Consumer Evangelism

Customer service experiences: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Tuesday, November 14, 2006 , the wee hours

EV1 Servers can bite me

In early 2003, Flippy and looked at the outrageous website hosting bills we were racking up every month, and we decided it was time to make the move up to a dedicated server. If it’s an unfamiliar concept, most small websites are hosted on shared servers—- one computer might hold data for 5000 or more websites, depending on size. With a dedicated server, one “owner” controls everything on the server, and there’s no sharing. It’s like renting an apartment vs. having your own home—when you have a dedicated server, you have more fancy options and growth opportunities because you make your own decisions. Depending on the size of a server and the amount of bandwidth each month, the average fee for a dedicated server is about $300 (monthly). Flippy and I started with one dedicated server from EV1Servers.net (at that time, it was called Rackshack.net), and then we added a second one. At one point we had three servers, but we scaled it back to two. We were always good, quiet customers who rarely needed tech support, and we were never in trouble for sending out spam, hosting illegal content, etc.

As many of you know, last month both our servers were hacked. Whomever compromised the servers used them to set up phishing schemes, and to also set them up to send out spam emails. This type of security information is totally over my head, so I was really scrambling to find help. EV1 refused to help me diagnose any of the problems on the server, or to recommend someone to help us fix the problem—they just kept threatening to unplug us. I asked for advice on their message board and no one came forward. When I couldn’t figure out how to fix what had happened, I decided to rent a third server, a “clean” one, and to move all our websites there. I could then cancel the accounts of both other servers and have them unplugged, and that would stop the spam mailings, the phishing, etc. I had taught myself to install firewall programs and to tweak some security settings, so I thought a brand new start would be the best idea.

I went to the order page on the EV1 site to pick out a new server and the first thing to annoy me was the price. There were fast, powerful servers with huge harddrives for a much lower monthly rental fee than we were paying for our inferior servers. I picked a model out and ordered it, and was promised it would be set up in about 24 hours. Five days later, the server was still not available. I asked for help via live chat, I sent emails, I submitted support tickets, and got no response. The only thing EV1 managed to do was to charge our credit card for the new server (they charged us the day we ordered it). I finally posted a note on the message boards at EV1 eight days afer my order and surprise, my server was suddenly ready. I immediately went into my account and cancelled it—I’d already made arrangements to rent a server from a different company. I’d told EV1 in emails that I was cancelling my order, but I guess they chose not to listen to me. Now that I’ve moved all our sites to a new server and cancelled our two old EV1 servers, they’ve locked us out of our old account. I’m no longer able to access things like our old billing statements, even though I didn’t ask to have my entire account cancelled, I just asked to have my servers cancelled. This pretty much guarantees we’ll never be ordering servers from them again.

Anyway, they still owe us $143 for the server we were charged for, but which we never used. The charges are pro-rated, so they charged us six days before the server was even online and ready to be used. I guess I’ll go post a note on their forums to ask for our money back, as it seems the only way to get their attention.

If you want a good company from which to rent a dedicated server, I recommend VertexHost.com. The servers are managed, and it can cost less than $300 per month. The guys at Vertex spent literally hours and hours moving our sites from our old servers to our new server, and they fixed our security problems for free. It’s nice to see some good customer service.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 11/14 at 12:44 AM
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Thursday, September 21, 2006 , early evening

Thank-you, Tetra

A few days ago I wrote about the challenge of repairing my Tetra DW96-2 Deep Water Aquarium Pump. The pump needed some routine maintenance after a few years of constant use, but I found the repairs to be not for the faint of heart! While making the repairs, I noticed a few cracks in the pump case—nothing which affected the efficacy of the pump, but it made the case difficult to seal, and I had to hold it together with some masking tape. I wrote to the Tetra company via their website, and asked if it was possible to buy a new case. Instead, they wrote back promptly and offered to send me a brand new pump, as it has a lifetime warranty! So, I’ll still have my original pump with the cracks in the case to use in an emergency, but meanwhile I’ll have a brand new pump sometime next week. I really appreciate their great customer service, and wanted to give them a bit of a shoutout—the pump is definitely worth its price.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 09/21 at 06:58 PM
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Tuesday, August 29, 2006 , late at night

Dear charities…

Please stop sending me things. I don’t mind sending $25 your way once or twice a year, but it bothers me immensely when you repay my donation by sending me unrequested calendars, stickers, notepads, keychains, dog tags, and innumerable other little trinkets. If I wanted trinkets, I’d just buy the trinkets myself, and it annoys me to think that you’re spending all the money I donated to you towards the effort of getting me to donate more money. That’s not why I sent you a contribution! I don’t think I’d even mind if you spent my donation towards attracting new donors, but stop wasting it on me.

