Highly Disappointing: A Rant

Today I had a customer service experience that fell flat of my expectations. One of our service providers, Network Solutions, recently updated their internal controls and, during this process, managed to completely disable and change many settings on one of our client’s websites.

And this puts us in quite a pickle. We were informed by their customer service rep that we would have to go back in and manually enable each of the (50+) products in order for them to be available for purchase.

In this business, as in the service industry as a whole, time is money. So this leads to the inevitable question: who gets the bill for this snafu?

Theoretically, the fault lies on the one who makes the mistake, but, shirking their responsibility and washing their hands of the entire situation, we are left with having to take the time to make the storefront operable again.

Do we bill the client, for the updates that we wouldn’t have made if this change hadn’t taken place?
Do we demand a fix or a refund of some sort from the provider?
After all, this is billable time we’re talking about that could’ve been spent working on another client.

Let’s not forget the client whose site this is. They make their money solely off their online sales. How long has the site been like this since the ‘change’ which we were unaware of? How much money could they have lost?

In this case, an apology simply isn’t enough. When the error falls on your shoulders, and it’s causing your clientele to lose money or valued customers this becomes a bigger problem that can't be fixed by an "I'm sorry".

Also, what happens next time they decide to upgrade their control panel? Will we have to do the same thing?

The unsatisfactory resolution and poor organization of Network Solutions has caused us to seriously reconsider our hosting provider.