Those of you who follow my Twitter account got a more-or-less play by play of my painful time flying Delta during my vacation.

My return flight was, without a doubt, a painful experience, made worse by the fact that nobody at Delta gives a crap. I had short flight on a “Delta Connections” flight and then a regular flight back to LAX.

Upon boarding my Delta Connections flight, we were greeted by the flight attendant (Flight was only about 40 people, so we only had one) to rounds of jokes and laughing. Most people on the flight had to gate-check luggage, because the jet was so small. I was not one of these people, but it did slow down the boarding process. I was in a good mood, and so was everyone else. My flight attendant commented on the Slater JetBlue guy: “That guy’s my fricken HERO.”…. but all jokes aside, we weren’t moving. Still. Something was wrong. After about 30 minutes of sitting on the runway, the pilot came on and told us that we needed to burn off fuel before we could take off. We ended up taking off about an hour later than scheduled.

It was hot. We were cranky. I had a connection to make. (Hence the name, Delta Connections) but what are you going to do, right?

I was up the entire flight, despite being sick and tired. I have to say, the flight attendant was a very interesting guy. Because I was seated in one of the first few rows, and service started in the back, my selection of snacks and drinks was “Water with melted ice, or water without melted ice.” (The hot plane and sit on the runway, I assume, was the reason we had no ice).We were flying on one of the older NorthWorst jets.

We finally landed and I stood up right away to run to make my Connection. But we weren’t allowed off the plane yet. We all stood there for about ten minutes. Then the flight attendant announced “It appears that the machine they use to damage your luggage is broken, so they are manually damaging it by hand. This will cause a delay for those of you with a gate check, and I’m sorry.” – Seeing that I did not gate check, I pushed myself past everyone standing around and raced to my next flight. I got there just in time, they were boarding when I arrived.

I boarded. We took off. I ordered food service. The “Cheese Platter”

Here’s a picture. That looks almost edible, right? Well, it wasn’t arranged like it is in the picture I got online. It was three pieces of warm cheese thrown in a little plastic tub, 2 crackers, a couple grapes, 2 almonds and an apricot. For six bucks. I felt instantly ripped off. I could get some delux meal at Burger King for six bucks. I would actually prefer that Delta raise ticket prices by 5 dollars and include a free meal. It would make me feel less ripped-off. Not to mention the report that the food on Delta flights is cooked in kitchens infested with rats and  cockroaches, I just felt totally ripped off.

None of my flights had *any* in-flight entertainment. Not in the overhead TVs, not on the seat in front of me. True, my Connections flight was a smaller aircraft. But I flew back on a huge one. No excuse for no entertainment on a 4 hour flight.

I got off the flight and went to play Luggage Roulette and wait at the claim. And I waited. And waited. And at 10:04PM, the belt stopped. I took out my cellphone and said to the group of others with me, “Luggage time of death: 10:04 PM.” we all trekked over to Delta’s Baggage Services office. It was a small room. With no air conditioning.It literally took then a good twenty minutes for each person. The man at the counter was slow. He pecked away at the keyboard, showing no sympathy. As over a dozen people sat and waited in line, listening to the same slow drool over and over. “Your…baggage…was…..from… where… again?”

Nobody – anywhere – could even pretend to care about the customer. The only person who smiled all day was my first flight attendant.

Hey Delta, have you ever hear of the saying, “Fake it till you make it?” – Fake those smiles. Pretend that you are human.

Dear Delta: This is my challenge. I dare every one of your “uppers” and CEOs and CFOs and whatnot to fly a cross country flight, cabin class. I dare you. They can’t do it. The people who make the shots at Delta are out of touch with their average flyer.  I dare your CEO’s to all fly CABIN CLASS and eat the warm cheese for lunch. Create The Filter. And EAT YOUR OWN DOGFOOD.

Previously, I have written blog posts about Horrible Fan Service and Customer Support.

Today, I want to share something interesting I have seen. A brand that responds to every single tweet mentioning their name.

