January 7th, 2009
by

Observations on service

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A recent sup­port call proved to me a few things about ser­vice.  I called to start the trans­fer process of my domains from register.com to another reg­is­trar.  The oper­a­tor con­vinced me to stay:

Everything is nego­tiable.  My rea­son for switch­ing reg­is­trars was price: Register.com charges $35/y/domain; the com­pe­ti­tion charges $10). Talking with the oper­a­tor, it turns out that there’s some flex­i­bil­ity in pric­ing. Now I’m renew­ing at $8/y/domain. 

Small talk goes a long way.  The oper­a­tor didn’t put me on hold while she was work­ing – she asked about the weather. We chat­ted about grey win­ters & snow­storms between trad­ing infor­ma­tion for the domain renewals. The net result: I felt like I was being treated as a real human by a real human instead of being a par­tic­i­pant in a machine-like, protocol-driven trans­ac­tion. It made a huge dif­fer­ence and all it took was the age-old con­ver­sa­tion tac­tic of talk­ing about the weather. 

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~ End Article and Begin Conversation ~

  • January 18th, 2009
    by Jo Anne

    1

    Would that there were more busi­nesses with which to deal that actu­ally had a real per­son at the end of the phone line. Mom

  • February 3rd, 2009
    by Dave Whitney

    2

    I once was a cus­tomer of Network Solutions, but they were far too expen­sive. While their site allowed for nearly com­plete con­trol of my domain con­fig­u­ra­tion, there were a few things I sim­ply had to call sup­port to get updated.
    So I switched to AllDomains.com. Somewhat cheaper, eas­ier to edit most stuff, but they still had the nig­gling mis­fea­ture of requir­ing a call to sup­port to get a cou­ple of things edited.
    So I switched to Godaddy.com. Vastly cheaper (I bought long-term and so paid only $7/yr/domain), and I could actu­ally con­trol every­thing. I’ve never had to call sup­port for any­thing.
    So while a com­pany does well to con­nect per­son­ally with their clients, a com­pany also does well to pro­vide the prod­uct (fea­ture set) their clients actu­ally need. Nobody at the other reg­is­trars could give me a clear answer as to why I had to spend their money on the 800 phone line to edit some con­fig that really ought to be doable via the web site.

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