Poor customer service - in this day and age!

In this day and age of bloggs and web-savvy users, especially those buying technical services - who would expect a DNS company to have poor customer service? Customer service is pretty much the most important part of a company - it is so important and influential that it can even make up for or mask a lesser product. By customer service I don't just mean the support department, but also accounts, pre-sales, sales, website - anything which services a customer's needs.

I needed a new DNS provider as my old one no longer replied to support tickets and seemed to be disappearing. I was recommended Namesco by someone; "I use them and they are OK." They did not appear to support IPv6 so I contacted their support and they said that although it's not on the control panel, I can contact them and they will add the glue records for me. So I moved my 24 domains.

But then I found out that they could not support IPv6 DNS glue after making a ticket to ask for it to be added. So I put up with having only IPv4. I've now got to the point I no longer want to run my own DNS servers (SaaS FTW) so I've been looking around and gandi.net seem to offer a good promise of customer service, full IPv6 support and free DNS serving. They also responded to my first ticket in minutes.

Back to the irritating Namesco control panel and I find that to transfer each domain I have to pay £10+VAT. I've never had to do this before when I transferred the last three times (I've had my own domains for 13 years). But not only do I have to pay £240+VAT, I have to repeat the process and go through a checkout TWENTY FOUR TIMES. Fail!

Don't they know a happy customer tells maybe three people. But an unhappy customer tells ten!

If the customer service staff at Smoothwall acted like this to our customers, I would have words with them, or their manager - and then make sure they got the training needed not to make the mistake again.

Now I am off to repeat an annoying loop 23 more times, get RSI and probably have VISA call me up and say there's suspicious activity on my card...