« Usbport.sys - Update | ::: | Wolfie’s July Project 3 »
Customer service? Not us!
The Internet can be a wonderful place; lots of new things to experience - social networking, blogging, photo-sharing. Lots of things that we all enjoy and can’t live without.
Shopping is also a big part of life on the Net. We’ve moved on hugely from when the only people selling were Amazon and no-one thought the idea would catch on. Now, businesses rise and fall on how well they do on the Net. Indeed, some businesses (like the aforementioned Amazon) don’t exist as a physical shop - the High Street is so 1980’s!
Which makes my last two days at work even more frustrating. We run a mail-order business, selling nutritional supplements. We’ve always sold by direct mail, but have been getting more and more business through our website over the last few years, especially in the last six or eight months after we gave the site a major overhaul. We don’t host the site ourselves, but instead pay a hosting provider called Legend (who are now part of the Thus plc group).
We’ve been with them for about 10 years now, but have noticed that each time they get bought out or merge with another company their service slips another notch down. Previous issues with email problems have left us missing orders from the site, and were met with no reaction. Letters written received only a standard “you’ll get a full reply from us in 7 to 10 days” letter, with no full reply coming at all. Telephone calls to “first line support” revealed that they know even less than their customers about the state of their network, and don’t give a damn about it. That’s when you can get through; if you’ve got nothing better to do for at least 20 minutes, by all means stay on hold.
Yesterday, their whole service went down. I noticed this at 8am when I tried to check email for the first time that day. The website was also down. Telephoning the support line, I was greeted with a message saying that there was a major network outage and they were working on it. No indication of how long it had been down or when we could expect their engineers to solve the problem. Apparently, the issue was also effecting connectivity but thankfully we weren’t touched by that as we get our Net access from another provider.
At about 1.30pm, a message was finally posted on their Network Status page but it gave no more information than had been available on the recorded message. Further telephone calls went unanswered (I have got better things to do than be on hold for 20 minutes). By the end of the day, the situation had not been resolved.
This morning, nothing had changed. A telephone call to support gave no further information, although I did manage to speak to a very uninterested individual who was able to give me no answers and didn’t seem to care that his customers were losing money by not being able to send and receive email, or have their websites visible to the world. After all, it’s not like we pay them lots of money each year for the privilege of being their customer!
The problem was finally corrected around 1pm this afternoon, about 30 hours after I noticed it and up to 40 hours after it may have first happened. I still have not been able to get a good explanation of what the problem was; the person I spoke to about 3pm muttered something about firewalls. There are two things that amaze me about this whole situation. First is that an ISP in this day and age does not have redundancy built into their hardware to take up slack on occasions like this; surely they must have a back-up of everything at a different site which they can re-route everything to?
Second - and more importantly - is that they don’t care. “Oh, a bunch of websites were down, some emails have been lost. Never mind. It’s only the Net. It’s not important. Compensation? No, mate!” As a small company, one of hundreds of thousands in the UK, we don’t have the resources to host the site ourselves so rely on companies like this. They know this and are laughing all the way to the bank.
Comments
One Response to “Customer service? Not us!”
I think you know what to do....
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
[...] give the full details here as a colleague of mine has written up the whole experience on his blog. This post is more about customer [...]