I have written couple of times earlier about customer service. Reading those one may conclude that I mainly write about negative experiences. We, as natural animals, have tendency to give more weight to negatives. It applies to everybody and I am no exception. At the same time there is a theory which says that in the world there is more negative than positive as that is the only way to appreciate the positives. This one we can see in daily observations when people give more attention to rare metals, paintings or other artefacts and would be ready to pay huge amounts for that. Circumstances, however, can change which specific object is valued at what place. This is what has kept the global trade running.

After running my blog for more than 10 years on default hosting of blogger.com, I decided to give it a proper home. This demanded a search for a hosting provider. After some research, I concluded that for my needs hostinger.com is the best option. I did some calculations for comparison and you can check for yourself a part of it. I have not heard of this service provider before, so I did read some reviews about it. Overall, I found it to be the right place to move my blog.

Although, it took some time, but doing theoretical research was still the easy part. I soon made an order and got their premium hosting with 2 domains booked with hostinger. Being an engineer myself I know that things may take wrong turn any time. For some reason, in this case, I was expecting a smooth ride. There is a saying, “Bread always falls the buttered side down”. After creating the site, I noticed that once logged in to their website, I was being kicked out of my session due to wrong credentials. This was sure frustrating. I noticed that they need the user to login from the country specific landing page in which the account was created. However, once logged in the redirect happens to hostinger.com. In some cases the redirect would fail, as the server was trying to authenticate on hostinger.com and as expected would fail. At the end, I figured out the problem was not with their servers rather with Firefox profile and I had to clean it up to make it work. For some reason, in that profile the specific type of redirect was not working. I did not suspect Firefox to be an issue as other website redirects e.g. google, youtube, yahoo and others were working fine. Well, at the end it all worked out fine and I have the new wordpress based website running (Work is still in progress though to edit all the migrated articles and fix photos).

Differences in theory and practice are more in practice than in theory.

You must be wondering where is the customer service in this? That is because I skipped the intermediate parts to keep the main story going forward. I logged in a support ticket with them even before opening the account to get a clarification. The response was straight forward, positive and encouraging. I used the same thread to raise my problem till it was solved. I won’t bother readers with the details, but would list down my reason why I liked their service.

Responsive :

For my initial clarification, I got a straight forward reply with options available without any links to some documentations that I should go through to clarify. This was very positive.

Continuity :

As the interaction continued, the support agent kept on changing. This, however, did not disrupt the flow of communication. It was very close to having conversation with a single individual.

Team and not individuals :

It was good to see that the actions proposed by one support person could be acted upon by other person. I was half expecting a response that this action is only authorized for the other person, so now need to handover to that guy. No, it moved smoothly from person to person.

Readiness to help :

In the case of login failure, they could not see any issue. However, they were still ready to ask for inputs to have another look. I sent them a youtube video of what is happening on my side and they came back with a response. It was a complicated one and I could see it came from a standard investigation script, but I know in such specific cases it is not easy to pinpoint a problem.

Ready for change :

I had some other concerns during the ordering and account setup. They were probably caused by language and interpretation. However, as a user it can be frustrating, especially when discussion is happening over an email. Being part of IT service and project management teams, I saw an opportunity where they can improve and update documentation and services to avoid such confusion. Maybe not for others but for me this was the best part, when the team responded with encouraging tone to look into the feedback and to contact the appropriate teams. I know, the change is hard and it may be lost in many other struggles or priorities. But, the first step is to accept a possibility of change. This was the big plus for me.

Friendly :

The team is friendly and does not take a very serious tone sometimes observed between customer and provider. For me, this is a positive sign too.

I had a bit rough but encouraging start of my relation with hostinger. I have booked for 4 years and I believe and hope to continue it for years to come. Maybe they improve so much that I won’t even need to contact their team again. Is that good ? I don’t know. But I hope that if I ever need support again I would be contacted again by such positive people who gave me reasons to smile and not by any “program” acting as a support agent.

Keep Smiling

Love

Arundeep Singh

Somewhere in a different industry

Mulla Nasrudin climbed into a barber’s chair and asked, “Where’s the barber who used to work on the next chair?” “Oh, that was a sad case,” the barber said. “He became so nervous and despondent over poor business, that one day when a customer said he didn’t want a massage, he went out of his mind and cut the customer’s throat with a razor. He is now in the state mental hospital. By the way, would you like a massage, Sir?” “ABSOLUTELY!” said Mulla Nasrudin.