The negligence of a company
March 10th, 2008 Posted in BusinessLast week I and a few others spent hours moving email hosting due to an unfortunate circumstance. One of the local ISPs was having mail filtering trouble. Spam was coming in and legit mail was going out days later and as far as I know the problem still persists.
My issue here is that a few of our clients were using the ISP as a filtering agent for their exchange boxes. This is normally an ok scenario when you are dealing with minute delays, but when mail starts disappearing you know there is trouble. For a couple of brave clients, we moved their mx to our servers, the others are still waiting…
These things happen. Servers go down and email gets lost. This I understand. Sure it could have been fixed very quickly if the ISP knew anything about mail servers, spam filtering or network routing, but even so, I understand. What I don’t understand is the fact that they did not make any attempt to contact their customers and explain the problems. Instead they denied they were having a problem at all. Now a week later, business has been lost, friends have been snubbed and even a missed party or two.
Customer service is not always easy. In fact, it is probably the toughest part of our business. However, if you explain the problem to the customer they will understand (at least 99% of the time). I guess they thought nobody would notice…
-mike
P.S. The majority of our clients were unaffected by the disruption becuase we do not use that ISP for mail hosting or filtering.