From the company that I use for hosting:
Hi Jeremy!Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attempted to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY (it was all due to a fat finger)!
We’re really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; we’ve already removed all those bum future charges on your account (#XXXXXX) and already refunded the $238.8 charge on your credit card.
You should get the money back on almost immediately, within a day or two max, and there’s no need to contact your credit card company or bank for the refund.
Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!
Sincerely,
The Foolish DreamHost Billing Team!
Charming, or irritating given the context?
9 Comments
All of their messages are irritating. Especially the ha-ha-we’re-so-funny newsletters after my email and site have been down for an entire weekend.
I agree that their newsletters are irritating. I’ve not had any problems with them as a host, but I also hardly use their services. The webpage where I put various papers could go down for weeks at a time without me noticing.
beyond irritating
Hm. Interesting.
There are 2 potential reasons that one might be irritated with the tone of the letter. First is the obvious one: it is very informal for business correspondence. The second is less obvious but more fitting for 2008, I think: anyone who talks the way that email reads is annoying. In other words, it’s not the informal tone (which is, in my opinion, a welcome move away from the bureaucratization of human interaction) but rather the way that that particular person chose to carry out the informal tone.
My response is independent of the service issues brought up be Radio Free Newport above, as I’m assuming Jeremy’s question was as well.
My response is also colored by the fact that I’ve worked for a couple of small tech firms that are probably a lot like this hosting company. I’ve also worked for a couple of big ones who had customer service departments and scripted responses to (almost) every conceivable customer comment. My preference is for the more humanistic approach to customer service that is generally employed by smaller firms.
To be honest, it seemed ok to me. A little cutesy, especially the “fat finger” part of it, but I would far prefer a proactive communication that clearly explains what the problem is and what they’ve done to fix it. One could criticize them for being too flip about the mistake and not sounding like they know how serious it is. Or for making the mistake in the first place.
I think my sentiment is pretty accurately characterized by the idea of them being too flip about the mistake and not sounding like they know how serious something like that potentially is. I hit reply and said just: “While I recognize that much of your correspondence has a cutesy schtick, it’s *far* less amusing in this context.” We will see how they respond.
Our local Super Target has this habit of double-debiting your bank account when you use your bank card. I called the manager the first time that it happened (it happened twice, and soon thereafter I decided to stop shopping there) to complain and ask for my money back and he said it should reappear in the next couple days. I was lucky I had enough to cover their mistake. I’m sure others have not been so lucky.
You think the tone of the email is a bit too cheeky, you’ll love the blog entry about this mess.
Wow. That’s just weird. Personally, I don’t mind a little cutesy, but if I’m having an outage or something like that then it’s annoying.