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Providers, what do you want your customers to know?
I'd like to think that customers and providers want to work with each other to ensure mutual benefit. However, there are cases where providers and customers have differing point-of-views that lead to conflict and LET drama posts.
It's easy to be a customer and less so to be a provider, so..
Providers, what do you want your customers to know?
What knowledge you wish your customers would get: if only he's a provider like me?
What's it like to walk a mile in your shoes?
Comments
Just because you pay someone doesn't mean you get to treat them any less than human, be fair and reasonable and 9/10 they will do the same.
Communication is important. If you feel like you're being treated wrongly, maybe the provider has no idea that you feel that way. Maybe to them it's just business as usual, the way everyone does things and no one has ever really complained about. Start a friendly conversation. Share your thoughts and concerns. Try not to waste their time, they have a lot of customers to take care of, but open up a line of communication and just ask "Why do you do things this way" instead of "I can't believe those jerks do this." Maybe you learn something, maybe they do.
This. People often forget basic decency. In my previous job, customers would start calling us as theives and how they will report us to the police for fraud in their very first 2-3 lines of the email. In all cases, their credit card has been compromised and all they had to do is file a chargback. As a provider you get hit twice. The rude email which makes you feel hurt and then the loss of money. I have never seen customers apologize after behaving this way
Maybe don't be a dick?
Realize that you are not the only client that a provider has to take care of.
A few things I'd love that clients knew or did:
Not a hosting provider, but I've noticed that a lot of providers appreciate it if you ask them upfront about hosting something potentially problematic (DDoS magnet, controversial content, etc.), and will then often go the extra mile to make it work.
My routine is when someone is getting all in capslock and urban dictionary that i don't react to his insults, because if you do he will win the discussion, i'll play nicely around and in most cases he turns into a happy user afterwards. I have someone acting like this since 3 years now and he's coming back every single time.
The worst thing you can do is going all ragemode in forums and feed the trolls, i've seen some providers doing this here.
But yeah, my points:
"XYZ isn't working", "Have a problem with XYZ" , "XYZ works somewhere else"
^In isolation without any further information is in no way shape or form helpful when it comes to troubleshooting your problem.
Also, latency.. its real.
1) Paying with Bitcoin does not mean you don't have to follow the TOS.
2) When you agree to something, don't complain later that it's unfair.
If it takes longer before we respond to your ticket doesn't mean we're ignoring or hating you, it means that either 1) the problem is harder to fix; or 2) we're busy.
When it does, don't bump your ticket, that'll put you in the bottom of the list and a response will take even longer
If you want to get attention of your host, best way to do that is to file a chargeback.. Works everytime! Guaranteed.
Just make sure you've backed up your data before that since your service will go offline straight after that guaranteed :P
That statement right there might get you added to the hosting blacklist as well. If that is meant as a joke it is a very bad one. If it is not you will never even know the name of any network I am involved with.
That is the worst way you can handle anything with a host or person.
You'll also likely end up on FraudRecord and find it more difficult to get services in other places. Seems like a legit use of it, regardless of how that service ignores false reports and takedown requests.
You know if multiple people do this most likely the hosts paypal get frozen. . .
Lots of interesting knowledge here:
Let me add one more:
Both of these statements have conflicts
Providers, do you prefer multiple questions in one ticket or when client puts each separate question in separate tickets?
The downside of all-in-one is it's easier for tech support to answer one question and mark ticket as solved and gloss over the remaining problems, which quickly turns into a mess. Filling multiple tickets at the same time may be considered rude or overwhelming on the provider's side though.
I'm not a provider so to speak (I work for Rackspace as a SysAd), but my biggest thing is this:
Tell me what you want, not how you want it done. I understand the Ubuntu forums said chmod 777 is the fix here, but no - that's never a fix. That's an extremely simple example, but it gets the point across. Tell me what you want the thing to do, not necessarily how it does it. Focusing too much on the how keeps us from doing the thing properly and nobody gets the desired outcome.
Also, if you want multiple things done, open multiple tickets. It doesn't hurt anybody and it helps to churn through the list of things to do without worrying about changing context or missing important details. However - if you want the same thing done in multiple places, the same ticket is fine.
I'm a tier triple A customer. I'm too good with providers.
But someday somebody will tits up and sue FraudRecord , that day will be an amazing day. Such a cancerous and kind of illegal tool. It will not be for money of course, just for the trolling. Who had like to see such thing? I would pay premium pop corn for that.
I like BuyVM and other's providers methods, ask for the license, verify all that shit then enable the account. FraudRecord is super abused.
I think it depends - I personally don't mind people asking multiple questions in a single ticket - if they make it clear that they actually have the separate questions - and if the ticket is easy to read.
It's not long time ago that I got a ticket that was like 1 A4 page long, and it was just one huge block of text - no new lines, nothing.
Just to understand the ticket I had to read it multiple times to figure out that there was a total of like 15 questions.
For that specific case - I'd love to get 15 individual tickets, because I spend more time trying to read and understand the ticket than I spend replying to it.
In other cases I have customers that are extremely good at formatting tickets and having multiple questions in a list - where I can easily quote them.
And in those case it was way faster getting all questions answered than if the customers would have created individual tickets.
But I generally let people do what they want, as long as they do tickets - if they're bad at writing tickets, well - then getting their reply also takes longer time.
Honestly if I have to open a ticket to ask shit then is not a good provider or you dont have enough experience. Read the TOS and Policies of the provider, if it's clear enough, you are good to go.
People do open tickets for presales questions as well that can be very specific to a given customer so the provider can't list it in their KB or in their TOS or policies
You are not the first person to think of that. It's been attempted before. "Sharing customer data with a third party" is illegal, if you haven't put it in your terms. Any provider who didn't put it in their terms and shared the data may be sued, not FR. You don't get punished for receiving data. The fault is on the provider's side, if they failed to explain how they use customer information.
That you are right about. This is why the whole system is being redesigned. I hope you'll appreciate the changes and the new report handling designed to reduce abuse.