The other day I clicked into a blog post on Customer Service by @patphelan

I don’t know the man personally but I do follow him on Twitter because of the company he started and my natural interest the type of people who start their own companies.

ANYWAY…

His post had to with the lack of Customer Service from a, wait for it,  Service Provider.

I agreed with his sentiment and nodded sagely at all the points he was making but as needs must,  went back to work.

Funny then, that a few minutes later, the ol’ Customer Service skeleton come out of the closet and bite ME in the arse .

Here’s a synopsis;

• I have a very large and important customer
• Said customer has lots of users on their website, aka mini-customers. 1500 of them
• The digital (security) certificate of their website required renewal.
• Naturally, I did my bit and renewed it.  Simples !
• No, NOT simples it seems.

The payment to  “the hosting Company that shall not be named”,  was made on the 11th.

After MANY support emails, waiting on the phone and even having to goon Twitter to get attention (that didn’t work either), 5 DAYS later the SSL cert was finally applied.

I am ranting on, so to pick up on Pat’s theme, if they had communicated clearly with me and showed me that they were actually trying to resolve the request, maybe I would have been a little more patient.

Unfortunately, the support person was NOT very helpful with information and in fact blatantly lied when giving me the deadline by which the cert would be installed.

The net effect of all of this is of course that recommending them, WILL be avoided like the plague.

I’m so adamant, that I won’t even put the Company name in this post.

Needles to say it was NOT this crowd, they’re awesome :-)

So the question remains… Customer Service, is it THAT hard ??

Answers on a postcard or just leave a comment.

P.s Do NOT use a Hosting Company that ends with 365……