Nomination for the worse online tech support chat ever.
Someone at my web host must have had a bad day Friday. After I discovered a problem with my email forwarding, I opened up a live chat session. Here’s the transcript of the first 10 minutes of the chat.
Support: Hello, how may I help you?
andrew allemann: For some reason none of my forward email accounts under domainnamewire.com are working. e.g. andrew -at- domainnamewire.com, pr -at-domainnamewire.com. This appears to have been a problem for the past month or two at least.
[About three or four minutes later I’m wondering why I haven’t gotten the usual “let me look into that”, or “please hold on”, so I want to make sure my initial query went through…]
andrew allemann: are you there?
Support: Yes
[OK, so the support guy is there. But a minute or two after he said ‘Yes’, and nothing else, I’m still wondering if he saw my initial query. So…]
andrew allemann: do you have any questions about the problem?
Support: No, I’m checking into it
Support: Be patient
Oh, snap!
Aaron says
I’ve gotten a lot worse than that. But still “be patient” is not the best response from support.
Elliot says
Hold your horses… the man is working.
Cindy says
Worst communication I have ever had is with Afternic.
Richard says
yeah, I’ve had some bad experiences with fastnext support. Some companies think they can get away with hiring anyone..including those who don’t know what they’re doing, those who can’t speak english on the telephone, or those who are flat out rude.
Free Domain Newsletter says
Certainly not nice, but if that is the worst you have had then I think you are pretty fortunate.
I would much rather have someone tell me to “be patient” then have someone who has no idea how to fix my problem.
Andrew Allemann says
FDN – true, true
Tim Bonehill says
Hi Cindy,
I handle customer service at Afternic and I’d be interested to find out the details of the poor experience you had with one of our representatives. Can you contact me direct at 781-839-7984? If email works better for you, I can be reached at [email protected].
Thanks!
EM @ KING.NET says
@Andrew
Can you not wait? LOL
So what’s the result of the support?
Andrew Allemann says
EM – we got it working…it’s all good.
EM @ KING.NET says
Cheers to you.
Ms Domainer says
*
Yahoo (non) support is absolutely surreal.
It’s like being in the Twilight Zone meets The Night of the Living Dead.
Or maybe Plan 9 from Outer Space???
*
Patrick McDermott says
Andrew,
If you really want to experience bad customer service, become a 1and1.com customer. 🙂
Ed - Michigan says
Patrick, you made me laugh right out loud !!
Andrew, my assigned DNS was not working at
my registrar. So I called the US number,
got India.
Fixed it myself.
Ed – Michigan
BF says
“Oh, snap!” This got me laughing… 🙂
Stephen Douglas says
Hi Dub-A,
On the flip side, the BEST online chat support is Whypark’s
Kelly Urqhart. Other best CS teams are at Moniker, Fabulous, Snapnames, TrafficZ, Afternic and Parked.
Worst support? Forgot the company, but it was actually the system they were using. Every time I went to check my website to provide more details to the tech chat support person, when I returned to the chat window, it would reset and lose all our previous comments. Gaaaack!
Worst CS overall? I agree with Patrick – 1and1.com, with a close second for GoDaddy and Enom.
(P.S. – I will bet anyone $10 that Tim Bonehill’s nickname is —- T-BONE!! We’ll let him tell us if he’s “bad to the bone!” Sweet! 😉
Ritz says
Has anyone ever had recourse to GoDaddy.com’s Executive Accounts Program.
how helpful is the Account Manager ?
thanks,
Ritz.
Tim Bonehill says
Not ashamed to admit that T-bone is in fact one of many nicknames I have!
Cheers!