This is a series of article on the customer support I got from iPowerWeb during my migration of data from my old host provider to iPowerWeb. I am somewhat satisified with the online support service I got from the support team. Due to the fact that I was also in the PSS (product support services) or response center (something like call center) business, it provided very good chance for me to analysis the support I got. It brings a much clearer way for me since it provides me a view purely from the customer’s perspective. Note: the message is ordered so the latest comment goes first.
Since I have to disclose the email communication between me (as a customer) and the support professional, I sent a query to support@ipowerweb.com to get confirmation that I CAN disclose the content. The result was negative. Their legal department didn’t allow me to disclose the communication between the support professional and I on my site. I respect their decision and won’t publish the emails I received. I have already prepared an article before I check with their legal department. So I removed anything I got from iPowerWeb and only leave the rest.
Response (Content removed) 04/09/2004 04:38 PM
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Response (Content removed) 04/08/2004 07:15 PM
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Another 24 hours passed. The result is, they finally find out a system administrator is not suitable to answer this simple question. A tier 2 support professional is better. :-D
But, Hey, now, 72 hours have passed and what will the customer think of the service? They cannot expect a Very Satisfied customer after the simple question pending there for 72 hours.
Customer (Jian Shuo Wang) 04/07/2004 06:11 PM
Any update on this?
This is uncool for me. There is no response in the next 48 hours. What is the result? What are the support professionals doing? The case was left alone there for 48 hours without any touch. Although I can understand – after working in a support center – that the huge number of cases may delay the response, but from the customer’s perspective, I started to wonder whether all the engineers are sleeping at work.
Response (Content removed) 04/05/2004 06:58 PM
Dear Client
Thank you for contacting iPowerweb technical support.
Content removed
This is very good for me that I got the initial response 38 minutes after I sent the support incident. This is a very important factor in customer satisfaction. The sooner, the better. Although they didn’t provide an answer, at least the customer know the incident is received and taken care of.
Customer (Jian Shuo Wang) 04/05/2004 06:20 PM
Is there any policy that preventing me from publishing the email
conversation between me and iPowerWeb support team? I am interested to share
the support email I got.
Regards
Jian Shuo Wang
Actually, there is no result in the next 48 hours….
This is a response to a somewhat old post but I’d like to make the comment anyways.
Did you ever get reason their legal team advised you that you may not disclose correspondence between yourself and them? Was there any legal justification for their advice?
If not, you probably don’t have to follow it. If I were in their position I would have told you that you can’t disclose correspondence details either given the circumstances but I don’t see the legal justification for this.
The perl and mysql version are too old to support unicode in Ipowerweb.
Unless you signed a non-disclosure agreement with them, you can post the emails you received from them. You can also post phone conversations. As long as you are not claiming anything that is untrue, you are free to publish what you wish and quote them at will. They will try to intimidate you with their legal department. Furthermore, you are providing your opinion by sharing your experience. You are fully entitled to express an opinion.
I wouldn’t worry about their “legal department”. Chances are they do not have a “department”, they have some friend or someone on retainer or a CPA firm that has a lawyer on staff who will craft letters on an as-needed basis.
My experience with ipowerweb has been such that they do not even have a support group. They have a group of people that are there sometimes. They claim 24X7X365 support…well, it’s been over 1 hour now that I have been waiting for a “live support” person to show up. This is typical of my experiences with their support. Phone calls remain on hold waiting for the next available person. Live chat refreshes forever waiting for a person. Emails go into a queue and sometimes are answered.
If ipowerweb is so busy helping other customers, then that means one of three things…
1. The customers are idiots. Of which I find that hard to believe given the number of intelligent people I know who have used and since left due to horrible support and service.
2. Ipowerweb has so many issues they are indeed over worked in their support centers and cannot get to all the customers
3. Ipowerweb is understaffed and cannot handle the call volume.
If it is item 1, then stay with ipowerweb. Personally, I have migrated my accounts from them and not only have NEVER had a support issue with the new service provider, my site has never gone down. When there are planned outages, I also get notifications. In unplanned situations (we had a hard drive crash), I got a notification. The notifications came with an estimated repair time too. Wow…what a difference. There is a tracking number associated with all contacts and history of the conversation.
If it is item 2 or 3, then that should say something as to reliability and availability.
There are a lot of other low cost hosting providers out there that provide the same types of services (and more) for the same price as ipowerweb. The difference is in the level of service. Beware of these sites that rate hosting services. Some of them are planted there to promote some of the lower quality providers. Use reviews from reputable organizations and be sure to search for things like ipowerweb sucks in google, along with the others you are researching. Certainly there will always be someone complaining, but looking at the positive and negative comments on all the ones you research will lead you to the right place, and likely that wont be ipowerweb.
In their defense, when they are up and not touching anything, they have been reliable for the most part. Whenever they do an upgrade or change, they seem to break things. There was a time when four mySQL databases just spontaneously disappeared and no one knows why.
If you go with ipowerweb, I would highly suggest you manage your own domain name. I had mine held hostage for over 2 weeks when they renewed my account but didn’t update the domain name and as such lost the DNS entries (though I paid, and on time) After teaching them now to do an NSLOOKUP and explaining how DNS works, I finally got tired of it and switched registrars so I could manage the DNS on my own and haven’t had a problem since…best of all, it makes it a lot easier to transfer out of a bad hosting provider when you have control over your domain name.
Sir,
i registered with ipower but didn’t recieve any Purchase confirmation email
i want it,please help