Change the tone of your support emails

AFFIRMATIVE.

The "Dear Customer" is definitely a distancing tactic. "Robot voice," as I call it, has the advantage in that it allows the company to enforce uniform behavior, predictable results, etc. It's a product of the industrial age, and is reinforced tremendously by outsourced call centers in their uber-efficient glory.

What I've noticed, though, is that many people adopt the Robot Voice even when their company doesn't enforce it. They think it's the voice of professionalism, as if customers wanted all the humanity stripped for their interactions in any business transaction. Some employees probably find it comforting, as it allows them to draw a hard line between their professional and personal identities.

I do think that more and more companies will explicitly request that employees talk in a personal, human voice. The benefits are too obvious to ignore for long.

The Planet is the most annoying, rude, problematic company after Ev1Servers being sold to them.

Their main concern is to "steal" people's money as legally as they can. And it does not matter even if you are a long time customer. They only want to fill up their servers with customers.

The Planet is a big time looser and internet killer.

ThePlanet is the most inept hosting company ever. Do yourself a favor and use Rackspace or godaddy or anyone. Hell give your nephew $10 bucks a month and let him host it on his 4 year old PC on a dsl account. You will likely get better results than thePLANET.com

They have lots of amusing lines. My personal favs;
- When your site is down and they can't fix it they say "Thank you for choosing The Planet"
- In the middle of an issue when it's far from resolved (both by online ticket and on the phone) they ask you if there's anything else they can help you with. Nope, just the issue I called you about but you've yet to resolve, thanks.

The Planet used to be _okay_, but now they're pretty terrible. They just upgraded to Orbit 2 and things are more difficult to find, the HTML/CSS is an absolute mess, and I won't even go into the design (okay, it looks like it was exported from Frontpage). They don't resolve issues, technical support on the phone tells you to create a ticket for everything, the billing department has no power at all – everything must go to the accounting department who, no, you can't talk to directly...they must be contacted by an internal ticket. Their monitoring is terrible, reporting downtime when in fact the monitor that is down, they took 3 months to set a basic hardware firewall up on my account and get it configured, and their sales reps beg and whine (no, really, call and ask for Emily Rice).

I'm glad I switched to Rackspace where I have a team of customer support and technical people that handle my account M-F 9-5. They know who I am and I know who they are. Hell, they even have a photo up on their website so I can SEE who I'm talking to. How awesome is that? Well, paired with the fact that they actually answer questions, apologize profusely when they screw up, and they can get very technically knowledgeable people on the line, it's really awesome.

I made the mistake of trying to order a server from ThePlanet.

Read the sorry details here. It involves credit card fraud on their part.
http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php...

When I was with The Planet I had to deal with pushy sales guys and getting passed off to multiple departments. The SLA was horrible and it seems like they knowingly recycle bad hard drives and hardware. NOT worth their inflated price.

I recently switched to corenetworks.net, and have been 100x's happier. Fast support and they work with you even though they are 'unmanaged'.

I don't dispute that you set up what was "quoted" My dispute is that what you quoted was not what I had asked for and that the quote failed to address the additional features I requested. When I read the "provisioning" ticket my requests were conspicuously absent from that information so it appears that sales "negelected" to inform techs of my needs in the first place.

Had the quote said "un-managed server" I would have known it was wrong before signing an agreement. Also remaining at issue is the fact that I specifically prohibited the use of the credit card to be entered into any database. The quote remained silent as to the "type" of server other than hardware specifications so I had to assume it was for what I had asked for.

You say you want to continue to work with me on this...then just credit back the charge and we will call it concluded.

Yes...after the fact...not in the quote request.
All I want is for you to terminate and refund...not keep arguing a dead issue.

I keep getting ticket responses that continue to totally ignore other tickets and my original faxed information regarding my credit card information.

I did NOT provide the original credit card information in Orbit. I faxed a one-time authorization and someone at the Planet ignored that form and entered the information against specific instructions not to do so.

What is it they don't understand about NO CREDIT CARD and CANCELED ACCOUNT ???

