What makes great customer service? Hire friendly people, teach them how to interact with customers and encourage customers to tweet about how great the service is? If you agree then you and Go Daddy have a lot in common. Unfortunately, customer service misses the mark no matter how nice the people are if you can’t offer the customer the service they need. Ask yourself; is your customer service hassle free? What do I mean? Read this case study and find out what NOT to do!
Today (Thursday) is blog day. I type in my admin site on word press to post my blog and it tells me that the website is unavailable. Huh? So I try my other sites. No dice. They have big fat signs saying they are unavailable too! Really? This isn’t good. So what do I do? Same as you would– I get on the phone to my hosting company.
It turned out to be one of the most frustrating service calls EVER!! I was greeted by a nice young man named Sean who offered to get to the root of my problem if I would just stay on hold. After 20 minutes I needed to leave for a meeting. I asked him to call me back. He couldn’t do it. As an inbound service person, once he hangs up his line is open and he will be required to help whoever is next rather than resolve my problem and my service will be discontinued –not just with him but with the back room server folks trying to track down my problem. Not his fault—just how the system works. Awful but nothing I can do about it. So I ask him to call me back right away on my cell phone so I can at least drive to the meeting site. I arrive at my meeting site a full 40 minutes after starting the call. Still no resolution so I leave the phone on during my meeting. And hated it!! My guest was extremely gracious and claimed not to hear the hold music (on low) but how disruptive.
Finally after well over an hour I find out that my server is down due to a migration from one server to another caused by a discontinued (we stopped it) certification service and it might be another 24-72 hours before it is back up. Of course I had NO notice it was going to be down or when. And for my inconvenience, they offer me a free month of hosting. Sound good? The catch is that it goes on the end of my contract so if I cancel, there is no benefit to me. So I get with a supervisor. I find out that the policy only allows that concession, they said that we should have known that there would be a migration (we didn’t because the certification we discontinued wasn’t in use) and that our servers would be down (we didn’t) and that they don’t notify because people don’t want to receive it. Really? You wouldn’t want to know if your servers take you out of the market DURING THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY? They are still not up as of 4:00pm. So although Go Daddy is not who I pay to host, they provide the service and the ones who inact these policies. I discover that I cannot reach my paid host to discuss this issue–all service is contracted to Go Daddy.
As of this writing, the sites are still down. I can’t post my blog. They don’t take ownership of the policy of just shutting them down when convenient for them with no notice. And they don’t compensate me for my time or business loss. So what are my choices? I can sulk and live with it. I think most people do because it is too much time and effort to make a change. I can keep trying to rattle their cage and get a better resolution. I can walk away with no compensation and find a new business partner that understands business. So as I am considering my options, they send me an email asking me to complete their service satisfaction survey….and encouraged me to tweet and FB my satisfaction. OOOOOKKKKKK!!! So I decided to follow their suggestion. I owe them that, right?
P.S. The rest of the story. At 4:30pm I call a colleague who is a techie and they get on the back end of my site and figure out that the issue is not what I was told but that in fact during the migration they failed to point my current site to the original name under which it is hosted. Now it is up and running. It took 10 minutes. We still have some issues with speed. You may find it is coming up slower. So the saga continues….
Have a great weekend. I know what I will be working on! What was the worst customer service blunder you have encountered?