Know-How Exchange : Customer Behavior

I agree with Joshua. Three weeks is way beyond the pale.

You should be using the loss to extract a complete refund from your hosting provider.

Then move on to a new provider that either:

1. Has great spam detection systems and excellent support, or:

2. Has great support, but no spam detection (or one that can be turned off), and use a decent third party e-mail screening service like MailGuard which will detect ALL viruses, most trojans, most phishing, and has a user-settable spam detection service that really works properly. It costs extra, but you can charge the end-user for providing a best-practice service.

Hope this helps.

Marketingsmarts,

I have to agree with all the comments posted here. My only opinion on this matter is how much revenue does this realtor actually contribute to your overall profit?

If this realtor website contribute a substantial amount of profit than yes - YOU MUST TRY TO MAKE GOOD WITH THE CLIENT. Offer them something that would want them to stay with you that would not hurt your company's overall revenue. If not, write an apology letter and consider it a loss of business.

Bad service is never a good thing. No matter what the reason, the ultimate responsibility is your company's and yours alone. The bad part is that it has been statistically proven that customers say 10 ten negative things about a product and only say 3 good things about it.

A rule of thumb of business that I follow is this "Success is measured by what you have accomplished and built. Not by what you lost."

Good luck.

To me, a lot would depend on who you are dealing with at the firm. For example, if you are dealing with the owner, who was informed of all the changes and was in the loop constantly, then that is one situation. But, if you were dealing with a middle manager, who might have received and ignored your information, and who now has been called to task for the email problems, and has responded by firing you, that is a very different situation.

In reading between the lines, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe the main problem is not the email - it is the fact that the business owner or manager had multiple people involved in technical problems, and the situation turned into finger pointing. From the owner or manager's point of view, they may not want detailed reports, they do not need technical people to spend time "explaining" things, they may just want one single, accountable person who can make things work and get things done.

If this business owner was looking to you to handle all their problems, and rather than making sure the problems were quickly solved, you handed the problem to someone else, and forced the owner to talk with some geek about wild techie email stuff, quite honestly, I'm not surprised he let you go.

My suggestion would be to let this cool off for a while, then use some sort of procedure to conduct a post-mortem and find out why this went wrong. One key issue: are your services as "robust" as they need to be - in other words, can you handle ALL of a small businesses computer related needs... or should you and will you always be at the mercy of other service providers, who may not have your best interest at heart.

I would get him to admit that the issue was the service provided by the web hosting company...not your service. If you can't do that, then your lost.

Once you've done that though, ask him how you could have handled it better. My sense is he will say you did exactly what you could have done and he needed to fire the manager....like they do in most sports.

That said, you may still get referrals from him.

Michael

I would let it go. You may come off wrong if you continue to pursue this. You might also be in some kind of violation if the person asked you to disolve the relationship and you keep at it.

Forget the customer.. .you need to work to neutralize any bad will. Whining and graveling reflects poorly. Instead, appologize, offer a refund and graciously step away.