----
Ticket Number: 5954839PLNT
Deborah M. 8/19/2009 10:16:25 AM Hello,

Thank you for contacting The Planet. I do apologize for any inconveniences. Any credit card you provide to us or into our system through https://orbit.theplanet.com or https://orbit2.theplanet.com remains on file until you provide a new card. The new card then replaces the previous card. If you would like the current credit card on file removed, we can do that for you; just update this ticket to that effect and we'll get to work on that as soon as possible. Please let us know if there is anything further we can assist you with. Thank you for choosing The Planet!

Sincerely,

Deborah M.
Billing Care Specialist
The Planet
www.theplanet.com
1-866-325-0045, option 3

Really I just came here to share some funny lines support gave me, but since you've now crashed our little party here's all the gory details of my fun experience with The Planet:

What began as a fairly simple email issue eventually spiraled into a thirteen hour fiasco where more was broken at the end than the beginning, and the only thing more scarce than solutions were updates about the status of the problems.

Sometime in the early morning on Thursday, April 2 email stopped sending and receiving from the server. At 9:46AM CDT a ticket was submitted containing the error message being generated, and stating the urgency of this problem to our clients. Nearly an hour and a half and two updates to the ticket later we finally received a canned apology and message that the problem was being looked into by Glen Ruffin. Forty five minutes later he stated that he had performed an update on Exim and the mail server was working again. It clearly was not, as Exim continued to fail repeatedly (error message again posted in the ticket) and no mail was being delivered to or from the server. Then within twenty minutes both Dustin S. and Laura G. updated the ticket stating that they were investigating the problem and that we should stand by for further updates. Nearly an hour and two requests for status updates later we received another message from Laura G. that she was still looking into the problem, followed less than twenty minutes later by another message stating that she couldn’t find anything wrong and would leave the ticket open for further work by someone else.

At this point, with no clear direction and over four hours peak downtime, I placed a call to the tech support phone number, where I reached Robert I. He pulled up the ticket and started to look into the issue. He stated that he would look into it and run some of the scripts available to them to further investigate the problem. I was asked if we had made any customizations to the mail system, which we had not. He stated that while he would be looking into the issue, the resident email expert was Gwen, who would be arriving in thirty minutes, and she likely would be the one to resolve the problem. I hung up with Robert and shortly thereafter he updated the ticket stating that he was running a CPanel/WHM update to try and fix the problem. Ten minutes later he replied that he was running an update to Apache to try fixing the problem. To my knowledge the mail server Exim has no interaction with the web page server Apache, so it’s unknown why this avenue was even pursued. Another status update was requested forty minutes later, and at 2:52PM Robert informed us that he was running one more script to try and fix it, then he was turning it over to someone else.

Shortly thereafter most of the sites on our server that use MySQL databases stopped functioning, producing an error that PHP no longer had the required protocols to connect to the MySQL server (both of which are located on the same machine, and had been functioning without any issues for many months before). This action took the issue from one that only affected some users behind the scenes, to one that completely disabled the majority of websites on our server in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. The error was posted in the ticket, and Robert replied that he had done all he could do. He suggested we try deleting some of the mail waiting to be delivered to see if that solved the problem! We of course replied that deleting undelivered mail was completely unacceptable, and asked that the ticket be escalated to a supervisor. This did not happen, and instead Robert replied again and stated that since we had said there were no custom configurations he went ahead and started upgrading things in an attempt to solve the problem. He then stated that he was going to upgrade our version of Apache, but didn’t want to make any changes without our authorization! And finally he stated that he would be handing this ticket off to someone else, thanked us for our patience, thanked us for choosing The Planet, and told us to stand by for updates.