This is not a tech brand. This is not an internet provider. Their product costs a buck.

Who am I talking about?

Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola, though their twitter page, literally responds to every tweet sent mentioning their name. A team of at least 6 (based on tweet ^ signs) respond to tweets around the clock, at every hour of the day…even on weekends! Any time the brand is @mentioned, you can expect one of the team to read and reply. Be it a coke recipe idea, a simple tweet like “I am always drinking coke” , praise,  feedback, or an experience gone wrong, the “Coke Twitter Squad” always is listening. They even reply to tweets in more than one language! The team also sends out trivia, games, and other fun Coke Facts to their 51,000+ followers.

Coke has hit the nail on the head with this one. They promote a positive experience while drinking their product. They engage with their customers and spread brand awareness. Each interaction with the team further drives the Coke brand into that consumer’s mind. By reaching out to every customer, they gain great interaction and brand awareness. When someone, somewhere, has an issue, the team is able to intercept the problem at the source and offer a solution. Instead of the customer being turned off and walking away from a situation unhappy, they correct the situation and show that they care about each and every customer. By engaging with customers and keeping them happy, it creates a great “feel” for a product.

One of the biggest influences in our society is our friends. And it is no secret that Twitter has become a tool for frustrations. Anywhere from cable companies sucking to terrible phone service, to problems with websites, other companies have tried this same approach by intercepting customer complaints and offering service. Comcast Bonnie responds to tweets such as “F*** you comcast!” asking users if they need help. But she focuses on the negative experience, and never spreads the positive light, the way Coca-Cola does. Although this is great for customer service and maintaining their image, it does little to actually promote the image and push it in a positive direction the way Coca-Cola is.

An interesting sub story: The Mozilla Support Team launched a project called “Firefox Cares” in which I was one of the 5 or 6 community members that “patrolled twitter” looking for tweets that mentioned firefox crashing, firefox issues, or users switching to chrome. We learned a couple of valuable things during the project, which has since concluded. (Last tweet was 11 days ago as it wrapped up). But one thing that we took out of it was that we were focusing too much on the negative users and not enough on the positives. So I stopped looking for users who were having issues with firefox crashing, and instead started searching for users who were using the new “Personas” feature of Firefox 3.6. I asked users what their favorite theme was, or their “Cant live without” extensions. And although we learned alot about the users by searching the negatives, we also learned alot about the positives. And we helped to create loyalty to the product this way.

As a whole, Coca-Cola combines the best elements of all the different “approaches” to twitter support that I have seen used. They engage with users at every possible opportunity, they welcome feedback, and correct bad experiences. They are a brand to be learned from!

Whew. That was a tiring blog post – Now, If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to have a sip of some refreshing Coca-Cola.

(edit: correction: in this post I said that the “firefox cares” project had ended. It was on a temporary 2-week hold and has since resumed. It is a “verified twitter” account, and yes, I am one of the tweeters on it.)

Alot of people ask me upon learning this why I dont use just 1 webhost, or why I dont get my own VPS. (I have one, for the record)

The answer is simple: less failure. Lets face it: Hard drives fail. Companies go under. If a server was to fail, I would only lose a fraction of my websites compared to the dozens that I spread out over different webhosts.

Last night, I broke one of my websites. I had to contact support and get things fixed. And I realized I should write a blog post about webhosting support.  To make the process easier, I’ll be comparing each webhost to real-world pain.

I am hosted by each of the below companies. To promote honesty and remove any bias, I will not be using affiliate links or posted promotion codes for the below hosts.

——

ASmallOrange – Shared Hosting (2.5 Years – Active Customer)

(Disclaimer: This blog is hosted by ASO, and has been since day 1.)

