Every company makes mistakes, and I’m actually quite forgiving about it, what they do next is what will make or break me as a customer, and I have the habit of telling a few thousand people.
I’ve been a customer of Dreamhost since I’ve had this domain and have had quite a few outages, and recently my blog was 403 (forbidden to others), as they forgot to fix all the settings when I moved to a dedicated server. Despite these hardships (which I’m willing to let go, you know I used to work at Exodus, a web hosting company) I’m sympathetic towards web hosts.
Despite my willingness to forgive, I have a hard time when I feel like I’m being patronized when I received the following email:
Hi jeremiah!
Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attempted to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY (it was all due to a fat finger)!
We’re really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; we’ve already removed all those bum future charges on your account (#198980) and fixed everything up.
Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!
Sincerely,
The Foolish DreamHost Billing Team!
To add insult to injury…
Despite the misspelling (embarassed) what really caught me was the blame of a ‘fat finger’ (I subdued my original title for the post). That’s not the cause, and companies need to take accountability in a human, and up front way of what the problem was. Later, I discovered an apology and explanation blog post, entitled “Um, Whoops.” sadly, they used cartoons (Homer Simpson) and images from pop movies (as well as elsewhere on their blog) to back peddle. I don’t need language written in chat-room-type language, I expect professional and sincere communications. The Dreamhost status blog (is this run by a different group? it must be) provides the information in a succinct, yet sincere manner.
While we complain about the cold heartless press release, I think the Dreamhost communications is a swing too far to the left, and recommend that we all find a place somewhere closer to the middle. I’d rather see pictures of the employees working on the problem (or live streaming) from the data center to demonstrate to me how professional they are working.
This patronizing doesn’t get my sympathy, instead it makes me irritated.
I don’t think this is a huge deal…it’s a tongue in cheek mea culpa for an issue that they caught and resolved. A minor issue at that.
This wasn’t a heart transplant gone wrong, this wasn’t a space shuttle exploding on launch, it was a billing mistake, which happens ALL the time and is usually handled with a much more draconian “we are the infallible business” attitude. Personally, I would prefer the former over the later – especially since they fixed the issue.
Really? Patronizing? As you read the email, did your tie roll up & smack your Evian water bottle, as you drove your Beamer off into the sunset? 🙂
I am in the corporate world and appreciate genuine email “speak” rather than some stuffy, un-feeling, stiff, so 1980’s corporate speak.
So it was funny!
Hopefully someone didn’t get fired due to the over-reaction of the email verbiage…and not the huge mistake of the “fat finger”.
-jen
Interesting that you felt patronized. I see it more as carelessly flippant. I think that if a company sends you a notice that they’ve made a mistake with your account and overcharged they should be polite, professional and sincerely apologetic. Humor has its place. This isn’t it.
The rule is if you’re dealing with your customers’ money, you’d better serious up, and fast. You can use a sincere, conversational tone without being condescending.
I have a feeling they didn’t fully realize the implications of their mistake when that light-hearted explanation was posted.
Speaking of patronizing:
You used the wrong spelling of pedal. That is, you used “back peddle”, instead of “back pedal”. I usually wouldn’t comment, but in this case it’s deliciously funny because it could be taken to mean they were trying to reverse the sale 🙂
cheers!
I got this error and laughed about it when I got the notification for the fix. I see nothing wrong with how Dreamhost handled the situation. I’m dirt poor and have about 60 dollars to my name at the moment since the rest of my money goes to rent, school, food, gas, etc. So this isn’t simply a matter of me having too much money to care about the error since it would have really set me back. In the end, they aren’t underreacting, it’s you who was overreacting.
Dreamhost customer support emails are often patronizing simply because their reps don’t bother to read the email history before responding. They superciliously inform the ignorant customer to do something that’s already been tried when it has been established in umpteen emails that it’s Dreamhost’s problem anyway.
DreamHost’s poor customer service has led to a serious privacy invasion. When my client attempted to sign up for an account, the transaction hung halfway through. When customer service (which can only be reached by tedious email exchanges) “fixed” the problem, the pay by credit card option was no longer available. The customer service representative insisted that we use Google Payments. I proceeded, and then my client realized his financial information is now in the Google system. The worst possible scenario then came true. Instead of completing the transaction, Google called my client’s bank for “preapproval”. This was not to complete the transaction (which was never completed), but to gather information for Google’s marketing. My client is furious, reviewing everyone’s privacy policy, and is looking into ways to bring this problem up at the political, and possibly the legal, level.
Throughout this whole situation, Dreamhost has been nothing but pig-headed. Every customer service representative ignores the case history and either refers us back to Google Payments or says patronizing things like we could have paid with the original credit card system. I offered them a solution where I quietly pay for the account using Google transactions, and they won’t even let me help bail them out!!!
I will never refer another client to dreamhost. Right now I’m looking for the best place to air this complaint publicly in as many places as possible. People have to know that when Dreamhost pushes people into using Google Payments, Google then has their financial information to aggregate and deploy for their own purposes.
Addendum: Dreamhost’s customer service reps also flame customer’s who complain on their forum. I know because one used his forum ID while responding to an email with the customer service issue header on it.
Dreamhost is okay however I’ve had better customer service and faster load times for about the same price with HostGator. They are definitely worth checking out.
I got to tell you, I disagree with all of the above people who expect “professional” communication.
I like to see humor and personal touches in messages (from anyone, even a company).
If there is one thing I hate to see it is the endless and emotionless, dragged on messages I get sometimes from companies(those kinds of messages sound very insincere when they are apologizing).
I expect them to act human and reply human, not “professionally” and insincere (like saying “we are very sorry for this” and “I understand the inconvience you have because of this”; both of those are from my recent reply from Microsoft Support).
Unfortunately, I am not a DreamHost costumer, but if I was, I would love to get messages such as that one you got (except without the billing stuff).