One of the things that really grinds my gears is lousy customer support, and sadly pitiful customer support seems to be the norm these days, they simply don't care about their customers or providing a good service, so I have decided I'm going to start blogging my experiences and review the best and worst companies I deal with. Below are my experiences for last year.

In this article:-

• DELL
• SwordSky
• WHMCS
• Gradwell.com
• SKY
• KAYAKO
• Zen Internet
• O2
• ENOM

For the record I know full well that it is not possible to please all of the people all of the time, and legitimate mistakes and misunderstandings do happen, so I try not to judge any company based on just 1 poor experience unless it is so bad I simply do not want to do business with them ever again, all of the companies mentioned below are ones I deal with on a regular basis. 
Now it has been suggested that perhaps my standards are are too high, but I disagree, my requirements are very simple and I  have consistently managed to provide this high level of support to my own customers for the last 12+ years, even from my days as a sole trader when it was me doing everything by myself, and during those 12+ years I have also consistently received good reviews and feedback from customers, in fact I can count the number of unhappy customers we have had in all those years on both hands.

Here are my (simple) requirements:-

• respond to emails/tickets in a timely fashion (my company replies to most tickets within 4 hours)
• when dealing with email, actually read it properly and provide a response that is actually related to the question asked
• if you don't know the answer, ask someone else and try to find out, don't simply ignore the customer/ticket and hope they will go away
• actually give a damn about what you are doing

 

I have generally found the worst performers is where support is being outsourced to India, and the reason for this is in most cases is due to a poor understanding of English (odd considering most of their customers are English speaking) and as a result they do not understand the questions they are being asked or simply do not read it properly, and as a result give responses that are total dribble, unhelpful, often using incomprehensible broken English and unrelated to the question the customer asked. 
For small companies it is understandable why they outsource as it is the only way they can afford to offer 24/7 support, but for big companies like Dell and O2, I do wonder why they do it, as it only serves to harm their reputation. 
Many of these common issues could be handled by some simple quality control, monitoring of support staff and their responses and pointing out mistakes so the staff learn by them and improve their communication skills and responses. And yes this is also something I do at my company and it has worked well. 
However sadly this is something most companies clearly do not do, especially the big boys, leaving the issues to continue and customers to become more frustrated.

That said, some of the worst support I have experienced is "in-house" provided by English people and and not outsourced at all.

 

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Parallels are the company behind such well known products as Plesk and Virtuozzo, they are also one of the most incompetent companies I have ever dealt with when it comes to support, a globally shared opinion according to Google and several forums.
They are so bad that if they need to login to your server they will get you to sign a disclaimer to say that if they screw up your system then you cannot hold them responsible or take any action against them. Not because they want to protect themselves from unscrupulous customers but probably because they have no faith in their support staff due to their history of screwing up people's servers. And the advice they give is also often such utter nonsense and if you were to blindly follow it, you would screw up your own server. And yes I can confirm this from personal experience.

Even the most simple support question can become complicated when Parallels is involved, today I used their live chat simply to report a problem with their forums, as I could not do a search as the Captcha anti-spam was broke and would not allow searches, here is the conversation below which I thought I would share for your amusement.

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Hello, your Online Store Hosting representative is Vishal J.V.

Welcome to chat.parallels.com, Vishal J.V. will be right with you.

Russ

We have just created trouble ticket for you. Ticket number: #1166686.

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Vishal J.V.

Welcome to Parallels Plesk Products Licensing Support.

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Vishal J.V.

How may I assist you?

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Russ

i am having a problem with your forums

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Russ

http://forums.webhostautomation.com/

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Russ

the search will not work, it wont accept the captcha message

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Vishal J.V.

May I know which Parallels product you are using?

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Russ

it says report to the webmaster, but I cannot find any contact details for the webmaster

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Russ

can you please advice who i need to contact

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Vishal J.V.

May I know which Parallels product you are using?

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Russ

see above

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Vishal J.V.

Please give me 1 minute Russ.

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Vishal J.V.

Thank you for your patience.

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Vishal J.V.

Russ, I had a check with the domain and the domain is registered under DIRECTNIC, LTD. So we suggest you to contact them.

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Vishal J.V.