The Good: These people know their stuff. Last night I was talking to their tech about how I totally broke my website and needed it reset. The person helping me was friendly, knowledgeable, and quickly got things resolved. ASO has a reputation of very friendly, knowledgeable, non-outsourced staff. ASO also does ticket assigning. I cannot stress how important this is. Once a tech starts to help you in a ticket, your replies are automatically routed to the same tech. Some other webhosts have tickets answered by the first tech who gets to them – this leads to people who are not familiar with the situation and steps already taken. With ASO, My ticket was resolved by the same tech that first replied, and each step of the way as well. This is how support should be done. When multiple techs all work on a ticket, there is confusion, and mis-diagnosis. (See below for that….) Also, ASO marks tickets as “On Hold” and “Progress” when a tech replies, instead of automatically marking them as “Answered” or “Closed” like most webhosts. They encourage followups and promote a friendly while still professional feeling.

The Bad: Even to this day, I get confused navigating their customized Kayako ticket desk. They hide the “View Tickets” link and also don’t send a direct URL to your ticket in emails.

The Bottom Line: Talking to ASO’s tech support is like playing with a kitten.

—–

SiteGround – Shared Hosting (3.5 Years – Active Customer)

(Disclaimer: I am the #1 most active user on the SiteGround community forums, more so than their staff. I have also been compensated for my valuable assistance to their community in the form of 3 months free hosting. SiteGround was also my first ever webhost.)

The Good: They are reasonable people (for the most part). Now, I don’t exactly agree with alot of their practices, terms, or marketing methods, but this article is about support. And, for the most part, they are very reasonable people. I’ve had issues with billing that SiteGround has compromised on. I’ve had my site hacked, and they have helped me fix it up. The techs are very reasonable and will explain the actions they take clearly. Nothing going on behind the scenes with them. Some of their techs are very friendly and knowledgeable people (more about that below).

The Bad: Now, I want to preface this by saying SiteGround was my first ever webhost. I started using them long ago, back when they offered 5,000MB storage (or something like that) IE, before shared hosting went down the crapper with “unlimited” crap. SiteGround experienced a period of awful growing pains. There was a point in time that they even placed a yearly cap on support tickets – each ticket based the yearly cap (7 tickets, I believe?) cost around $12. However, customers groaned, and SG quickly reversed this decision. However, To this day, even though their customer feedback forum is filled with complaints about their awful support desk, they have yet to make it easier to actually open a ticket. Finding an actual human to talk to is an endless navigation of KB articles and links burried at the end of a page. SG instructs users to post tickets in the “cPanel” category when there is nowhere else to post it, because the desk is so poorly written and confusing. I understand the reason this was done was to cut back on questions answered in the KB (of which, I might add, siteground has the best I have ever seen) but it still is a royal pain in the ass to finally post a ticket. And, once you finally get to speak to a tech, you have about a 50/50 shot of getting someone who would rather shoot themselves than be helping you. Ive opened like 30+ tickets with SG, and about half the time, I get a friendly tech who is able to help me. However, a few times, I feel like the person I am talking to isnt even reading any of my replies. They send canned replies and ignore the situation. They give the feeling that they hate their job and don’t give a rats ass about your issue. These people are poorly trained and awful techs. Personally, having been with SiteGround for a long time, and becoming friends with a few of their techs, I believe this is due to management getting greedy and skimping on training for techs.

The Bottom Line: Talking to SG’s tech support is like a really big maze. And, at the end of the maze, you either get kicked in the shins, or you find a plate of warm cookies. Good luck.

—–

BounceWeb – FFMPEG Hosting (1 year – Active Customer)

The Good: I will never forget the day I ordered hosting from BounceWeb. Every webhost should be like this. I opened a chat with a sales tech who walked me through getting everything setup. He offered me a discount coupon. He helped me get things running. Then, we shot the breeze. While I waited for my account to get activated, we chatted about webhosting, the news, sports – you name it. The guy was friendly, and he was a genius about the BW product. He knew what they were selling and how to sell it. He was friendly. He made me feel like I was worth more than just a 7$/Month account. I mattered. I was important. I might have only been one out of 50,000+ customers, but I counted. I was personally attended to. It was great. Tickets are responded to in under 30 minutes. Nice people. Nice staff. I’ve only opened 4 tickets with them (least of any host) so I’m not too experienced, but those 4 were great.