After another forty five minutes of complete downtime for most sites on the server had passed, and without any updates to the support ticket, I decided to call and see if I could speak to Gwen. I reached Dustin, who said Gwen was currently on the phone. I asked to have her call me immediately when she was finished, and he took my number and indicated that she would be calling me back shortly. After another full hour and a half, and a couple more ticket updates by us, Gwen finally updated us that the MySQL problem was still being worked on, and the Exim problem had been escalated to CPanel. CPanel then connected to the server and solved the Exim problem within approximately ten minutes! We again attempted to speak to Gwen to find out where we were at with the MySQL problem. She asked us to provide them with a list of all the sites experiencing errors, along with all the error messages and line numbers they were generating from! While completely pointless since they all started generating the exact same error at exactly the same time, we obliged and spent the next fifteen minutes updating the ticket with a list of the fifty three sites that were all generating the same error message! Gwen then Googled the error message that was being generated and pasted in a link which we had found in a matter of seconds after the errors were first generated (which was now more than three hours ago), stating that it may be helpful to us, and again thanked us for choosing The Planet. We replied right after that stating that we hadn’t at any point made any changes that would have caused that error, it was due to the upgrades they had done in their futile attempts to resolve the mail problems, but she was never heard from again, all the while the majority of our sites were still completely inaccessible.

Thirty more minutes later we asked again for a status update, and had to wait a further thirty five minutes for Matt V. to respond. He apologized for the issue, asked us to stand by while he investigated it, said he would update us, asked us to contact them if we required any further assistance, and thanked us for choosing The Planet! Over two hours later with two more requests for status updates from us, and Matt again apologized for the delay, stated that he was still investigating the issue, would update us, asked us to contact them if we required any further assistance, and thanked us for choosing The Planet. Thirty minutes later he wrote again and explained that since all those sites used the FlexCMS software package (written by us as it turns out!), they determined that was the cause of the problem and left it at that. He went on to state that Apache, PHP, and MySQL were working fine on the other sites, so the problem was due to FlexCMS and that was outside the scope of their support services. And for one final smack in the face he mentioned that for a fee their technical support team could help us fix FlexCMS to get it working on the server! It should also be noted that among the sites on the server which suffered from the MySQL error, several did not utilize FlexCMS in any way. Cerberus Helpdesks and WordPress blogs also had the exact same problem!

Around this time we gave up on support being able to fix the issue and started looking into solutions or workarounds on our own. It turns out all that needed to be done was to rebuild the MySQL users table with passwords that matched the scheme that had previously been in use on the server before being broken by Robert’s upgrade attempts. We painstakingly spent the next couple hours rebuilding user account passwords through the MySQL command line, and removing CPanel skeleton files which were randomly inserted into some site accounts during the earlier repair attempts.

We currently have four dedicated servers with three different companies (including The Planet), and have had a number of dedicated servers over the last ten years. This incident was by far the most frustrating and insulting one we have ever experienced.

Note:
I'm not looking for compensation or changes to our server (we're still stuck with you due to some client commitments), the sole purpose of this message was to share my experience with others. Empty apologies and requests for additional information about this issue will be ignored.

I am glad I stepped out at the outset. I got a bad vibe when things went down hill in the very start of ordering a server.

Had they just said..."Ok we understand we forgot to consider your special setup needs but will take care of that for you at the price we quoted for setup..." I probably would have continued with the agreement for an un-managed server and moved my clients.

I am kind of glad they showed their unwillingness to accommodate their own miss-communication between me, sales and support, when they could have had another customer. They had ALL of my needs in writing up front and chose to ignore the parts they did not want and continue with the setup anyway.

(excerpted from deleted post)
Something fundamental here - a pattern, if you're willing to see it - is that people hate dealing with The Planet's support team. The Planet's support team makes customers feel helpless. It fails to SUPPORT customers. Dealing with The Planet support makes me, personally, feel crazy. It makes me want to bang my head on my desk. The robotic replies, the refusal to be helpful, the unwillingness to provide real support - they are hallmark characteristics of 75% of the last 4 years (of 8 years total) of support interactions I've had with your team. And I - like anyone else you find on this thread - can fairly easily produce the support tickets to support such a claim. You understand, I hope, that there's a bevy of folks like Dave up there who are intelligent, patient, reasonable people who had similar experiences, and who have yet to discover this particular forum to air grievances. And I hope you understand also that your defensiveness upon discovery of this thread is what prompted him to post his entire story.

I deleted the rest of the post because actually, Kevin looks to be a reason for hope here. Glad he found this forum.

