Tuesday March 11
 
12:31
 
My experience with dotserving.com is almost over

…but not quite.

Despite the fact that they never set up my account because they couldn’t get “voice confirmation” that I existed, dotserving charged my credit card. So in dotserving’s eyes, I exist enough to charge my card, but don’t exist enough to get the account I’d paid for.

I’d been emailing the *owner* with presales queries 2-3 days before signing up. I’d told them which of their current users had referred me. All of that meant nothing. Until they heard my sweet voice, I only existed for card charging purposes, not account using purposes.

I say “almost over, but not quite” because dotserving had the choice of *cancelling* the charge on my card, or *refunding*. With a cancellation, the transaction simply disappears. With a refund, I lose the currency spread and movement between charging and refunding, approx 5-10%. Despite being clear to request a cancellation so that I am not charged anything, they processed it as a refund - so I’ll be charged something for this bad experience.

Dotserving claims that they called me, but couldn’t get through to me. With the call options on my phone, even if my phone is out of service, I’ll get a message to say that there was a call when I come back in service. There was no message - so in my opinion, that is just an excuse. Even if they did call and couldn’t get through to me, like they claim, pure business logic and customer service means that you send a notification mail, or you try again. I was customer number 666 (how appropriate, eh?) so they hardly are rushed off their feet. Once again, I’ll repeat that they knew which of their trusted customers had referred me, and I’d been in email contact with them for several days.

It really sounds like ass covering for slow service to me - they are probably not big enough to be able to handle new accounts during the night, but they don’t want to admit it. At the weekend dotserving tried to cover non and slow response to presales questions by claiming they had sent emails but I didn’t receive them. I gave them the benefit of the doubt about emails, but I now suspect that was ass covering also - or that their email servers lose emails.

Dotserving claim they responded to my support tickets within 20 minutes, and sent me mail with their log records to verify it. What they missed out is that the support replies were nothing but “wait 4-5 hours” until Billing comes in, in addition to the 4 hours I’d been waiting. They didn’t give a toss about solving the issue, or checking their systems. Again, if they’d made a call to me, that should have been on the system.

Rather than looking at this from a cool head business perspective and saying “We screwed up” or “We should review our procedures to ensure this doesn’t happen again”, the responses from dotserving’s owner have been “I wont debate this” and attempting to post on my blog.

I initially signed up for dotserving based on a friend’s recommendation. He has had no problems with them, and I should mention that in fairness. But I have had problems. If the support had actually bothered to try to resolve the issue and set up my account, or the replies this morning had been friendly and admitting they had issues, or they’d said “Hey, you had a bad experience, try the first month on us and you’ll see that we’re OK” (I’d have said no, but it would have been a good gesture), I’d probably not be writing this now. I suspect dotserving are one of those companies that are good as long as you don’t have any problems with the process - but in my case, they certainly fell down.

In the big picture of things, I’ve not lost a lot of money on this (assuming the refund goes through), and I didn’t give control of my website to them, so I had no downtime. I’ve only lost time and energy - so I should be thankful for that.

Rant over. Let’s hope the amount charged to my credit card isn’t too much.