Since Easyspace was acquired by Iomart for £10.5M at the tail end of 2004 services have been in decline. One of the problems, and I speak as a user and customer of Easyspace since the 90's, has been in their outsourcing of support services to India. When support was based on shore in Byfleet, Surrey, the technical response and customer service experience, was always spot on. 

This Thursday I contacted Easyspace support with a very simple problem to resolve. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to renew five of the domains in my stable with a debit card, as I have been doing, for what must be now almost ten years. 

The response I got back on my support ticket, time stamped 4:33am (about 9am local time India) claimed "Debit Card is for Monthly Customers Only.", and prompts me to follow a link about payment methods which goes on to explain about direct debits. 

My query had asked "I have tried to renew these [domains] on three separate occasions, even using different debit cards but I keep getting the same message - unable to process at this time."....

Iomart is a public company. You expect an appreciation of the difference between a debit card and a direct debit, but there isn't one. Perhaps this is an outcome of not properly managing an outsourced function, where you end up getting a customer response which begins "this is the wrong answer".

Of course, since last year I have been migrating all my services away from Easyspace, ever since I had been encouraged / miss-sold an upgrade to a dedicated server with a rubbish Plaxo control panel. In fact, this is the reason I registered the domain, reallyannoyshit.com and started this blog. Over a year later and this company are still annoying the s... out of me, and are still getting it wrong.

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Hi! I was sorry to read your comments about Easyspace and our Support services, generally speaking we receive excellent feedback from the majority of our users when they interact with us! We've answered just over fifteen thousand ticket requests since June with very few complaints! We have Support Teams located in the United Kingdom (Glasgow and Lancaster, not to mention our 5 Data Centres)and Bangkok, Thailand. Something which we are very proud of I might add! Our team in Bangkok are involved in the day to day decisions of our Support team and despite the difference are fully integrated in our "one team" ethic. Having worked for some larger corporations who employ true outsourcing where they operate almost like completely seperate organisations I can be confident when I say that we are very much different & much more effective! From looking at the ticket it does look like the agent in question has misunderstood your request and provided you with an incorrect answer, a mistake on their part which is a human error, not just because they are "out-sourced". We take Customer Service very seriously at Easyspace, whether it be by Telephone, Ticket, Live Chat, Email, Fax or our new Customer Forums - feedback like yours is important, as it highlights areas in which we can improve. When issues like this are brought to our attention we take positive action to improve where possible! Additionally we regularly monitor internet forums and blog sites like this one, just to make sure we're not missing out on vital feedback which can help us improve. Again if I can offer my apologies - nobody likes getting the wrong answer and we certainly dont like providing you the wrong answer! If you can let me know some details of your account we will happily review the ticket in more detail and arrange appropriate refresher training for the individual who handled your enquiry. Kind Regards, Johnathan Williamson Customer Support Manager Easyspace Ltd http://www.easyspace.com johnathan@easyspace.com

Jonathon, thank you for your response to this blog post. I was encouraged to read your feedback and to see you have actually taken the time to respond and to do so as a person rather than an anonymous title.

I have been a low maintenance customer of Easyspace for many years, and used to recommend Easyspace, but this last year I had a number of bad customer service experiences which began when I was encouraged to upgrade to a dedicated server. The whole issue was never properly resolved. When I asked to make a formal complaint nothing happened.

I never did get any details about how to make a complaint  or what the procedure was / is. Like most customers I voted with my feet and moved my servers to fasthosts. All new domain registrations I've put through UK Reg with the plan to migrate all other domains before their renewal dates.

Your response, however, is very welcome, but I would still be interested in understanding your complaints process as this is really the last resort of customers. As it wasn't accessible to me I had no other remedy but to become a customer elsewhere, even though I would have really preferred not to.

Just noticed my post didn't format the spaces at all ... thank you for persevering and reading it! Generally speaking we are very open about receiving complaints, we believe that any member of our team, on any of our Support channels is capable of handling a complaint. If you feel it is not being handled correctly you just have to ask for it to be escalated to that individuals manager. At that point, myself or another of my colleagues will read through the history of the issue and then contact you to discuss the matter. I am particularly disappointed to hear that your main complaint was from the handling of a Dedicated Server upgrade - I would be happy to look into it in more detail and provide you with an official response on the matter. We pride ourselves on providing excellent support, especially for that product range. So much so that we have a seperate Support line just for that product! I cant say were perfect, mistakes happen but I would hope that when they do, we at the very least do our best to rectify the mistake. My email address is johnathan@easyspace.com, please feel free to drop me a mail with your account number and I'll have a look for you if you feel it would be of any benefit. Kind Regards, Johnathan Williamson Customer Support Manager Easyspace Ltd http://www.easyspace.com johnathan@easyspace.com

An official response would have been great at the time. A clearly defined complaints process would also have helped. Despite your response, I still don't feel as if Easyspace has a defined complaints procedure.  Ordinarily a formal complaint is handled independently and works to resolving the issue in a specified timeframe. Formal complaints are logged, and are visible to senior management. This is not the same as escalating to a persons line manager.

I upgraded to a dedicated server on the basis you were discontinuing virtual servers.  This was the story I received from your dedicated server sales team. Visiting your site this evening I note virtual servers are still on offer, over a year after I was told they were being discontinued. This might explain why no one could ever give me a specific date when they were ending.

The dedicated server, running Centos, actually decreased the quality of my hosting. The main reason being it included the Plesk control panel. This actually limited my hosting to ten domains, unless I was prepared to pay for an upgrade licence to Plesk. I was hosting more domains than this on my virtual server, FOC.

From this experience, I am not a fan of Plesk. Had it been possible to uninstall Plesk from the server and run something like Webmin I would have gone for that but I wasn't prepared to pay an engineer to do this when the sales person who sold the dedicated server to me had viewed my account details and should really have alerted me to it.

I was basically given the choice to start again, which I did, except I did so with Fasthosts. The problems didn't end there though. Easyspace continued to debit my bank account each month with a quarterly charge for the server, i.e. you were taking three months of charges each month. This had racked up to over a £1,000 before I noticed it when I became illegally overdrawn and was charged by my bank who had bounced a number of my month end payments.

Although this is the case I would like to acknowledge your efforts in responding to this blog as it does demonstrate an interest in customer care, definitely a move in the right direction. What I would really like to see though, more than an official response to my issue, is a defined complaints procedure other users could follow and trust in should they experience problems similar to mine.

Well Done all for having the honesty to do this online, its a refreshing departure from the usual denial that accompanies legitimate complaints.