Hi Todd - here's my bad
customer service story. Thanks so much for
the great site :)
I recently received the most impressively awful customer
service I've
had in a long time. One day, my website disappeared. I
assumed I'd
forgot to renew my domain name and/or hosting deal. Then I
remember
I'd gotten an email notifying me that my hosting had been
renewed,
and the payment automatically taken from my Visa, a few days
earlier.
So I called the service provider, who we can call "Webserve
Canada."
After being on hold for about 1/2 hour, I talked to a dude
who
treated me like an idiot, and when I quoted him the
transaction
number of the payment that had been made, he said that was
for the
hosting, and I must have forgotten to renew my domain and
that I had
registered the domain with another company.
So, I poked around my records, and finally realized that NO,
both the
domain and the hosting was through Webserve, and the payment
that had
been made was for both. So, I tried repeatedly to call
Webserve
again - it took a few days until I had time to hold long
enough to
get through. The woman I talked to this time said they
would look
into it and get back to me within 24 hours. Five days later
(my
website still down) I still hadn't heard anything. So, I
started
sending emails and looking for new numbers to call. I
decided to
just cancel the account and set up with a new company.
I sent an email, saying I wanted a refund and to cancel the
account,
and that my website had been down for 2 weeks, even though I
had paid
for the renewal, and had received an email to that effect.
A few
hours later, some lady called me and said "oh, your website
looks
fine to me!" Lo and behold, it was up again (I'd checked 20
minutes
earlier and it was still down). I said I still wanted to
cancel and
have my money refunded and the lady finally said ok, and
that she
would email me an epp code to transfer it to the new
company, and not
cancel the account until I had time to switch it over.
She emailed me the link I had to go to to get confirm the
cancellation. I did that, and my website disappeared again,
and I
received no code. Then I got another email saying my
account was
officially cancelled. I replied, asking where the code was,
and
saying I was told the site would be up until I received the
code. A
few days later, I received an email saying that they didn't
see any
notes to that affect on my file. I replied that I still
wanted the
code, and let them know how bad the service had been.
FINALLY,
probably about 3 weeks after my website was taken down for
no reason,
I received the code, but no apology, not even an
acknowledgment of
the problems they'd caused me.
I moved to a new company we'll call "Dreamhost" which is
cheaper
and had my site up the moment I loaded the files! I still
haven't
received my refund from Webserve.