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I read all 3 bad reviews you got and I agree that none of them would make me not want to use your service in the future.
STOP! Do not make fun of Karen M. Karen-Tina and her imbuttant cause!
After all, someone abuses her trademarked (butt * politely whisper)!
I do not approve, unless a poll on LET shows that a majority is for or against something or other ('$7' excluded). The official poll results must be published on www.karenstrademarkedbutt.plug to be considered valid and binding.
FYI: @host_c your top provider status has been suspended for 0,3 ms (roughly equivalent to Karen's mental capacity) as a mild punishment and reminder that Karen might be on her way to a safe-zone.
No, but you should include a computer knowledge exam during the ordering process.
Anyone who cannot pass this exam is only allowed to order managed servers.
There's high chance she was looking for underwear or some stupid stereotypically girlish query like
[B-lister celebs] at a beach. Then, Google/FB feed it to her.Perhaps she forgot to turn on the NFSW filter. Perhaps she's so sensitive that too much of skin shown caused mental anguish.
Let me try. #ZAU-948353
By your concern, I suppose you could make pre/post-purchase questionnaire. Or make checkbox titled "By clicking this I agree I will not ask support to help me with basic setup for my vps"
Oliver is one of the best I am dealing with in that regard. Knows his shit and his attitude I can relate to all too well xD
Hi,
please let me clarify this:
There is no problem if a customer is asking howto do this or that or is asking for advice IF its clear that the customer actually tried to make it work and do his best to solve it, but for what ever reason it just does not work ( as expected ).
There is a big difference between:
"Please fix/make X work, i have no time/motivation/money to learn/do/pay for it myself, please do it for me"
vs.
"I tried to make X work, using $this config but it gave me $that error and according to $favorite_search_engine/AI this could be $foo. Do you have any idea/advice what could be wrong, i am somehow stuck"
The 1st will get a "sorry our prices do not include server configuration/management. The server you decided for is a self-managed server. Please use your favorite search engine / AI to find out howto make X work".
The 2nd will get from us a deep analyze what could be the reason, while counterchecking on our side while using our own knowledge and luck to hopefully find together with the customer the root cause of the problem and fix it WITH the customer -- not FOR the customer. If this is done with 1 ticket reply and 30 seconds, perfectly fine. If this needs multiple ticket replies with hours, then shame on the missing knowledge, but we will do that too. ( And learn ourself from it too by the way).
This. This is why I like you dude.
I'd far prefer honesty. It makes it far easier to tell whether you are competent, if you need a little suggestion you may not have thought of, or need to be avoided.
People brushing me off usually makes me suspect incompetence.
I personally prefer polite honesty without any kind of corporate speak and without the kind of raw, quasi-rude response that one might expect from someone you aren't paying money to.
While I've never done tech support or operated a helpdesk, I have done consultation work and some of the clients have been... Helpless, to say the least. If someone is struggling to configure a hostname, rather than questioning whether they really want a VPS, you should use that as an excuse to politely remind them that this is an unmanaged service:
Something like that will go a long way. They'll either reply saying something like "I know how to configure computers but I've never used a VPS. Is 'hostname' here supposed to be the same name I'd set with 'hostnamectl' or is it some VPS-specific thing?" or they'll say something like "Oh, I've never done this before. Can you do it for me?" which would open up the opportunity for you to charge for a managed service.
This. 10000% this. Each person is going to react differently, and it's not too difficult to figure out the best way to phrase things. There's no one right way to talk to everyone. If someone seems to know their shit, don't dumb things down for them. If someone seems like they clearly have no idea what they're doing, explain things with an emphasis on the upshot, not the cause.
Here are three examples of tickets I've had and how the interactions differed:
A good experience with a provider that is human, not corporate. - A VPS I had (and still have) with Aluy was due to be migrated from the UK to the Netherlands. For some reason, my VPS remained down and unable to start. When it was handled, I was accidentally given the wrong person's VPS (amusingly, it was a VPS owned by someone who was trying to set up a phishing site). There must have been a bug in the ticket system because the tickets I wrote got auto-closed without notifying them. Eventually I reached out here. They solved the issue and apologized. What struck me was that the interactions were not corporate at all. It really felt like talking to a human (because I was talking to a human). The takeaway I got from that interaction was that we're all human and we all make mistakes, and I don't feel anything negative about them. If anything, I walked away from it knowing that, if I have any future issues, I'll get to talk to a real human who acts like a real human. That's extremely important and single-handedly turned a disappointment into something that made me feel more confident about the service than before the issue.
A bad experience with a provider that was just reading from a script. - A VPS from OrangeVPS was temporarily suspended due to an IP blacklisting issue. When I reached out, I pointed out to them that it was not actually my IP that got blacklisted. Their entire /24 was blacklisted, which included the IP I was assigned to. They said that I was sending "email spam" (the report had nothing to do with email) and didn't seem to understand anything I was saying. They did unsuspend the VPS, but only after making me list to them how I'll "prevent any compromise in the future". There was no compromise, of course, but the fact that the support was essentially just reading from a script left a bad taste in my mouth. It's a shame because the service is great, but that single support incident was disappointing because they never acknowledged that the problem was on their side. At least they knew to ignore the uceprotect report, which was ironically, if I recall, the only report that was on my IP specifically. The other two reports were the blacklisting of the entire /24, and a silly duplicate report which boiled down to "we blacklisted this /24 for getting on a blacklist".
A good experience with a provider that did not dumb down the technical details. - A VPS from SiteHub suddenly started receiving duplicate IP datagrams. ICMP echo requests were coming back with many duplicates, while others were dying to an expired TTL. I collected as much information as I could and I reported it to them. They very quickly replied and fixed the issue, explaining exactly what went wrong. Apparently they host a Nigerian K root nameserver anycast instance and there was a routing misconfiguration. The support I talked to didn't sugarcoat what was happening or dumb it down. There was no "sorry, it was a networking issue and we fixed it". Instead, they actually told me what was happening because they could tell, based on my ticket to them, that I would understand their explanation. That left me understanding that they are absolutely a technically competent provider.
Rule of thumb for me, for a long time, has been "I have no issue with a customer who doesn't know anything about this. What I do have issues with is customers who doesn't know anything about this but act like they do, and even worse they are almost certainly aware THAT they don't know, they're just assholes.
However, a customer who openly tells me than they have no idea what to do and actually listens when I talk - those are the customers that I'll gladly help install goddamn Mozilla Firefox even if it takes 30 minutes."
nothing beats the truth
short and truth
is enough.