I will provide you the contact number.

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Vishal J.V.

+1.877.856.9598 or +1.813.283.5168

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Russ

what has this got to do with directNic? it is your website ?

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Russ

run by you

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Russ

directNic are a domain registrar

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Vishal J.V.

Yes.

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Russ

so your asking me to contact a domain registrar to report a problem with your website

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Russ

the website is nothing to do with them

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Russ

how will they be able to help me ?

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Vishal J.V.

Please give me one more minute.

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Russ

i need the contact details for the webmaster who manages your forums so i an report the problem

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Vishal J.V.

I am having a check Russ. Please give me a minute.

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Vishal J.V.

Thank your patience Russ.

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Vishal J.V.

I apologise for the long delay.

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Vishal J.V.

I will have a check with the issue with our next level of support and willget back to you through email within the next 24 hours

I recent topic on CFGURU about clients who blame the technology rather than trying to diagnose the real problem reminded me of a couple of funny tech support stories I thought I would share where the client has incorrectly blamed ColdFusion/Hosting for their problems.

 

When is ColdFusion not ColdFusion, when it's PHP of course

I had a client (lets call him Dick) kept complaining that their site had stopped working AGAIN usually telling us there was a server problem and to restart CF as it was broken, every time I checked everything was working fine on the server, cf was working etc. They would never give us any more info about the problem other than that CF was broken.
It eventually turned out that they had got their site redeveloped some time ago  in PHP and also moved the hosting elsewhere as well, so not only was it not a CF site, but we were not even hosting it :-)

Every so often we will get another email from them saying they have problems with FTP, email or something, and each time we have to explain that we cannot help as we are not their host. Hopefully one day someone will update their records

 

2 sites are better than 1

Another client (lets call her Dizzy) emailed us to say that the changes she was making to her site were not showing up and ColdFusion must be broken. Bear in mind that we did not develop her site, so shouldn't be supporting it either really, but i'm such a helpful chap yaknow .
I got her to give me the URL of her admin interface, I logged in saw her changes, made some of my own changes, checked the site and there were the changes, no problems.
I couldn't understand why she couldn't see her changes, I got her to clear her cache, restart browser etc, after many exchanges of emails and phone calls, I eventually got her to send me a screen shot, at which point I noticed that the domain name was totally different to the one she sent me.
It finally transpired there were 2 different domains each hosting an exact copy of the site, one was hosted with us, one was hosted elsewhere.
When she edited her site, she did so on www.domain1.com/admin but then viewed the site on www.domain2.com, why I have no idea, but that was why she couldn't see her changes as she making them on a totally different site.

Unfortunately this happened every time she made changes to her site, she would contact us and we would go through this all over again.

We have all had many a giggle at the online postings of idiotic support calls/email that tech support staff have had to deal with from people that clearly shouldn't be allowed to own a computer, so I thought I would share a few of my own. Just when you think you have reached the limits of stupidity and no-one could ever ask or say anything more dumb, someone comes along and surprises you.

 

I recently dealt with a customer who had registered a domain name, signed up for hosting and had the holding page up and running but could not get his site to work because he would not upload it to the correct place (wwwroot). No matter how many times I told him that his site needed to go in the wwwroot he would not listen as he thought he knew better. In the end he decided to take his business elsewhere because we supposedly had no idea what we are doing, he was advised how to transfer his domain, but then decided for some bizarre reason that we were with holding his domain and stopping him using it, even though he had already changed the name servers and pointed it at his new host. He then claimed that his domain name had not even been registered and we had ripped him off, despite the fact that he was able to view the web site with the holding page, he had edited the name servers to point it elsewhere and the WHOIS showed it was in fact registered.

 

Here are some of the incredible rantings I got from this chap. Now I accept the fact that some people are simply not very I.T literate, and that is understandable and most of those people are aware of their limitations and openly admit them, but this crazy guy actually claimed to be an I.T professional and is a MCITP and a member of ACITP (wooo) , which is why I thought this utter lunacy was actually worth posting as my 5 year old son knows more about the internet than this guy. And no I don't even have a clue what he is talking about most of the time, and his inability to write coherent English or use punctuation doesn't help either:-)

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