The Bad: Billing was confusing to contact once a customer.

The Bottom Line: Talking to BW support is like walking a dog in the park.

—–

ReWind Host – WHM Reseller Hosting (1 Month – Still trying to get a refund)

The Good: NOTHING.

The Bad: Unprofessional staff. Lies. Nightmare. Ignores tickets. Their WHMCS install is painfully slow. Closes tickets on customers. I encourage you to read my horror story here: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=952110

The Bottom Line: Talking to these “people” is awful. I would rather have my leg amputated, while wide awake, without anesthesia, than talk to their techs.

——

LiquidWeb Hosting – VPS Server (2 Months – Active Customer)

The Good: Professional staff that are EXTREMELY knowledgeable. Speedy response times. Issues fixed quickly, and techs provide detailed diagnosis & explanation. LW has the best support I have ever been with in my many, many years of webhosting. Ever. These guys are amazingly smart and helpful. Proactive. Friendly. They ROCK. They genuinely care about your issue and work hard to resolve it.

The Bad: So, remember when I mentioned ticket assigning? This is the host that seems to have a problem with it. My VPS server was having issues. A tech went in to fix it, told me the problem, and that it was fixed. The next day, same issue came up. New tech gives a different reason & different fix. Well, that fix diddn’t work either. So a different tech tried another different fix. I had something like 4 different techs take a look at my site. Problem was, almost every time I would reply to the ticket, a new tech would answer it. It created confusion and headaches. I was confused and lost. I felt like they were giving me the runaround – every tech had a different excuse for the problem, but nobody could fix it. So, like most frustrated people, I took it to twitter. LW saw my tweet, and their support manager called my cell phone to personally clear things up with me. The problem was fixed, it was cleared up, and I felt like they really cared about me. I appreciate that personal touch to go out of his way and call me up. (also, for the record, the first tech had indeed fixed the problem the first time. I just kept getting error emails from cPanel because it had not saved and resolved properly). This is my example of when ticket assigning really shines. Although, I’ve had other LW tickets that were resolved by 1 person, so it’s hard to judge. The only other gripe I have with the liquidweb support is that the helpdesk is ugly. And I mean really ugly. It looks very 1999-ish. To pay my invoices via paypal, I have to manually go to the paypal website and do a “send money” request. Ew. Seriously, guys? Get with the program. You need a new helpdesk and billing system. Oh, and you are the only webhost I know without customer forums.

The Bottom Line: LiquidWeb has the best support staff around. Period. They are knowledgeable and care about every customer.

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Site5 Hosting – WHM Reseller Hosting (1 Month – Refunded)

The Good: The CEO publishes his personal email account. You can reach him at almost any time of day, any day of the week. He gets things done. Support staff is very personable and friendly. Not much experience with this host, so I can’t say toooo much.

The Bad: I was mislead by a sales member and tech agent about the compatibility of a product on their hosting. This was a deal breaker and forced me to cancel the hosting. The CEO promised me that their new VPS plans would be able to support it. Well, I waited weeks for the new VPS plans. Aaaand… nope. Not supported. >_<

The Bottom Line: Its like gossiping with a teenage girl – Check your facts. Un-educated techs make assumptions and sales reps are pushy to make a sale. Even though these guys are really friendly, mistakes happen sometimes. Still very good though.

—–

BouncyServers – ShoutCast Radio Hosting (5 Months – No longer a customer)

The Good: Anthony, the owner, is a very knowledgeable person. Very friendly and generally helpful in assisting in situations.

The Bad: Its more or less a one man show. When I was a client, the site interface was clunky and confusing. Appears much better now, although I cannot login, so I’m not sure.

The Bottom Line: Friendly guy, good hosting. Not much more I can say without being able to log in to view tickets – Bad memory!

—

Invision Power Services – IP.Board License / Hosting (4ish years? – License Holder, No longer Hosting Customer)

(Disclaimer: I am an active modification author for IP.Board. I am very friendly with the techs on a personal basis, and also have advanced knowledge of their software.)