Kevin,

It's nice to see that someone is at least interested in the image The Planet has with its customers. Sadly, I think you'll have your work cut out for you for some time with that task. As Geoff and others here have said, these are not isolated incidents, they seem to be a pretty predictable pattern. There will always be tickets and issues that fall through the cracks, and with technology there will always be lots of problems to resolve, what makes or breaks it is the attitude and actions of the person on the other end of the phone/chat/ticket. The part that really bothers me is the number of individual people who dealt with my issue and all failed to care about its outcome. If nothing else, our stress during that episode would have been seriously reduced simply by getting timely updates as to the status of the issue.

As I said I never came here expecting anything to change, but if you'd like to contact me directly the ticket number was 5614382PLNT, I'm sure that will lead you to whatever other information you need.

I am now more convinced than ever that those at The Planet don't have a clue. Today I got emails asking me to provide them with routing numbers so they can directly debit my bank since I refused to let them hold a credit card!

This for a canceled account that is still pending a refund? Does their left hand even know what the right is doing? No !

--

Nicole M. 8/20/2009 9:03:57 AM Dear Customer,

We are not charging your credit card for any services at this time and it has been removed from your account. We have received approval for bank draft collection on this account. Please fill out the attached form and fax it to 281.714.4707. This form will give us the necessary information to withdraw your monthly fees from your bank account instead of a credit card. Once we receive the faxed form back we will initiate the ACH process for your account. Once you have faxed in the form please update this ticket again.

It was also made clear to sales that I would use Bill Pay on my bank. If that was not going to be acceptable, she had ample opportunity to inform me that would not work. Knowing this in advance should have been the time to halt the process right away.

With all the information faxed in advance including my preferred payment method and my requirements for server setup did not trigger any opposition or complaint from Gaby in sales, thus it was implied that my needs were agreed to when she submitted the order. The very nature of any contract is a "meeting of the minds" and my mine was clear. Absent complaint from sales those faxed documents became part of the agreement I signed. The Planet had ample opportunity to refuse my request before accepting my agreement.

They did not refuse them but then failed to follow through.

The latest is that they "...did not receive my list of requirements". To that I posted in the other forum a copy of an email sent back to me by Gaby in sales acknowledging receipt of that information. As to why they can't find it is beyond me, but the bottom line is I required some specific things on the server and provided those needs in writing via fax and email to sales who, it appears, lost or otherwise failed to make that list available for those setting up the server.

I never did receive a server as I ordered and needed because someone dropped the ball in making sure all of my documents got where they belonged. Then they want to blame me for being upset when they charged me for an incomplete server built without referring to what I clearly told sales that I needed.


I did not lose that information...ThePlanet did.


http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php...

More indirect hassles. Since I just filed a decline form with my bank, they automatically blocked my business card. Now I have to go to a number of auto-pay accounts to change them...but can't do that until the new card arrives.

Although the Planet says they removed my billing information the bank won't trust them on that account and insisted they must replace my card.

More crap from ThePlanet. They say no one knew of my requirements which included setting up a name server.

Here is an email back from sales where it was again spoken of prior to my signing a contract.

This was dated August 4th prior to receiving the actual quotation. It very clearly indicates I expected name servers set up and even provided them in the email. This was repeated on several occasions on the list of things I needed.

==
Gaby Salas
Sales Representative
gsalas@theplanet.com
Direct: (214)782-7790
Cell: (214)354-6504
Fax: (214)560-9759
www.theplanet.com

From: Paul Kruger [mailto:paul@absolutebestpromos.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 10:23 AM
To: Salas, Gaby
Subject: Update Server Proposal - Intel Xeon 3210

Gaby

Check the attached. If you recall I spoke about omitting the RAID drive so I deleted it from the spreadsheet which recalculated itself.

Also I will need the IP addresses necessary for the registration of my name server so my registrar can complete that process.

DNS on server will be set up to use:

NS1.stuffdone.net
NS2.stuffdone.net

Let me know.

On the 11th I entered chat regarding this problem. At that time I told them this would be on hold until I resolved it with sales. At that time no one advised me to specifically enter a cancellation ticket. I trusted them to put it on hold until it was resolved. They are in such a rush to take my money and not deliver what I asked for that they lost my instructions, ignored my concerns and set up a server as they wanted it not as I requested. Here is the transcript.