With this being the anniversary of hurricane Katrina, I guess I’m starting to get some “annual reminders” from the larger charities we sent money to last year. Interestingly enough, the charities which send out the most “stuff”, are also the charities which could be criticized for being “90% administration and 10% action”. In contrast, small groups like Alley Cat Allies just send me a simple donation request twice a year or so, without any fanfare. It makes me feel like they’re using their donations more wisely.

While I’m on my soapbox, if you’re going to send me personalized address labels, spell my name properly! I don’t think I have one set of address labels with my name spelled correctly. The closest I ever get is my first name lacking the hyphen, which is fairly close, but why can’t it be perfect? Flippy, on the other hand, has a nice simple name so our desk overrunneth with Flippy’s return address labels.

In closing, I don’t want to donate any more money to HSUS, ASPCA, or NSAL until they lay-off the hard sell. I’ll continue to donate to a number of other smaller charities who do grassroots work. I’ll also continue to support Best Friends, of course—they send out a magazine if you donate, but you can opt out of receiving it, and I confess that I really enjoy reading it.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 08/29 at 11:11 PM
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Saturday, July 15, 2006 , late evening

Leslie’s Swimming Pool Supplies

This post is in my “consumer rant” category.

Dear people at Leslie’s Swimming Pool Supplies: You can’t seriously advertise, “Always free shipping and handling” in big letters on the front of your catalogue, and then have the fine print say, “Selected items only”. You also can’t advertise “Free shipping” all over your website, and then charge a “handling fee” instead. I generally like you people, so stop sucking. Thank you.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 07/15 at 10:12 PM
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Tuesday, June 06, 2006 , lunch time

Everyone wants free cherries!

We often order our groceries online, either via Vons.com or Albertsons.com. Grocery delivery is particularly useful when we order heavy items, like 40 lb. bags of water softener salt, so we’ll place about one order per month to have a nice man deliver heavy items to our garage. I placed an order a couple of days ago at Vons.com, and it was delivered this morning. I go over the delivered items with a fine-toothed comb to make sure nothing is missing, because the one disadvantage of delivery is that there’s often one or two items which are missing or otherwise incorrect. I found two problems, one with cereal and one with cherries, so I called Vons.com customer service. I was literally on hold for half an hour waiting to speak to someone, and then waiting to have the problem resolved, and the customer service agent I spoke to was absolutely humourless.

My first problem was with cereal. I’d ordered a “buy one, get one free” cereal, and received three boxes while being charged for two. I should have received two and been charged for one. It turns out that at the very bottom of my order receipt there’s a notation for “corn flake” and a deduction of $3.79, but the cereal I ordered wasn’t corn flakes, and the deduction wasn’t directly under the cereal listing on the receipt, hence my confusion. The customer service agent told me very sternly, “You didn’t order corn flakes, so when you saw ‘corn flakes’ on the receipt, you should have noticed it was a deduction. And you were only charged for one box of cereal, so you received one EXTRA box at no charge”. I know she was visualizing slapping me on the hand with a ruler.

My other, more serious issue, was with cherries. On the Vons website cherries are listed as “bulk, $1.00/each”, and when you enter a quantity in your shopping cart it equates each increment to .25 of a pound. So, I put a quantity of “4” in my cart, and a little calculation under the cart said this equaled 1 pound. My cart showed a charge of $4 for cherries, but when they were delivered, I received 4 lbs. of cherries at $4 per pound, for a total of almost $16! Now, I like cherries, but not $16 worth when I’m expecting $4 worth. I brought up this issue with the customer service woman who said that the number of items I ordered was a reference to how many pounds I wanted, not how many quarter pounds. I explained that the website didn’t reflect that, and reminded her that it listed the cherries at $1/each. To this she replied, “That’s per cherry.” I asked if she was being facetious, as there was no way one cherry would weigh one-quarter of a pound, but she just said that was how the website was set up. She then said she’d credit me for everything over and above the $4 I intended to spend, for a refund of $12, and said that this was an on-going problem which the webmasters were trying to correct. She sounded quite disgusted when she said, “Everyone is calling and wanting free cherries!”

