Why is Customer Service Always Second Rate?

It’s almost like it’s there’s some set rule among web hosts? You decide to get a great domain and now you need a place to host it. After searching online for hours, asking friends about who they use, and even asking around on various forums, you finally settle on a web host that looks good at a decent price, so you pull out your credit card and pay for them.

Everything’s going great. Visitors are pouring in, your site is up and running (and looking beautiful), emails working, sales are starting to trickle, then all of a sudden – nothing – you wake up and your site is down and the email server can’t be found. You see some error message when you go to your homepage, you can’t download any files from your site, heck, you can’t even login to your web hosting control panel.

Well, you decide to try to open up a support ticket with the hosting company and use your back up email for communication with them. You go through all of the steps on their website to submit a ticket and a few days later you receive an email from them about your problem, but the email looks like it was written from an alien because there’s so much techno-babble in there you think that there’s no way the person who responded is even human! I mean, it makes no sense whatsoever. What do you do now?

So you pick up the phone and call the customer service number for the hosting company. After pushing about ten different buttons to get where you need to be, the phone system has you on hold and they’re playing some kind of weird music as you wait. Then after about forty minutes waiting on the phone, a rep finally answers the line, and your heart sinks. Your heart doesn’t sink because a rep finally answered the line; it sinks because you can’t understand a word that he’s saying. He’s talking to you like you’re a moron, like you caused the problem in the first place, and isn’t being helpful at all. It’s only after you ask to speak to his manager that he treats you with some respect and is even a bit helpful. After finally finding out what the problem is and fixing it, you hang up the phone and wonder why you ever bought you hosting from that company in the first place.

When you are looking for a web host, it’s worth it to pay a little more. It pays to have support that’s easy to reach and to be able to ask questions about your service that will be answered in a way that you understand. You want a web host that will partner with you for your business because if you’re not able to run your online business from their company, then there’s no need for you to be a customer with them.

It’s situations like this that always remind me that the old saying is true: You get what you pay for.