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.

Dell ()

Now Dell have been an odd one, I have had a very mixed experience with them, and as such I wasn't sure whether to list them as good or bad.
Dell do have a terrible reputation for customer service, if you Google the topic you will find unending raft of complaints. They do outsource all their sales and support to India, which is no doubt the cause for all the complaints due to reasons mentioned above, and I have experienced this first hand when trying to contact them, either via the live chat on their website or via email or via their contact forms. All the aforementioned communication issues are there, inability to read emails properly, wrong advice given, failure to return calls or reply to emails, pretty much hopeless. 
My biggest problems however have always been with their sales and pre-sales support, which has always been dire, which is another oddity, as you would expect that to be the area they would make the most effort with rather than risk losing new customers.
I would suggest completely avoiding communicating with Dell via their website or via Live chat, as it will drive you mad.

However my experience when dealing with warranty support has been somewhat different.

I purchased 2 x DELL laptops despite all the issues I had with pre-sales as I had set my mind on a Dell XPS, and I have had cause to contact Dell support 3 times to date. Actually getting hold of someone in the first place was an issue, I did have to email quite a few different people before I got a response, however once I did finally get in touch with someone able to deal with my issue and did a good amount of moaning about the poor communication, I was pleasantly surprised and very happy with the resolution.

With my first issue they simply sent me out a replacement laptop under warranty with no quibble, they even let me keep the original laptop until after I received the replacement so that I could copy over all my data.

The second issue we had was caused by my wife spilling coffee all over her keyboard, they sent out an engineer 2 days later to replace the keyboard, granted we had to pay for the callout, but that was to be expected considering it was our fault

The 3rd issue was again dealt with promptly under warranty, they sent an engineer out to my office (at no charge despite us not having an onsite warranty) to fix the problem, again within 2 days.

So while Dell have been a pain to deal with and get hold of, I have been happy overall with the warranty support and speed at which they sent an engineer.

As a business user wanting fast onsite warranty support I would probably recommend Dell. but as and end user who is more likely to want email and phone support for a desktop PC, my experiences would say this would not turn out well.

Swordsky ()

I purchased MySQL backup software from this company, seems to be a one man band as only 1 person every responded to emails, he responds to sales enquiries, but as soon as you have a support issue that he doesn't know how to deal with he simply stops replying.

I have opened several tickets, got an initial response, then as soon as he realised he couldn't answer the question, the responses just stopped. In one case I persevered for 5 months sending regular emails asking for a reply, but no response ever.
I had assumed they had gone out business so I tried sending a sales enquiry from a different email address, got a reply, asked why he had not replied to my other emails for 5 months, again no reply.

I had some tweets from someone else having the same issue.

There is no phone number or address on the website, and WHOIS info for the domain is hidden, so he obviously does not want anyone contacting him or tracking him down, which is of course quite suspect.
Note to self: do not do business with any other  company who do not have any phone number or address.

So no support at all, period. Can't get much worse than that. I would have recommend to everyone not to purchase this software from this company unless you are happy to never get any support.

WHMCS ()

This company produces billing software specifically targeted at the hosting industry, one of the most popular products in the market from what I can tell, shame about the support.

There is no way to contact them other than via their ticket system, their phone number goes straight through to an voicemail system stating that they do not accept incoming calls, they also do not return any calls if you leave a message.

Their website and helpdesk also seen to be down quite often, meaning there is no way to contact them at all.

For general support issues (how to use the software etc) their level 1 support does an ok job via their ticketing system, we have received fairly timely responses to simple issues or questions, however if the issue gets even remotely technical then things will start to go downhill and responses will become less helpful and less timely.
Obviously when your dealing with billing software you cannot afford any major downtime, but If you have a serious mission critical issue with this software that is impacting your business or costing you money, then prepare to bend over and be royally screwed as you are assigned to 2nd/3rd level support and wait a very long time for any help, they simply do not seem to care at all, have no sense of urgency and will happily leave you with a broken billing system for an indefinite amount of time.
We have had some serious issues with WHMCS simply not working and screwing up our customers invoices and have waited many weeks for any reply, and then anywhere between 1-2 weeks for each subsequent reply after that. they refuse to read the ticket history forcing you to repeat details again and again. delaying replies and solutions further still.
If you chase up an open ticket, it gets moved to the bottom of the queue, thus delaying any replies even further, as there is no way to reach them by phone, so you simply have to wait indefinitely until they decide to respond to your ticket.
If you open multiple tickets, they have a tendency to merge tickets together, causing more confusion as the ticket subjects wont match the issue and due to their refusal to read ticket history, the previous issues before the merge will simply be ignored and forgotten, thus delaying responses even further and causing you to have to repeat all the merged issues and re-explain them several times more.