So, add me to the list of common criminals who only want to pay for what they actually order. If there’s such a thing as karma, I might end up as a cockroach in my next life for my insistence on “free cherries”.

Edited to add: the cherries don’t even taste very good, so I’m not getting $12 worth of free pleasure out of them :P

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/06 at 12:59 PM
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Monday, January 09, 2006 , evening

Little irritations

Flippy’s sister-in-law loves it when I write cranky blog entries, or so she tells me. This entry isn’t so much cranky as just irritated, so I hope it will suffice.

The kittens are growing more rapidly by the day, and even though they’re in what seems like a HUGE Rubbermaid container, they’re quickly out-growing it. With a litterbox at one end, a bed at one end, and two dishes in the middle, there isn’t much room left for them to play and wrestle (or to just exercise). I decided today to go buy a “cat cage”—one of those large metal cages, with plastic shelves, which sits on the floor but has room inside for all sorts of things. We first tried Petsmart, who had none in stock (despite advertising a couple on their website). We then went to Petco, and were told that the only one left was a floor model. That was where the fun began. I could tell that the cage wasn’t assembled properly, and was asking for help from the sales person to disassemble it, and she more or less ignored me. Actually, what she did was to put it back together again, incorrectly, despite my pointing out that it was obviously wrong. I asked if there was an assembly instruction guide, and was told “No”. I asked if the store would price-match their website price for the same product (as Petsmart happily does), and I was told, “Maybe”. As the checkout line grew longer and longer (the only checkstand open, of course), a manager was consulted, much whispering ensued, and we were reluctantly given a price match. This was substantial, as the item in the store was $70 more than the item on the website. You’d think we were robbing them at gunpoint, though, despite the fact that I said, more than once, it was okay if they couldn’t match prices, I’d just go home and shop online. I was still buying other items from them, and I was certainly polite and friendly.

We bought the cage, rolled it out the front of the store, and when we tried to lift it up to take it to the car the entire frame lifted off the bottom, proving my assertion that it wasn’t assembled properly. No problem, it just made it easier to get in the car. We noticed the bottom was full of dust clumps, proving it had been a floor display for a very long time. When we got it home, I hosed the whole thing off, and noticed one of the two plastic shelves was cracked in two places. No problem, I told myself… I’d make do for now, and try to order a replacement shelf online. As I was washing the bottom out, I noticed a bunch of odd dents in the plastic, a slight problem. Then I noticed the final and ultimate annoyance… all four corners of the cage bottom were cracked completely through. It’s as if someone assembled the thing with a sledge hammer. Now we’re going to have to go back tomorrow to return it, and I’m sure that’s going to be a delightful experience.

Petco has never been my favourite store. The employees at our local store always seem unhappy and moody, and they’re mostly uneducated about what they’re selling. We have a Petsmart nearby where everyone is friendly, the store is clean and bright, and they allow local animal shelters to display pets there for adoption. They have a nice grooming department, and as I mentioned earlier, they price match with their website, so everything is a great deal. I wish they’d had a cat cage in stock so I could have avoided the Petco fiasco, but I was so eager to give the kittens some extra space that I didn’t look closely enough at what I was buying, and I ended up with a piece of crap. Still, you’d think a store would want to check out a display model before they sell it, make sure all the parts are in order, and perhaps even offer a discount to the customer for buying an old product. Not at Petco.

