Three Keys To Building An Engaged Community, Culture & Customers

I find it interesting that DynDNS talks about putting customers first.

The first technical support help I have needed from these guys has been less than Customer-friendly or Customer-centric. Their philosophy, as far as I could tell from my interaction with them, was to tell the customer “It’s your fault” but without providing anything in the way of logs to help the customer figure out what was really going on. This, while saying “the logs show it’s your fault”.

One of their Ninjas (what a bunch of pretentiousness — guess it helps explain their attitude toward their customers) told me that he saw in the log where I had changed my password and that’s why “it’s my fault” I was getting a badauth failure. I pointed out to him REPEATEDLY that the failure was happening BEFORE I change the password. And further, that resetting it DIDN’T fix the problem.

It was also pointed out that only ONE out of THREE (sorry, actually TWO) of my domains with them was apparently having this failure. Now with both domains updating with the same client at the same time using the same login and password — they were un-able to understand the logical inconsistency of saying it was a password problem on my side.

Now, it may have been the case that actually BOTH domains were failing of authorisation. This would have been useful information to me — but all they said was that I had a bad password; no details, no excerpts from the logs, no indication that may have been the case. In short: No Help.

This problem also manifested itself just after I had renewed one of my domains. Does it seem to you that this would make a customer think there may be some problem with DynDNS — Especially when there was a notice on the Renewal Page saying they were making some changes (un-specified as to details and scope in any technical way) and Some Problems Might Occur (again un-specified) and to contact Customer Support for help. From every indication I got from their Ninja, this is not the way a DynDNS Ninja thinks! (And the guy told me they hadn’t changed anything that should matter — but w/ no details how can I tell?)

Apparently I am supposed to read minds, or perhaps the internal operations of DynDNS are some Universal Law of Nature everyone is supposed to know. I must have missed that lesson somewhere.

But don’t try to point out to a Ninja that his “answer” to your problem is just plain stupid. They’ve got very closed ranks, against their customers over there, if my experience is any thing to judge by.

No logs. No detailed information. No indication of trouble-shooting thought processes (which made me think perhaps no-one was working the problem) . No suggestions based on the facts — other than the simple auth failure. MUST be my problem with a password. Just a parroting of “It’s your problem”.

Why not _show_ me, not just tell me, your justification for this claim, which happens to not make sense given only ONE domain seems to be failing.

They may be bright guys over there… but I think their Customer Support skills lack a good bit of polish.

I don’t know what the problem was — It went away just about as mysteriously as it came. One of those (finally) Came Clear Under Test situations. (I did install a new ddclient — but there’s no reason the old one should have suddenly begun having problems — and all the login and password information for the new .conf file were _directly CUT and PASTED_ from the old (“broken”) one.

They were happy to keep bringing up _my_ “attitude”… but could not even begin to realise I had a _reason_ for it. And speaking of “attitude” — they’ve got plenty to give to their customers, themselves. Do such seems to take precedence over actually providing useful information to their Customer.

(I finally got some useful information: But only in the form of post-rationalising, condescending “answers” once _I_ started proposing questions as to possible problems; that being the best I could do (guessing) for lack of concrete information from any Ninja!)

Thus they escalated bad attitudes on both sides by failing in helpful communications.

And then they threatened to close down my DynDNS Account because they are not happy with me pointing out the illogic of their “trouble-shooting” — they call that “insulting” — but get to throw their own insults freely at their Customers. And their Customer Support Manager backed the Ninja up on this! Great Customer Relations there, Chris!

Interesting experience. And I liked (still do) DynDNS. They just need to re-examine their Customer Support Ninjas’ (and the Sensei’s) actions and attitudes, and emphasise providing helpful information and _solutions that fit the symptoms_ of Customer’s problems over circling the wagons.