17 July 2009

Wow (the good kind)

The term 'customer service representative,' in theory, refers to an individual who will provide service to the customer. Most of the time, these people provide headaches and frustration to the customer instead. How many times have you had to practically yell into the phone to deal with these people to get them to reading from their prepared scripts that are designed to frustrate/confuse you into giving them more money?

But I'm not here to rant, because I just had the best customer service experience ever. Here's how it went down: Two years ago, I bought a domain and hosting plan from GoDaddy.com. In the last month or so, I've been getting emails telling me the plan was about to expire and that it was set to auto-renew (i.e. automatically debit my account). I didn't want the plan anymore, so I went to the website and turned the auto-renew off, expecting that to take care of the problem. But then today I check my email and there's a receipt for the auto-renewed plan.

Sighing the deep sigh of a guy who hates phones because of things like this, I called GoDaddy. The dude asked how he could help, and I told him what happened. Without missing a beat, he said, "Alright, I'll just go ahead and cancel your plan and get you that refund." No annoying questions about why I didn't like the service, no trying to sell me on the benefits of a hosting plan, no tempting me with a 30-day free trial. Just one 20-second conversation and the problem was solved to the customer's satisfaction. Wow.

The sad part is that I'm amazed by something that should happen all the time.

3 comments:

hockeyfrog said...

You completely lucked out with the CSR you had with GoDaddy then. I wish my tale would have ended more like yours, but alas, it did not. (Long story short, mine wasn't set to auto-renew, which was fine, I was switching to a different plan. Unfortunately when I set up the new plan to replace the old one, all of my files, sql tables, everything... gone. When I questioned it, the response I got was "You canceled your service, which terminated your account. You started a new account with the new plan. We can get you the data back for $150 within 30 days if you'd like." I was less than pleased.)

Congrats on the new blog layout though! I'm slogging through mine, and eventually will get to it.

Chris said...

Well that's just mean. "We have your lost data, but you have to pay to get it back"?!? That is exactly the opposite of the treatment I got. Do you know anybody else who has had CSR encounters (good or bad) with GoDaddy?

Aaron Brown said...

I had a good experience with calling GoDaddy, regarding my domain I purchased with them.

It turned out since I got my domain through SmugMug via GoDaddy I was just logging into the wrong site, they helped reissue me a new password and point me toward the correct site to manage my settings. I was also impressed because I called pretty late in the evening (in Hawaii) and they were open.

AB