[rant] How to screw up a web-hosting support system.

[ChrisGreaves]

(1) Write the back-end so that if an individual human sets up two accounts with the same home phone number, your automated response system recognises the phone number but selects one of the two accounts at random.
(2) Do not have the back end system inform your support staff that this phone number, or this account, has another account related to it. Let the support staff assume that we are discussing MiserableTorontoCustomer.com while the customer assumes we are discussing DelightedLocalChappie.ca
(3) If you are based in the USA, treat all spaces within postal codes as characters. Do not tell your customers in Canada (or almost every other civilsed country) that you are going to drop the trailing non-blank letter of the postal code without warning.
(4) Do not train your support staff to recognize that any address outside USA might have a “faulty” postal code.
(5) Especially, do not worry about the address details conflicting with those held on file by the credit card company. The credit company is quite capable of rejecting the truncated postal code as “Not matching our records”. And it will do so in mere microseconds nowadays.
(6) Even though the customer phoned the supplier voluntarily, and even through the customer WANTS to give money to you (the supplier), make sure that the customer understands that the credit card number can NOT be dictated over the phone lines because “this call is being recorded to serve you better”.
(7) Impose a $11.95 service charge on your customer’s account because your flaky back-end system has caused so much hassle and delay that your long-term (well, ten years at any rate) customer’s account has lapsed and your automated systems have put the domain into suspended animation.
(8) Then tell your customer that the $11.95 surcharge has been declined by the credit card company. (This is a sop to the customer, and will make him/her/it feel valued)
(9) Explain to your customer that credit card companies often decline payment because “you are thousands of miles away”. (To be perfectly honest, I don’t know if this restriction applies only to minor cards such as my MasterCard and VISA, or whether it applies to serious credit card companies too) (But I am now reconsidering this year’s vacation in the Île de France, I can tell you)
(10) If your frustrated customer says that he/she/it has just spent thirty minutes on hold, point out that “It is raining in Dallas”, which is where I guess the company conducts its cruddy business.
(11) Although given all that has already passed today, maybe the company is based in Yuma Arizona, but just uses the weather in Dallas Texas as an excuse.

I shall not name the company, because Hostgator might get upset and close my account
before I can take my business somewhere else

(signed) "I now have a list of 25 Canadian Hosting Companies" of Toronto.

[John Gray]

How are you on companies that provide you with new broadband lines?

[ChrisGreaves]

How are you on companies that provide you with new broadband lines?

New broadband lines are OK, as long as they don't come with a dongle and a waterproof bag and a pulley and don't make me plant another tree.

Most important: They should not relocate my apartment to a new postal code.