On one occasion they did not bother to check which version of the software we were using and sent us a file to install for the wrong version of WHMCS, completely breaking our system and causing even more issues. They left us in this situation for another 2 weeks until they finally bothered to respond and then did it again.
We got no apology, they simply blamed us for not having the latest version of the software installed, despite their own forums being full of complaints from customers who had installed the update and wished they hadn't due to all the bugs it contained.

Their staff seem to have no idea how to debug issues with their own app or PHP in general and will demand that you debug any errors and find out what the cause is, which is a real nightmare as WHMCS has no obvious error handling and has a tendency to just cause useless server errors when something breaks and logs no PHP errors at all, so debugging it yourself can often be trial and error and does require some good technical skills.

To say this company's support may cause you to tear your hair our in frustration would be an under statement.
While the product is powerful and has a lot of features and is generally considered the best compared to competitors, I would be hard pushed to recommend anyone to use WHMCS based on their customer service as billing is one of the most important aspects of any business, if it breaks and you cannot get support then you are really up the creek without a paddle, this could easily put some people out of business if they are unable to bill their customers.

Gradwell.com ()

We have been using Gradwell for our VOIP service for several years now, and their customer support has always been consistently good and reliable.
They reply to tickets promptly, they are reachable by phone, and usually answer within a few rings unless busy.
If your issue is hard to deal with by email, they will happily call you to go through the problem.

We have had very few issues with their service either, only a few minor outages that did not really affect us in any way, so really not much else to say.

I would recommend Gradwell.com to anyone wanting VOIP services and good customer service/support.

SKY ()

Unfortunately I have nothing good at all to say about SKY, they are absolutely abysmal in every way in every dept. Their support is again out sourced to India, and they *NEVER* read emails properly before replying, so replies from them are consistently nonsense and nothing to do with the question you sent them.

Sky boxes are notorious for going wrong, but the problem is that if the problem cannot be fixed by simply turning the box off/on, then their answer is nearly always to do a factory reset and lose all your recordings.
If they need to replace the box then they provide no method of copying your recordings to the new box, I have lost count of the number of time times this happened and we have lost entire series that we hadn't watched yet.

The sky broadband service/support is no better, they force you to plug your router into the master socket, and it wont work anywhere else, which is ridiculous, other ISP's do not have this issue and most folks master socket is in an inconvenient place. If your service goes down, they will do everything they can to blame you. They will even say that all the wiring in your house is faulty, even though it works fine with every other ISP, it can get quite expensive to prove the fault is at their end, and the service goes down regularly. I had to spend considerable money buying 2 new routers in order to prove the issues were not at my end, and then eventually they simply blamed my household wiring.

Sky will also happily transfer your phone number to any other provider without your consent. When I took sky Broadband I also decided to transfer my phone line over to them too (bad mistake). Shortly after moving to Sjy, we got a letter from them saying that we had requested to move away (we hadn't), so I contacted them and said "WE HAVE NOT MOVED, DO NOT TRANSFER OUR NUMBER", but they ignored my request and transferred it anyway.
The crazy thing was they could not even tell us where the request had come from or who they had transferred it to as the request was anonymous, so we couldn't even transfer it back.
What brilliant security they have, they will allow anyone to hijack and transfer your phone number without any authorisation or proof of identity what so ever. It took us 2 weeks dealing with OFCOM to find out who had taken our number and to get it moved back to BT, during which time all our calls were going through to someone else. It turned out to be TalkTalk who had hijacked us in the end.

KAYAKO ()

Kayako produce one of the most popular helpdesk/ticket systems on the web, when it comes to number of features they are hard to beat, and the interface is user friendly, easy to use and intuitive and I haven't really found any other product that compares. Sadly when it comes to their tech support, this is where they really let themselves down.
Kayako is an American company, but EVERYTHING else runs out of India, all development and all support. Now I don't think they outsource to another company, rather it seems they have setup 2 separate companies in India to handle the support and development, which you would think mean they would do a good job as all their staff are dedicated to their own product, but sadly no. They still suffer from all the common problems, not reading and understanding questions properly and giving incorrect responses. In fact their staff often do not understand how their own software works and I have on many occasions had to explain it to them in order to get them to accept that my issue was a real issue.
What this means is that if you are not technical and do not understand their product significantly well yourself, then you will not know that the advice they give you is wrong and will blindly follow it, and there have been many occasions where had I followed their advice it would have complete screwed up our ticketing system or had the complete opposite of the desired effect.

For example, one time I was having issues with some of the parsers not working correctly, parser rules are used to determine what emails are allowed into the system, so you can allow only specific email addresses or subjects or only allow emails which are replies to existing tickets. this serves to stop your system filling up with spam and to filter certain emails into certain depts. The advice they gave me was to create a new parser rule which basically allowed all incoming email into the system without restricting, thus overriding all our other rules and rendering them useless, which would result in our helpdesk filling up with spam.

