How to lose a customer with the least amount of effort

February 27, 2007

Middle Finger

1) Don’t provide any telephone support

2) When they’re forced to use chat support in their browser, make them wait for 45 minutes to acknowledge their presence

3) Make sure the support rep can barely understand English and is fluent in copying and pasting prewritten responses

4) If you can’t help the customer, blame others and make them call them

5) If your customer manages to find a phone number for the company, make sure every employee in the office refuses to help them, directs them to the chat support that they already wasted half their morning on, and refuse to refund a single cent from the monthly fee they were charged only two days ago

6) Celebrate the loss of a customer and see the effectiveness of blogging in how quickly the true face of your company is shared with the public.

Hosting Zoom

Thank you Reseller Zoom, really, I appreciate all your support. MediaTemple, here I come.

For future search result optimization and those that missed the subject of my anger, let’s throw in an alternative title, “6 reasons why you should never use Reseller Zoom”.

Written by Travis in Articles  |   Share This   |   12 Comments

12 Comments

  1. Aaron said on February 27, 2007...

    Travis,

    I don’t understand why hosting companies act like they are the cable company. I mean the cable company can afford to treat you like crap because you don’t have any options.

    Hosting companies are a dime a dozen so I don’t understand why they just won’t bother helping the people that pay their bills.

    add Network Solutions to your list. They are a little better but still provide bad customer service, lie, and won’t refund any amount of a 1 year paid hosting package that you activated 1 week ago.

  2. Travis said on February 27, 2007...

    I don’t think any company has the right to act like that. Cable, telephone, internet, they should all have a responsive support system.

    Yeah, Network Solutions is the same, except they did have telephone support when I had to call them for my client last month.

    It’s such a shame that everything is so materialistic and none of the higher powers in companies ever get to see this ridiculous service on the frontline.

  3. Eric said on February 27, 2007...

    These people ripped me off and I was just about to post about them myself. You took the words right out of my mouth Travis!

  4. Travis said on February 27, 2007...

    Unfortunately, I don’t have the time today to transfer to MT. Hopefully tomorrow or the next day.

    Right now The Ad Feed is offline and has been all night because of the Zoom assholes.

  5. Aaron said on February 27, 2007...

    I agree no company should act like that but oligopolistic companies can kind of get away with it.

    Fortunately hosting companies haven’t banded together to get legislation passed to limit our rights.

    Good luck.

  6. Ran said on February 27, 2007...

    Same here with HZ! I couldn’t agree more. They moved my sites to another server last week WITHOUT MOVING THE ACTUAL FILES!!!

    MediaTemple, Please don’t fail me…

  7. Travis said on February 27, 2007...

    I had gotten the e-mail a couple weeks back saying they were going to move the server and I had to change the ip addresses at my domain registrar.

    So I did that. I wake up this morning and half of my websites are down.

    After speaking with the first rep he/she said the same thing happened as to you Ran, my files were left on the old server which they shut down for good last night.

    A copy is on the new server but my domains have yet to redirect to it and they can’t help me.

    I’ve lost a few thousand page views today and have no way of explaining to my viewers what happened until this gets worked out.

  8. TheBillfold said on February 27, 2007...

    Well said, Travis. I especially can relate to point # 3!

  9. How support should be provided -- Young Go Getter said on February 27, 2007...

    […] Hosting Zoom, take note. Simple enough, is it […]

  10. Richard Brown said on February 27, 2007...

    I too experienced VERY frustrating problems with Reseller Zoom. The tech support guys were so lazy! They wanted me to do all of the work to transfer from my previous provider. It states on their website that they will take care of all this! They just tell you to do it all, and they are so rude about it too. I actually threw this blog in their face! I am also switching to Media Temple but currently they are not taking on new Grid Server accounts (as of 8am March 20th)

  11. Richard Brown said on February 27, 2007...

    Hi all, i tried out Media Temple, the customer service was very good but the hosting plans were very complicated and had a lot of hidden ad-ons. I started out thinking that i would only be paying $25 per month but it became apparent that i would need to spend over $85 per month. After much searching i found this hosting provider:

    Reseller Hosting (https://secure.hostnine.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=richabrown)

    Their rates are very good and they offer great customer service with lots of additional feature such as ModernBill to help keep track and bill your customers. ModernBill has much better reviews than WHM Autopilot provided by Media Temple.

    Also if you use the discount code “h9″ you get 50% off your first purchase, sign up for the year and your save ALOT of money!!!
    (https://secure.hostnine.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=richabrown)

    Just thought i would share this with you all

    Rich

  12. Danny said on February 27, 2007...

    Ha! I’ve written up a similar experience with cingular over at BMA:

    http://www.beyondmadisonavenue.com/2006/08/customer-service-is-officially-an-oxymoron/

Leave a comment





Read before submitting:

Please be kind and rewind, and shove any spam up your behind. Use <a href="http://www.link.com">my link</a> for any links. And remember, all your comments are belong to us.