Creating Detractors and Why you should not use AIT.com

I continue to be amazed at how dysfunctional organizations can be. I recently had an experience with my PREVIOUS web hosting company, AIT.com that does such a great job of explaining HOW ORGANIZATIONS CREATE DETRACTORS that I will share it with you for two primary purposes:

1. To illustrate to my corporate readers how organizations create detractors through the dysfunction of how they handle their customer interactions, and
2. To use word of mouth marketing to tell everyone that they should NOT use AIT.com for their web-hosting provider

The morning of February 15th I noticed that my email box was not receiving inbound email. That's strange because I receive many emails a day and I am in the middle of a project that required my client to send me several documents. After placing a call to my web hosting company I learned that they had migrated some Windows servers and had a disaster on their hands as a result. All of their Windows clients were down and they had Microsoft there working on the problem. I went a full day with no email and no communication from my hosting company. I called several times, with long wait times and a few disconnected calls. Not a pleasant experience.

I got busy doing other things and thought, I can live a day without email, and went about my work using my Yahoo account for critical exchange of documents. The next day I called again, and again, and again and spoke with several customer service agents who shared with me their own frustration over the situation including one agent that told me she had been there all night due to the problem and another agent who actually told me that "it isn't our problem, it's Microsoft's problem". I could not believe what I was hearing. My business was down for over 24 hours and they tell me it's not their problem!

To keep this posting to a reasonable reading size I will summarize my UNBELIEVABLE customer experience.

* I was down for a full week with no answers as to when I would be able to receive email again. Keep in mind this is my business, not personal email.
* While on hold I all you hear is how they "put the customer first", and trying to pitch additional services that at the time I had no interest in hearing.
* Several times my wait time was 5 minutes, then 7 minutes, then 11 minutes, then 1 minute and after a while I was simply disconnected.
* A couple of times I asked to speak to a supervisor who I never spoke with and once I was disconnected in the process. They had my phone number, but didn't have the courtesy to call me back.
* After several calls, I was sent satisfaction surveys, stating that my problem had been resolved and requesting that I rated my satisfaction. I would respond to the survey with my COMPLETE DISSATISFACTION with no response from the company or any acknowledgement that they were trying to resolve my problem.
* When I followed up on my "closed ticket", they would reopen the ticket and tell me they would not close it until they spoke with me and confirmed that my problem has been resolved. Several hours later I would receive another survey and email stating my problem was resolved (these email are to my Yahoo account because I haven't received email at Windward for days).
* After several days I found a new web hosting company and switched providers to www.1and1.com (a referral from my web designerweb designer).. ...can you say word of mouth marketing.
* One week later I was back up and running at 1and.com with no word at all from AIT.com. Still haven't heard a word from them. I lost all email sent to me from 2/15 - 2/21. We cancelled out account, stopped payment on any outstanding billings and will tell everyone we know not to do business with them. Silence from AIT.com....

If I had time on my hands, I would have called every media outlet I know to see if I could get this on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or other mainstream media outlets. Ok, so it's not as big a deal as Jet Blue leaving passengers on the tarmac for hours, but it was a big deal to me. It cost me days of productivity and delays in communicating with prospective clients for future projects. It cost me real money!

This story illustrates how dysfunctional organizations are at truly embracing a customer centric culture. The front cover of Business Week this week shows the "Customer Service Champs". There is a story about a Southwest airline passenger with a mess of a travel experience and shortly afterwards received 2 free tickets from Southwest in the mail. All companies have issues; it's how you handle them and how well your processes are designed to address the problems that make the difference between detractors, promoters and neutrals. I don't know if the Southwest passenger is a promoter, but he is clearly not a detractor. My experience shows an organization a clear blueprint on how to create a detractor and I hope I can have a lasting impact on their future revenues by telling everyone I know NOT to buy services from AIT.com.

One last note on the power of word of mouth. Today I received a comment on my "Don't buy Mercedes"posting from June of last year. The comment shared a similar experience with Mercedes and his very positive experience with Lexus describing it as finding "heaven". The Internet provides a perpetual record of customer experience. So this is not a one-time thing, my experience with AIT.com could spread the word for years to come.