On the positive side, they are at least a nice polite bunch and if you persevere, they will assign you a senior staff member and you will eventually get someone who understands the issue and you will get it resolved, it can just be very frustrating at times.

ZEN INTERNET ()

Internet service providers are another type of company who are notorious for terrible support, and as my entire business revolves around the internet I need reliable internet access 24/7, so I cannot afford to use a crappy ISP.
We use Zen for our ADSL at the office and so far I do not have a single complaint, the service has been reliable, no major outages that have not been resolved by a router reboot, and their support has been brilliant.
When we were with our previous provider our ADSL connection started to get worse and worse, and slower and slower, and in the end it died completely. We spent several weeks with no access trying to work with them to resolve the issue, but their support dept  really was clueless. We had a BT engineer out, who could not find any problem at our end, so determined the issue was with the ISP.
So In the end I gave up and moved us over to Zen, only to find we still had the exact same problem, so it turned out not to be our previous provider, however had their support guys been more skilled they would have worked that out.
On my first call to Zen I explained the situation and everything I had gone through with the old ISP and the guy asked me "do you have any other equipment near your router or plugged into the same power socket", I did, I had a VOIP phone, so he told me to turn it off and unplug it, I thought this seemed an odd thing to ask, but I did it anyway, and lo and behold our ADSL came to life.
It turned out that my VOIP phone or its power supply had developed some sort of leak and was causing interference on the ADSL line that was passing next to it from the router to the phone socket. A completely obscure issue, I would never have thought of it in a month of Sunday's, the old ISP did not think of it, even the BT broadband engineer did not think of it, yet Zen tech support solved it within 20 minutes.

So if you want a reliable broadband service with expert support, I highly recommend Zen, they are worth paying that bit extra for.

O2 ()

I have gone through a fair few (business) mobile providers over the years, and so far O2 have been the best of a bad bunch.
In general I can say that the network itself has been pretty good, coverage is patchy from my home address, but I have had that problem with every provider, but at least we do not have any regular outages or major cock ups.
Their email support is absolutely abysmal, again it is outsourced to India, and again they are completely useless, there is pretty much nothing they are able to do other than tell you to call support or sales (even though that is what they are supposed to be), they seem to be nothing more than a token answering service. So if you need to contact O2, always do it by phone as the email support is as pointless as asking your gran how to compile a linux kernal.
In general their UK support staff are more helpful and polite and will generally replace phones without any quibble if there is any issue.

Their sales dept is another matter though, they just make stuff up as they go along and I have been blatantly lied to on several occasions. For example, when you signup on a contract you usually get a FREE phone (for certain phones), at the end of that contract you are entitled to a free upgrade (for certain phones) on your phone if you renew your contract. When I tried to upgrade one of our phones at the end of its contract they quoted me £280 for a 3 year contract, but after checking their website I found that the exact same phone was FREE on a 2 year contract. When I called backed and questioned this they could not tell me why I had been quoted £280 and said they did not even do 3 year contracts. They then gave the phone for FREE.
I have been fed this type of garbage on several occasions now and I suspect have overpaid for previous upgrades which should have been free.

ENOM ()

One of, if not the biggest domain registrar in the world, with the most awful support in the world to match.

Every time I must open a support ticket with them it makes me groan with a feeling of dejection at the pending battle that will ensue.
Most of their staff are fairly clueless how their system works, and too lazy to put in any effort to find out or find correct answers. When they get something wrong or simply don't know, you will usually have to argue with them for several days in order to get them accept they are wrong or escalate the ticket to someone less clueless to find the answer.

Example:
We recently had a customer who set their domain to "do not renew" as they didn't want it anymore, this was done and verified by us.
Somehow ENOM renewed it anyway and re-enabled the auto-renew.
This had to be explained to them like 10 times, because they could not get passed the "auto-renew was enabled so that is why the domain was renewed"  sentence that they kept just repeating over and over again.
This then upgraded to "if the domain was set to renew 30 days prior to the renew date then it will renew even if you disable the auto-renew".
Which is of course complete nonsense, and also irrelevant as the auto-renewed was disabled more than 30 days before, which they were told at the start.
The argument went on for days, and finally they were provided with a screenshot that was taken on the day the auto-renew was disabled. As this point they had to give in and agree to refund the domain.

On another occasion we asked them to provide an invoice for a customer because their system does not sent out receipts or invoices by default, and when using the reseller portal, it is ENOM who actually charges the customer not us and sometimes customers ask us for invoices.
This resulted in an argument with their accounts dept stating that "they cannot give us an invoice with the customers details on it because it is US who charges the customer not them", and they then bill us, so it was us who paid for the domain", so the complete opposite of how it actually works.
No they had no idea how their own billing system works, or how their own reseller portal works, both of which are used by thousands of resellers every day in the exact same way.

This is the type of painful experience you can expect with anything except the most simple/basic enquiry.

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