Ideate

Poor Service and Customer Handling

by Andrew Smith on 17/02/06 at 8:21 am
1 comment

We use the Internet a lot. All the time. If the internet goes down, we usually take the afternoon off.

We have been using iBurst for the last year or so. It’s faster than ADSL, cheaper, there are no wires involved, and it has the major advantage of not having anything to do with Telkom.

This week the connection has been terrible, which led to this e-mail I sent them last night. I’ll post a response here if I get one, but I somehow doubt anything will arrive:

Dear iBurst

My small company has 3 accounts with you, and I refer tons of friends to iBurst.
But this week you have seriously let us all down, and unless you pull off a customer relations miracle, you stand to lose a ton of happy patrons.
The connectivity in Cape Town this week has been terrible, and despite your laughable “incident report” page showing that everything is resolved, it is definitely not. Currently there seems to be a major issue with DNS lookups.
That would all be forgiveable, if you would at least keep us up to date with what is going on (and warn us via e-mail or SMS when you are experiencing difficulties), and if you responded to customer feedback.
This is now the third message I have sent via the contact form and e-mail, and I have heard nothing in response.

Please make a plan to communicate with your customers. It makes poor service delivery much easier to live with.

Regards

Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew Smith.

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