It’s a truism in sales that it’s usually a lot more expensive to find new customers than it is to keep old ones. That’s why good customer service is so important. Yet it seems so many companies, especially large ones, forget this until an account closure is imminent.
To save their blushes, I won’t name them publicly, but I recently encountered atrocious support from our old hosting provider. To give the best service to you we run a dedicated server. For the past three years I’d been very happy with our setup. The server had been reliable and stable, the only downtime being during scheduled maintenance. Admittedly I hadn’t had to ask the company for anything much as everything just worked. However as our picture collection grew (over 11,000 pictures now) we were getting to the point where we needed a larger hard disk on the server.
I contacted the hosting company and was pleased to find that they would fit a new disk for a one-off charge. There was only one slight problem, our server, being an older model, was not compatible with the latest types of disks on the market. Would this be a problem I asked? Not at all was the reply, our engineers will sort everything out. So, a time for the upgrade was agreed (outside office hours so as not to disrupt normal business), and I backed everything up and notified everyone who needed to know.
The evening of the upgrade arrived, I arranged to work late, to make sure everything went smoothly. The time for the server to go offline arrived, but nothing happened. Instead I got an email from the hosting company’s engineer tasked with the work. “Unfortunately, your server is not compatible with the disks we use for upgrades”…
To cut a long story short, no upgrade happened. Instead there were weeks of exchanges between myself and the company’s sales department. They said I should go for a new server, I asked what deal they’d give me, no deal was offered. Communication was further complicated by the relevant salesman seemingly not having a full grasp of the technology he was selling. Eventually I’d had enough and looked at other providers in the market.
As things turned out, I was able to get a better server at a lower price than I’d been paying and I have no hesitation in naming our new providers as Poundhost.
The transition to the new server has been fully completed, with minimal disruption. Of course, our old company has recently started ringing the office trying to keep our business…
Be assured that if anyone has any service issues with Careimages we will strive to address the matter within one working day and usually much more quickly. Our customers matter to us.