While we’re going to have the bother of returning the damaged cage, and will have to wait for the new one to ship to us, it ended up being a pretty good arrangement. The cage on the Petco site had free shipping, and there was a 10% off discount coupon, so we ended up saving a little over $40 over the price we paid for the scratched and broken one. Now I just need to get the kittens to stop growing for a week until it gets here.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/09 at 08:33 PM
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Wednesday, July 20, 2005 , early afternoon

Drs. Foster & Smith: I think I love you

Here’s a company to love: Drs. Foster & Smith. Here are just some of the great customer service experiences I’ve had with them:

- I ordered frozen fish food and paid for overnight delivery via FedEx. When the order arrived, the food was thawed but still cold, so I wrote and asked if it was safe to refreeze it. They replied that it was safe as long as the food was still cold, but just in case, they were reshipping the order at their own expense and packing it with extra ice.

- I ordered some tap water neutralizer from them, and when it arrived, some of the liquid had leaked out because the cap was loose. It was just a small amount, but I wrote and nicely suggested they do a better job of sealing the caps on liquids. They sent a replacement bottle of tap water neutralizer at their own expense, even though I told them I wasn’t upset about the small amount of leakage in my original order.

- Phoenix is severely allergic to corn, but we wanted to give her a supplement from the Foster & Smith website which contained “vegetable proteins”. I wrote to ask if “vegetable proteins” included corn, and while their agent didn’t know, she went to the trouble of contacting the manufacturer to find out. She then sent me a follow-up email to let me know that the product was corn-free.

So, great work, Dr. Foster and Dr. Smith. Again, you’re not the least expensive website on the Internet, but you’re always truthworthy and reliable.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 07/20 at 02:06 PM
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EntirelyPets.com: you’re going down

My cats just love their Panic Mouse toy (I’ve posted video of them playing with it before, and it’s still a household favourite). Unfortunately, they broke the string on the original Panic Mouse wand, and the replacement wand I ordered from Amazon.com just didn’t meet their high expectations. I guess the original wand with its long string was a bit of a strangulation hazard, so the Panic Mouse company made a new wand of firmer plastic. My cats tried it and didn’t like it, so I set out to look for some of the original “string with fuzzy ball” replacement tips.

I was able to find a great selection of Panic Mouse replacement parts at EntirelyPets.com, and happily ordered two different types of wand—the original with a fuzzy ball on the end, and a newer wand with a mylar ball on the end. When my order arrived, EntirelyPets had sent me the original wand as ordered, but then sent one of the firmer plastic wands that I’d already tried and didn’t like. They didn’t send the mylar wand, despite the fact it was listed correctly on my order receipt. I wanted to return the plastic wand because not only did my cats not like it, it was less-expensive than the mylar, so not only was I missing a product I’d been stiffed a few dollars in the process. I figured I could just write to EntirelyPets.com’s customer service department to ask them if I needed to return the incorrect item, or if they’d just want to skip the extra shipping charges and send me the mylar wands.

Five days passed with no reply from EntirelyPets. I double-checked the email address on both their website and in my confirmation email, and I was writing to the correct place. I then forwarded my original email to them again, with a note saying I hadn’t received a reply. After waiting another two days, I finally got a response. They said, “Please call any one of our Customer Service Associates so we may assist you better. “

What?!?! I place an order online, they provide a customer service email address, they ignore my email for a week, and then they finally respond with zero information and just the instruction to “call them”? Why on earth do I need to pick up the telephone to conduct business with an Internet company? They messed up my order AND they over-charged me—shouldn’t they be bending over backwards to remedy the situation? Apparently not, as I replied and told them I wanted to have the order corrected via email and I haven’t heard from them again.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 07/20 at 01:53 PM
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Orvis: the best of the good

For great customer service, I can’t think of any company which beats Orvis. Their products are a bit pricey but the quality is excellent, and everything comes with a lifetime replacement guarantee. Orvis has replaced one of our dog beds twice, each time after Dante chewed a hole in it. They do this at their own expense, and always with a friendly and a courteous email. On other occasions when I’ve written to ask about replacement parts (for example, replacement polyfil for the dog bed), they’ve promptly sent me a link to the item in question. I think they’re just a super company, and I’d happily recommend them to anyone. Thank you, Orvis, for great Internet customer service!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 07/20 at 01:44 PM
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Reward the good and punish the bad

I’ve added a new blog category called, “Customer Service: Good, bad, & ugly”. I have so many encounters with customer service reps that I wanted the chance to publicly commend the great ones, and kick around the bad ones. Let the games begin!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 07/20 at 01:39 PM
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