I think there are two philosophies at play here. Their philosophy is that every opportunity to make money should be taken. By charging a large pass replacement fee, they capitalize on their customers’ misfortune and land a little extra cash. However, people lose their passes rarely so the question is: is the occasional extra $50 in their pocket really worth the bad customer service. Am I really going to think about buying another pass when I know it costs another $50 if I lose it? In comparison, Copper Mountain in Colorado charges $15 to replace a very similar pass, so I’m not just making numbers up when I say it can be done cheaper.

BUT, imagine if I had contacted them, and they said “because you’re a valued customer and have committed to skiing with us, your season pass replacement is FREE”. Might I not be inclined to tell my friends about the awesome customer service I just received? I might even be inclined to tell the whole world how awesome Kirkwood is. Is it better to have my $50 or my eternal gratitude, that will bring more of my friends to the resort? Which makes more money for the business in the end?

Of course at the end of the day, I did find my season pass, so I won’t be forking over $50 to them any time soon, but…now there’s inspiration for this blog post…. The moral of the story is: if it’s easy for you, make it free for your customers, and make them feel special. That’s worth much more in future dollars than the money you can make from their misfortune.

Such has been the story with me and Comcast. I get one disconnection, I shrug it off. I get another at 1am, and I take it as a sign to go to bed early, but today I had several disconnects during the day, while I was working, when I needed my connection to do work. At this point I was already filled with emotions built up from having terrible service over the last three days. So when I tweeted about it, I was already in a very negative mindset. Luckily, Comcast is one of the few companies that actually has very competent twitter support that can actually solve problems.

Nonetheless, how much better would it be if Comcast paid attention to the data that they already have. They know how many times my modem disconnected in the last week. If it happens once, send me an email telling me it was a minor hiccup. If it happens twice, have customer support notified right away. Don’t wait for my complaint! Email me, tell me you know the source of the problem, and when it will be fixed. How much cheaper will it be than dealing with crabby negative customers like me after 3 days of bad service?

This post takes me back to the saga I had with bluehost, who for several months would not admit that the box I was being hosted on was being oversold so badly that the database was down on a regular basis. Don’t let it get to that point. Be proactive in your customer support and your customers will love you.

Of course, I had once again fallen for the old obscure-naming-to-confuse-customers trick. Ah USPS, you got me again! Yes, this is not the first time that I had to google what Arrival At Unit means. You’d think it was your Unit right? Your apartment, condo, or house maybe? No, of course not. Don’t you know that Unit actually means a local USPS facility? You didn’t? That’s weird, I thought that was common knowledge. That’s not at all misleading.

A quick google search yields 630,000 results for people asking questions about USPS Arrival At Unit. And this problem has been around ever since the tracking sytem went into place. Downright embarrassing, when it would take next to no time to fix the wording. Oh well.

Or, you could reply right away and say “Sorry, I don’t know the answer right now, but I’ll get back to you in a couple [hours,days,weeks]“. Which do you think makes the customer feel better?

Savvy companies know that the psychological need for immediate gratification is at an all time high, especially in this age of Internet-driven attention deficit. So please, don’t keep your customers in the dark, panicked, growing more disgruntled by the moment. Turn their concern with your products into their delight with your customer service by promptly answering all emails. It’s that easy to turn potential detractors into your best supporters. All it takes is a customer service culture that makes this concept a number one priority.

I’ve included a one liner history of my interaction with them. My responses are paraphrased, while theirs are direct quotes from their emails. Note that they usually respond hours later when the site has restored itself due to their reaper scripts constantly restarting the database.

• February 13 Yan: Database problem.
• February 13 Bluehost: The processes on your server have been shut down. The site is showing up and running.
• At this point I call them, have a chat, they say they have had ongoing problems and they will be fixed. I ask them to notify customers. They do not.
• Mar 9 Bluehost: Currently MySQL on your server (box12) is overloaded.
• Mar 10 Bluehost: It looks like you are exceeding your own mysql active connection limit which is 30
• Mar 10 Yan: How can I exceed 30 connections with a blog that gets low traffic and runs 5 php processes? Database is down again.
• Mar 10 Bluehost: At this time there are no connections to terminate.
• Mar 17 Yan: Down again.
• Mar 17 Bluehost: Checking the sites both show up an running. At this time there is no issue at this time.
• Database goes down 10+ times between March and April. I just wait, hoping they will fix it.
• Apr 17 Yan: Down again.
• Apr 17 Bluehost: I have checked your databases, and do not see the connections maxed out.
• After several angry emails, my ticket is escalated to the next level of support. The person seems more intelligent than the previous support staff who clearly have no ability to investigate past events.
• Apr 18 Yan: Why do I see scripts that constantly restart mysql?
• Apr 18 Bluehost: When there are problems with mysql the server will try to restart it.
• Apr 18 Yan: Brilliant answer.
• Apr 25 Bluehost: I can see that Mysql has been having some problems on your server. (Ya think!?)
• Apr 25 Yan: Who is eating my connections? I asked before and no one answered how 5 php processes are eating 30 connections.
• Apr 25 Bluehost: [...]Not necessarily from your account[...] To be honest some boxes seem to have more problems then others and box 12 happens to be one of those boxes.
• Apr 25 Yan: How about telling your customers that box 12 has some capacity issues and moving them off?
• Apr 28 Bluehost: I have been keeping a close eye on box12 it hasn’t been having any issues the last few days. There is no capacity problems.
• Apr 28 Yan: Down again.
• Apr 30 Bluehost: no response….
• I call them up. The support person verifies that there have been ongoing issues on box 12. I ask why the customers have not been notified. She says because they prefer to spend their energy on fixing the problem and probably most customers don’t use the database. I say, fine, but it’s been 2 months. She says she doesn’t have a good answer. I inform her that their failure to be proactive is resulting in this blogpost.

Well, that’s the story. Draw your own conclusions. Either there are some serious miscommunication issues inside this company, or the support staff have been lying to me outright. In either case, it’s not a company I wish to continue to do business with. I’m looking for a new hosting provider to move away from Bluehost.

They’ve moved me to a different server now in hopes that this new home will have less downtime…however as of today they have still to my knowledge not contacted anyone else on box 12 to tell them about ongoing problems.

I ordered some pants and a blazer from them, and while I really dug the pants, the blazer was a bit large, so I had to return it. It took them some time to get to my return but Chris himself contacted me by email, and with a couple instantaneous email exchanges and a phone call, my return was processed very quickly. With inbox bankruptcy becoming a fad, it’s nice to see some people still realize that people love to get instant replies to their emails. Instant reply = instant satisfaction, no matter the content :-) Thanks for the quick service, Chris!


We regret that we cannot receive your e-mail at this time. We will reopen on Monday, April 28th at 9:00am. Please Re-submit your inquiry after that date.


Newsflash guys: this is the Internet. Just because your store is ‘closed’ doesn’t mean you can’t accept email. Asking your customers to re-submit an inquiry is plain silly. How about a nice friendly “We’ve received your email and we will get to it as soon as we get back.” What is the world coming to?