by I received an Important Message from the people at Register365 this week to say (in a very roundabout way) that they have decided to discontinue their telephone support and replace it with a more efficient and effective chat/email-based system.
Thankfully, I haven’t had to call their support lines that much since becoming a customer some 3-4 years ago but whenever I did, I actually found their level of service to be pretty good. They usually sorted out my issue there and then and seemed to know what they (and I) were talking about most of the time.
What struck me as a little ironic is the fact that this is being put to me as a better, more streamlined service when it is in fact clearly about cost and nothing else (in my opinion). It is also somewhat surprising that should choose to take this step in light of the recent bad press being directed their way as a result of a number of significant power outages at their sister company Hosting365.
Then again, if faced with the choice of more expensive annual hosting fees versus reduced (or no) telephone support, I know which one I would choose.
Only time will tell if this will work in their favour or not.
Hi James,
Many thanks for your feedback. You are right, it does boil down to costs – but by removing the freephone option, we can increase our 24/7 live chat/email team by more than 8 full time people, thus dramatically improving the speed of response by those methods.
Hi Stephen,
The chat-based system sounds the more promising and I can see myself using that more than the email system. I’d imagine most others would share the same preference due to the shorter response time(s). I can’t really complain that much since I rarely used the old telephone service (thankfully) and hope not to need the new systems either 🙂
I suppose my original comments were more to do with the timing of this announcement than anything else. I would have thought that this move (at this time) would have opened 365 up to more criticism (in light of other recent events), and potentially lead to loss of more customers to other hosting providers.
In any case, thanks for taking the time to post your comments.
And how have you found it so far? As a new customer I’m less than impressed by the service. Having to wait around for an email that doesn’t come or for live chat that seems to take about an hour to be responded to is frustrating, and then to get a canned response that doesn’t address my actual query – my own support requests have been going on for about 2 weeks now. Seems to me that a phone call should have it sorted within an hour.
Yeah, it hasn’t really impressed me either. I have only tried the chat service once or twice and on both occasions I found it difficult (and more time consuming) to convey what I was asking for via an instant message.
Also, I’m not sure that the person at the other end had very good English so this made it even more difficult for them to understand what I was asking for. In this instance, a phone call would certainly have been easier I feel.