Gandi is in the top5 of the domain sellers worldwide. They have margins slightly above that of the competitors from the top5 but claim that this is compensated by excellent customer service and ideal philosophy (not trying to squeeze every last penny from the customer or fooling the customer in any way). They claim to be ethic too.
I didn’t want to bring this out but the latest post from their blog was the final drop.
That blog post tells us that their customer service is great because they have an on-line form that you can use to submit your issue and wait in the hope of getting it resolved “by one of the support team members, who takes care to answer you as soon as possible“.
GoDaddy charge less for domains. BUT They do have a contact telephone for the customer service.
So how is Gandi better? How can they use better customer service argument to explain higher prices?
Why would you want quick support anyway? Couldn’t you wait several hours?
Not if you’re running a business and the issue is critical to running this business!
We faced this half a year ago. Gandi discovered that some of the domains we have purchased contained other company’s trademark names as part of them. Without any further notification Gandi has disabled all domains that we had in possession, even the ones that didn’t violate anything. Email notification was sent to inform us that violating domains have been disabled.
Alright, I admit it was our fault in the first place that we haven’t properly read the paperwork. But that doesn’t give Gandi the right to disable domains that are not violating anything.
Once I discovered our main website stopped working I started searching for any Gandi contact telephone numbers so that I could resolve this as quickly as possible.
Guess what? Gandi didn’t have any support telephone numbers. Neither had they any working telephone numbers stated in their whois information.
The only option I was left with was the on-line form that Gandi staff is so proud of. It took over 24 hours for Gandi support person to read my support request and fix the non-violating domain.
Our main website was out of service for over 24 hours and we lost at least 20 customers.
After this incident I stopped thinking Gandi is democratic, ethic or fair.
The customer service is also unacceptable. If you can’t afford telephone support you should at least give some mechanism of contacting in urgent situations.
They didn’t offer any excuse or apology and I will be moving my domains to another registrar in the near future.
Feedback on poor Gandi support from other customers:
Update: Gandi feedback form doesn’t display and tells me “You can only provide your feedback via this form one time per week.”. I didn’t give any feedback yet but the page is telling me they’ve already had enough from me this week.