The Good: Very VERY friendly support techs, CEO, Management… all around friendly people, who can also turn on “professional mode” when needed. They listen to their customers. The support is top notch, issues are resolved without much back-and-forth. Techs are knowledgeable, support desk is clean, and I enjoy talking to their techs. They know the software like the back of their heads. I just realized I never look at the back of my head. This is a stupid analogy. They know the software like their own hands. Better? The staff is very friendly, they take genuine interest in their customers.

The Bad: Alot of customers gripe about the 2 business day ticket reply SLA. Although I get a reply usually within hours, people still seem to complain about it.

The Bottom Line: Talking to IPS Support is like watching baby puppies.

—

But the Cringe
Who lived quite south of Redmond
Did NOT

The Cringe hated Vista and Microsoft too
Oh he had his reasons — maybe more than a few
It could be that his machine never really quite worked
It could be he thought that guy Ballmer’s a jerk
But the most likely reason (and the easiest rhyme)
Was that he simply enjoyed giving them a hard time

But it wasn’t just Redmond, oh no, not at all
That caused the Cringe’s green skin to crawl
It was Apple too, and the Apple boo-hoo-ers
Those iPhone and iPod and MacBook froo-frooers
With their silly white earbuds and smug little grins
Who think saying anything bad about Apple’s a sin

He stood there in Cringeville, hating those knobs
And the god that they worship, the one they call Jobs
With his black turtleneck and his oh-so-hip glasses
Whose overpriced gizmos earned the love of the masses
If you listen too closely you can hear them all sing:

One more thing!
One more thing!
One more thing!
One more thing!

You’d think the Cringe heartless, but that isn’t quite true
There are geeks he feels sorry for, at least one or two
Like those poor Yahoo girls and sad Yahoo boys
Who’ll wake up on Christmas without any toys
Jobless, flat broke, down and out, on the skids
Don’t call them orphans — they’re just Jerry’s kids

Even the Cringe found some things really scary
Like the bobblehead Google twins, Sergey and Larry
Who could buy up the world with their endless Goo-dollars
And have money left over for diamond dog collars
When you’re richer than rich, who needs to be evil?
Just me, thought the Cringe, as he rolled up his sleevil

“Why,” he thought, “there are a million things I could hate
Like pimple-faced CEOs who can’t get a date
And all of those social networking freaks
Who spend all day tweeting and all night throwing sheep
Not to mention Dell, Sony, HP, and Cisco
Gateway, Amazon, and of course SCO.”

Then the Cringe remembered whom he REALLY despised
Who should be whacked with a stick and poked in the eye:
The spammers, the scammers, and slimy flim flammers
The Bit Torrent blockers and neutrality knockers
Web censors from China to Kalamazoo
NSA snoops and the RIAA too

All of them this year were badder than bad
All should make Cringesters sadder than sad

So the Cringe waited, and waited, and waited some more
For the whining and moaning, the gnashing of teeth
The cries of despair, the calls for relief
He listened, and listened, and listened for it
But the geeks out in Cringeville didn’t whine — not a bit

They kept Digging and Stumbling and gladly Slashdotting
They kept surfing and roaming and WiFi hot spotting
Their Blackberries glowed from all that tap tapping
Their Flickr streams flowing, their Google Maps mapping
Amidst all this bustling, happy computing
They didn’t even mind the Windows rebooting

What happened then? Well in Cringeville they say
The Cringe’s snark supply shrank three sizes that day
Finally, exhausted, the Cringe gave up the fight
And he said, with a sigh, as he turned off the light,
“Merry Cringemas to all, and to all a good night.”

http://www.dantynan.com/2008/12/24/how-the-cringe-stole-christmas/

At the same time, I was working on my webhost, and setting up WHMCS. And then it hit me – A way to allow customers to call in to check the status of their ticket, check their due invoice balance, or speak with your tech support department.

I will be debugging the code over the next few days, but I expect a launch before the new year of the beta version. It will be free for whmcs licensed customers.