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Dumb/Drunk clients
They are pain in the arse, probably the most difficult part of running a web hosting business. Today some guy signed up with my shared hosting and requested I let him use custom nameservers. I told him IP address to use. I use same Ip for both ns1 and ns2. Client tells me he wants different IPs for ns1 and ns2 so i quickly login to solusvm and assign another IP to my own vm and reply to his ticket telling him the other IP.
After 20 minutes I get notification from paypal that that idiot has opened a "not as described dispute". I quickly login to whmcs and terminate his account and in paypal I sent him a refund. Then after half an hour I get a reply to his ticket. ""now that will work. I had just opened a dispute with paypal, just tell them the issue is resolved.""
Is this a game or what?? In all this time I have replied to tickets in less than 10 minutes.
Now he tells me
""I saw that and i realized we were not able to do business today. If you still want, i am sure i will be needing more hosting in a day or two, and if you are cool with offering me the 2 different nameservers, then we can be in business for years to come.""
I really want to tell him to fuck off. But I think that would be against the rules of business.
What would you do in this situation?
Thanks
Comments
Kindly say no thanks and move on, unless you need the money and you're willing to deal with this shit again.
I would tell him to fuck off, probably why I'm not a web host..
It all stems from knowing it first!
I'd tell him I don't think I'm the provider for him and then forget him. Then I would think about moving my second nameserver elsewhere. I'm not sure why my ns1 and ns2 were running on the same server. Maybe I was the one who was drunk to begin with.
"then we can be in business for years to come" ... lol
take his word on that. nameservers in working order, awaiting 5 year up front payment.
Well one lesson I have learned in this, as a business owner you can never get angry or fight with a client and give them what they deserve. But sometimes it gets really difficult.
It isn't a problem. You can use the same Ip. If you're hosting ns1 and ns2 on the same hardware, there's no benefit at all having more than one IP.
Thats usually the red flag. People with such proposals can be very often simply ignored as customers.
As to your question, I would kindly decline and maybe also point out the (premature) dispute as a reason. Not that this will really educate people (or in this case this particular person) but one might always hope. But doing business with him, definitely no.
Drop him as a client, move on.
Tell him no.
Because of the dispute.
I actually have a guy kind of like that who is one of my longest-time and highest grossing customers. As far as I can discern he has no idea why he wants a server or what to do with it, but he bought the biggest one he could get, a dozen domain names and a wildcard SSL certificate to go with it even though he doesn't run any websites on his server and doesn't grasp what the purpose of a SSL certificate is. He generates at least 80% of my support tickets and takes up a lot of my time, but somehow I can't quite bear to get rid of him.
For your guy I think if you can gracefully send him on his way, you should. If he's filing disputes already he probably will continue to do so and be a lot more trouble than he's worth.
Your customer is not going to purchase any other hosting account from you because of his intention is using a different IP Address for each Name Server.
You both don't have a patience.
1. Your customer don't even give you a chance to resolve ip address issue.
2. After your customer open a dispute you don't even contact your customer that you already resolve IP Address issue.
(I am not against you, Take this as a suggestion because of no one is going to tell your faults.)
Thanks everybody for replies.
I agree with you. I realized I shouldn't have sent the refund so quickly. It was partly my fault too.
Just ignore him and move on.
Side note, its worth have a second name server setup. Buy a cheap VPS (128MB RAM will do) and use it solely as a slave name server.
That way if anything happens to your main server, at least domains will still resolve for you customers.
I have a lot of guys who have A records for off site services like Team speak servers and game servers.
With a second name server, even if the main box goes down its only their website that's affected and their other services remain resolvable.
Why don't you just hire the LET true value 'PR' expert. He'll know what to do
But then this would become an apology thread.
As far as I understand from the original description @stallion responded accordingly in the ticket and that should be enough. I dont consider it as necessary to take extra "customer" retention steps after a dispute was filed (for no reason).
Lets not already turn off-topic
I had same/similar problem with client.
I have marked his invoice as unpaid, and i have send him suspension notice.
He payed again in same hour. Paypal dispute was opened by his friend who is paypal account owner as he don't remember that he made that particular transaction.
After all that drama, at the end client was suspended because of spamming.
et voilà :-D
Any chance of potential customers from this forum has just vanished. You don't sound very professional yourself, maybe I'd go as far to say a bit thick, another hostpapa wannabe.
You do realise GVH (to name of of a few) has said much much worse and still gets customers off LET.
There are people who act like that, this will not change regardless of what business you're in. I find it that approximately 20% of VPN customers are very impatient and act exactly like you described if they encounter a problem during the setting up of the service. But once they are all set, they will stick with you for long. Reason for that? In my opinion the impatient people don't like "change" and the inconveniences that come with it and since they won't blame themselves, they will blame you.
So as long as your service is fine he will stick with you, because he wouldn't like to go through the same again.
So my advice would have been - win him with extremely polite and customer oriented support, even if that means extra care.
That way you will save the bad review/comment which he will most likely post now, you will also get the chance of him referring you to other people, most likely the same people he would have complained to. (approx. 1 out of 4 of my customers are referred by friend)
But above all, get staff that will be dealing with that instead of you, as long as you do that job yourself you will always have cases like that.
And eventually if it gets to the worse and he does comment or post something negative somewhere public, go to that place and reply, not by attacking him but by saying that you have thousands of happy customers and you've learnt from that experience and you won't disappoint anybody else. Like hotels do when you say they are crap on TripAdvisor.
You already spent too much energy on this. Move on, forget this retard.
Agreed. just tell him to f off.
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OP was simply expressing deep frustration about the situation casually (some may argue a public forum is not the best place to vent as an employee) and is well aware that is not something employees should say to customers.
Anyhow, I'm not surprised OP took the steps he did, especially if the customer filed a chargeback and did not give the provider a chance to fill his request.
I guess it comes down to whether the provider feels it worthwhile to service the customer long-term, with the possibility of increased support cost (e.g. customer wants managed services if not included and uses chargeback again to coax provider to fulfill) but potentially satisfying the customer (e.g. some just need one-time setup and only minor changes after) to retain his business. Maybe some people like the challenge.
tl;dr: the chargeback in this case is not a good sign, but a customer is a customer, so just do your best to work with him or courteously conclude any exchanges and move on.