GoDaddy Customer Service

When I realized how easy WordPress was and how you could setup pages in addition to posts I decided to have my domain (davidsilversmith.com) forward to this blog (internetmuse.com).  So I logged into my GoDaddy account and setup the forwarding.

As with many things, what seemed so easy actually led to a week of confusion, 4 email exchanges with GoDaddy and two phone calls with them.

What worked?

• Both times I called GoDaddy I was directed to a live agent within 1 minute – pretty impressive.
• The agents appeared to know their stuff and were pleasant to talk with – no geek speak or speaking down to me.
• When I said I was pretty experienced (I once ran a call center for an Internet Service Provider) the agent listened and then adjusted his approach
• The 2nd agent took the time to review my prior calls and prior changes that I had made – no snap judgments.

What, shall we say, sucked?

• Even while I rave about the service – I actually had to solve the issue on my own.  I found that I made an error in one of the DNS entries – something the agents could have and should have seen.
• Email responses were 100% canned.  You could see that the paragraphs were formally written canned answers that the agent plugged in.  In both case, the answers were only marginally related to my question.
• The agents made no use of the history or flow of the exchange.  This was classic focus on the activity (writing email, keeping response time down) and not focusing on the results – solving the customer’s issue!
  • I emailed them with question and included all my account info including 4 digit PIN
  • They emailed me canned answer
  • I rewrote my email highlighting the specifics which their canned answer did not address
  • They emailed me that to answer that question they would need my 4 digit PIN

I started with email support because it was not urgent and usually you wait on hold forever for a live agent.  It was a surprising experience for me to have positive results on the phone and such poor results on the email.  When done well, email support can be so much cheaper for the provider so while pleased as a customer with the support, from a Customer Service Management perspective I wonder about their structure.