Real customer service experience at Gandi
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:
- http://rocr.xepher.net/weblog/archives/000103.html
- http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/internet-sites/gandi-net/189266/
- http://hostjury.com/reviews/gandi
- http://www.100best-domain-names.com/user-reviews.php?company=60
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.
March 13th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Hi Reactive Software team. I’m sorry you feel you’ve had a bad experience.
I appreciate you’ve been upfront that you bought a set of domains which infringed on other company trademarks which is why (from what you have said) our support team will have suspended your domain names.
However, if your main business domain name was not involved in your trademark infringements and we disabled it inappropriately, then I can only apologise as I would also be extremely annoyed in the same situation.
I will check out the full case history with our support team and come back to you with a more detailed response.
With regards to customer support response times, we do provide a 24hr email response service which I believe is what you experienced. With regards to comparing our service with Go-Daddy, take a look at a blog article by another customer who has experienced both services, this provides you with an alternative view:
http://www.miconian.com/2007/04/why-i-deliberately-overpaid-for-my.html
Essentially they can provide a telephone service but the costs are recovered by constantly selling other services to you including sales calls.
Get back to you soon.
Wendy
March 16th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Hi Reactive Software team,
I’ve now got the full details of the case that you are referring to. It seems that you registered 13 domains relating to password recovery for major online providers, e.g.
hotmail-password-recovery.com
myspace-password-recovery.com
etc.
Our team monitors registrations like these as they often related to phishing or spamming activity, which we at Gandi do not support or tolerate. We therefore took action and suspended the domains and the account.
The reason we suspended the whole account was that more often that not these types of registrations are done by professional fraudsters or spammers, and the whole account needs to be terminated.
If in your case if you had registered these domains without realising the consequences of the trademark and security infringements, I will take your word for that and assume it was innocent, but you must surely recognise that this looks very dodgy and understand we have an obligation to protect other people’s trademarks and support internet security.
In any case we received a mail from you on Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:04:18 asking why we suspended your domains, and at Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:03:59 (10 hours later) we replied to you to inform you your mail domain was reactivated.
I apologise for the inconvenience this caused you, but in registering these domains that clearly violate our T&Cs and trademark law, you must understand that you put your account at risk. I’m glad we were able to get you back online with your main domain, and wish you all the best for the future whether it is with Gandi or not.
Thanks,
Wendy
March 16th, 2009 at 08:46 pm
Wendy,
My main point: there’s no way to get in touch with Gandi if there’s an urgent situation.
I am ok with Godaddy trying to sell me something else (which is not too obtrusive so far) in return for a 24/7 telephone number and a smaller fee (it’s not too much but why should I pay more if I don’t get more?).
Eugene
April 3rd, 2009 at 02:08 pm
Full dialogue at:
http://www.gandibar.net/post/2009/03/13/Customer-satisfaction-at-Gandi#comments
Thx for discussion Eugene. Wendy