back up and running, after more than 30 hours down.

I made plans to move to a new hosting system – as did the folks I was getting service from who were resellers. They had a number of clients on the server that went down — big, important clients. But of course, you know, you forget – it was on the list, but not a top priority. Until there was another problem.

Late the night of July 12, email stopped working. Messages to me were bouncing, with a “mailbox full” warning. But it wasn’t full – I had no limit on my email usage. I logged onto the control panel, it showed all should be fine, but I got an error when trying to access web mail.

I called the gent who originally set me up on the server. He noted that when the server that went bad was fixed/replaced, all the numbers/quotas on the sites and email accounts that were on it were reset to some lower default number. He made a switch and I was back up – for a few minutes.

I left to teach a class, and returned, after business hours, to no email. I had submitted a trouble ticket to ZingServe, which again too nearly three hours to respond. They told me I was over my limit on email, and I needed to contact my reseller for direct support. I told them I was not, but for their mis-handling of the server blow-up and restore. I used the word “blunder” (gasp!).

“Mark,” the customer support “admin” — according to his email sig (no last name) — then replied that “actually, you are not even our customer” — then followed up with “At this point we will no longer interact with you directly for any support issues due to your abusive manner.”

Humbly, I would suggest that if you don’t want to deal with people, and you don’t want to provide customer service, then don’t provide a service that people rely on. I took steps, with new urgency, to leave ZingServe behind as quickly as possible.

I replied to him that his was a classic response – and that he had not provided any “support” – and noted that I guess if I have a Verizon iphone, apple doesn’t consider me a customer. It seemed to me that putting businesses that “aren’t your customers” out of business for 30+ hours, then failing to communicate that other issues are likely to come up and cause further problems days/weeks later is more abusive than (charitably ) describing his little incident as a blunder.

But wait, there’s more! Mark then responded that I was free and encouraged to move to another provider ASAP, noting that “We will no longer provide support to you in any format an I’m now blocking you from submitting support requests to our help desk. Any further abuse will result in immediate termination of your account.” Guess we still have a bit of a different view of “abuse.”

My final input on the matter – I suggested that if he responded with helpful information as quickly as he does with indigation, he’d probably have a lot more and a lot happier customers.

Maybe I should send him that article I found about how introverts can be good networkers.

I’m now set up, after some stressful moments, with web hosting service thanks to Nick Armstrong, who provides an affordable package and gives much of the proceeds to the Larimer County Food Bank. He also helped me set up email through Google Docs, and integrate it with my website – still some tweaks to be done there, and I have some learning to do, but it looks promising.

Have you had a bad experience with a web hosting service, or other business? Have you experienced customer contempt, rather than customer service? Tell me about it, please.

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