Ah – the Beauty of Live Chat

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 www.sarahcarroll.ie 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 at www.register365.com, 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.

Marek Baba [12:41:05 PM]: Welcome to our real-time support chat. How can I help you today?
Sarah [12:41:05 PM]: hi – how come somebody has put a web site up at my domain name – sarahcarroll.ie?
Marek Baba [12:41:15 PM]: Hi Sarah
Sarah [12:41:22 PM]: hi marek
[12:42:18 PM]: you still there?
Marek Baba [12:42:27 PM]: it is not your site??
Sarah [12:42:45 PM]: nope.
Marek Baba [12:43:23 PM]: give me a moment please
Sarah [12:43:30 PM]: sure.
Marek Baba [12:44:06 PM]: do you know [edit: name has been obscured to protect the innocent who should not have to suffer because of the incompetency of others]Nnnnn Mmmmm?
Sarah [12:44:11 PM]: nope.
Marek Baba [12:44:19 PM]: I found this domain on her hosting account
Sarah [12:44:52 PM]: well, somebody at hosting365 let her add my domain to her hosting account. Please remove it.
Marek Baba [12:45:39 PM]: it’s not that simple
[12:45:45 PM]: first couple questions
[12:46:06 PM]: what is your login/password to this domain on register365?
Sarah [12:47:19 PM]: of course it’s not. As always, you guys mess up and I gotta jump through hoops to get things put right. my log in is [xxxx] and the password begins with [x] followed by [xxxxx]- for security purposes I’m obfuscating some of the characters.
Marek Baba [12:49:28 PM]: what is account ID?
Sarah [12:49:50 PM]: [yyyyy]
Marek Baba [12:50:02 PM]: good
[12:50:42 PM]: btw how is this possible that she know about domain name?
Sarah [12:51:01 PM]: duh – I’m supposed to know this?
Marek Baba [12:51:47 PM]: I’m asking about this stuff cause last time when I romoved domain from someones account I had a lot of problems
Sarah [12:53:01 PM]: You guys have a policy of parking new domain names until someone asks to activate them. I’ve never been asked for my credentials when I request a domain to be added to my account… I think it’s an issue with your process. All I can tell you is that the domain is registered to me, I have paid for it, I got the log in info. You might like to ask Nnnnn these questions…
Marek Baba [12:53:51 PM]: I didn’t want to be rude, sorry
[12:54:58 PM]: last question to you: on IeDR site I found admin contact of this domain
[12:55: 03 PM]: what is address?
Sarah [12:56:30 PM]: no – you’re not being rude, that’s fine. It’s just I have really bad experiences with hosting/register365 so I’m probably a little hostile 🙂 It’s not you. I’m just amazed that someone can hijack my domain like that. What is the address? on the IEDR site, you’ll see that hosting 365 are the contacts. The address that should be there is my office addres, no 1 rogans court, patrick st. dunlaoire.
Marek Baba [12:57:22 PM]: ok it is sufficient to remove domain from that account
[12:59:04 PM]: btw it’s a pity cause this site is very cute 🙂
Sarah [1:00:59 PM]: great, thanks, please do that. And can you get your managers to introduce a process where they verify that a domain name actually belongs to the person who asks for it to be added to their account before adding it? Dealing with register/hosting 365 is a pain in the backside compared to other registrars. And Marek, that is a completely inappropriate note there, not intending to be rude or anything.
[1:03:00 PM]: Now, I’m signing off. Please confirm by email to [registered email address] that the site that is in another person’s account is no longer in it and that I can assign an ip address to it myself.
Marek Baba [1:03:28 PM]: please wait a minute
[1:03:54 PM]: after I remove it you can add domain to your account
[1:04:28 PM]: ok done
Sarah [1:05:10 PM]: thanks, i don’t intend to do it tonight – i’ve lost the 30 minutes that i intended to do it in – between finding that the site had been hijacked to finishing this chat. Bye
Marek Baba [1:05:27 PM]: bye

This one gets to go into the muppet of the week competition again. Not Marek, he seems like a really nice sort of fella, bless. Must be awful to be on the front line of that and to be getting into trouble for removing domains from peoples accounts. Not to mention being so disappointed not to be chatting with the pretty blonde 20 something Sarah Carroll whose web master cheekily [edit: see follow up post to hear how it happened] got register365 to hand them over my domain. Never mind getting a rap on the knuckles from the 40-something feminist Sarah Carroll for inappropriate comments (sorry, but I couldn’t resist it).

Note that no email has arrived for me at my registered email address. Betcha it’s gone to sarah@sarahcarroll.ie… .