I do love the old live chat, and the lovely fellas over at Hosting365 (or Register365, try as I might, I can’t work out which is which or what is what) really give it some welly. I’m technically on holiday this weekend, so last night I thought I’d get my personal domain name active, and actually do something with it. In November, I registered through Register365. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll have seen my last live chat with the delightful Stanislav, where I found out that Register365 were collecting card details and storing them on their database in my account every time I registered a domain name with them. Without any indication that this is what they were doing, and without any way of re-using them, and without any way of me deleting them from the account. That did give me a good giggle - once I got up from the floor.
Anyhow, recently an email arrived into my mailbox from register365 which I think was referring to domain name registration, but might have had something to do with hosting. I didn’t get an email to the email address that I registered with them when I registered sarahcarroll.ie, though. The email told me that “As you might be aware, we have been working hard over the past year to improve the quality and responsiveness of our customer care”. It then went on to tell me that “In August 2007 we launched a new web site, which delivered an industry leading range of web hosting and domain name registration services. Register365 became the cost and feature leader of the Irish market.”
So far so good. The email continued to explain how they have launched a new support system, extensive searchable knowledge base and some video tutorials. And live chat on every page. Then the email said “Over the years, we’ve provided freephone telephone support during office hours. In that time we’ve learned through experience and feedback that telephone support is inefficient, expensive and not as effective as email or live chat at delivering problem resolution”. And it went on say that they are discontinuing telephone support but now offer premium support during office hours at a cost of 95c per minute.
Needless to say, there was quite a bit of discussion about this on various forums and email lists - my favourite one is the e-business list where the moderator pulled the plug after quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing between the messrs McCarron and some of their less than happy customers.
Now, I’m going to have come clean here - after many years of having domains registered at Hosting365, having our dedicated servers there and helping many customers to set up hosting with them, over the past 6 months I’ve just found it impossible to continue working with them. The reason it’s impossible is because of the way that they communicate with their customers, how they are delivering and how they respond in an emergency situation.
Two emergency situations in the past 12 months. Not great for a datacentre, and it did prove that most of us didn’t have adequate disaster recovery plans. (It’s not an easy overnight fix, but most of it is in place). All datacentres have their problems, but like everything else in life, it’s not the problems that are the really telling thing - it’s how you deal with them.
Personally, I can not believe that someone would make a statement like that. I’m not sure who should be more insulted - their customer support team or their customers. Yes - there are always customers who make telephone support inefficient. Just last week I sat on the phone with one of our customers as he asked me to hold on whilst he logged into his own website admin to make a change before coming back to the query with his invite site. I did ask him if he’d like to ring me back when he finished that operation, but he didn’t get the hint. Ah well, you grin and bear it. And yes, during that time other customers are suffering because they can’t get through to talk with someone, and you are suffering because you can’t continue working on what you were working on - but hey - he’s a customer. He’s probably been on the receiving end of rotten customer service before, and possibly felt that whilst he had me on the phone he wasn’t going to let go in case he couldn’t get through again. Or maybe he was just having a bad day and didn’t feel like respecting my time or thinking that it was valuable. Maybe he thought he was the only customer we had. Did we make him feel that well looked after? I’d like to think the latter, but suspect one of the former. I feel a guidebook to good customer relationships coming on…
So to last nights efficient live chat. Please note that the hour was actually 11.40 pm not 12.40 as recorded.