Billing is telling me I must cancel 48 hours before it goes to billing however they sent it to billion before 48 hours and before I knew there was a problem with the setup. That is an impossible option unless one is in possession of a time machine.

http://www.stuffdone.com/transcript.pdf

I got a rather interesting response re my cancellation request. Seems I was supposed to cancel at least 72 hours before I ever had a contract? I am waiting to see how that is supposed to work. My time machine is broken.

---
<font>

Stephanie C. 8/21/2009 4:50:00 PM Dear customer,

Thank you for choosing The Planet!!!

As stated previously, the cancellation request was submitted on 8/12/09; however, the contract ended on 8/10/09. The cancellation request would have needed to be submitted a full 48 hours before 8/10 in order to prevent the contract from renewing. You will now have to ensure to submit the cancellation request now later than 8/7/09 in order to void the contract on 8/10/09. At this time, we are unable to apply a service credit to the account per our cancellation policy. We apologize for the confusion and inconvenience. If you have any further questions please contact us at 1-866-325-0045 option 3 or via live chat at www.theplanet.com. Have a fabulous day!

</font>


Now to make this as clear as possible I did not even fax my documents to them until August 10th mid-day.

The just keep digging their hole deeper and deeper.

If you have access to the tickets system you will see that there is nothing here that has not been presented to the Planet in the ticket system. You will also note that no attempt by the Planet has been made to resolve the issue other than to constantly justify their own actions and to ignore the nature of my complaint.

In fact the tickets themselves keep going in circles. An prime example today was this in the ticket system advising me I have to submit a cancellation request ( dated the 20th ) even though the Cancellation request was created by me on the 12th within the very 48 hour period cited in another post by Planet staff.

Are they trying to "trick" me into another cancellation ticket in order to show one created that was way past the 48 hours they cited to me in one of their tickets?

I did NOT receive the server I requested. Once I sent those documents to the Planet I no longer had control over what was done with them. I assumed everything I faxed would arrive at the proper place. It appears they did not and now you accuse me of demanding something more than I ordered just because The Planet lost them...at least three times !!

Why do you people insist you are incapable of an error then try to make me the fall guy because someone there lost or ignored documentation that was faxed as part of my order.

At the VERY LEAST when I first brought this issue up last week you should have put a halt on everything until it was resolved...instead your people insisted in ignoring my complaint to continue to do exactly what YOU wanted despite my specific requests.

The length of this issue and the number of tickets is clear evidence that the Planet considers itself infallible and their customers wrong.

What ever happened to the American Business Ethics of old....do customers mean nothing to business any more?

That is not the case. I provided EVERYTHING I needed and the Planet lost it somehow then instead of trying to resolve the matter all they do is try to charge me more money.

-------------------

A new response telling me I have to submit a cancellation ticket even though the cancellation ticket was created on the 12th. Less than the required 48 hours after faxing the documents.

Nicole M. 8/20/2009 11:01:30 AM Dear Customer,

You were advised via ticket 5933757PLNT that you will need to submit a cancellation request to remove this server from billing. Once we receive the cancel request we will be able to remove the server. Please refer back to ticket 5950443PLNT for information about the refund request.

Regards,
Nicole
Customer Accounting & Control Department

--- My Cancellation Ticket dated the 12th ---

Ticket Number: 5939094PLNT Ticket Type: Accounting Status: CLOSED
Opened By: Master User Open Date: 8/12/2009 4:14:04 PM Current Opener: Master User
Last Updated By: DequincyM Last Update: 8/13/2009 8:30:37 AM
Summary: CANCELLATION REQUEST 2009/09/01: Stuff Done(C66006)

I have already issued a charge back via my bank. I will no longer even try to deal with The Planet other than through my bank and Visa. Given all the contradictions in the ticket system alone I have no doubt the charge will be reversed including the fact that the charge was placed after the signed authorization had expired. It was valid for only two days, 10th and 11th for the period in which I expected the server to be delivered. It had a printed expiration of the 12th after which that authorization to use that card expired.

We see how the Planet "resolves" customer complaints. That is the reason for the forum. It is how we by-pass the hidden ticket system to alert others to issues that should be part of their decisions when choosing a hosting provider.