Industry Leading Technical Support?
December 10, 2007
All Fasthosts Customers affected by the password change received an email this morning thanking them for patience and understanding during this ‘very difficult time’.
While we mull over the content of this letter, there was one statement that stood out, claiming that Fasthosts would “return to providing industry leading technical support as quickly as humanly possible”.
If you have been a customer with Fasthosts for any length of time, this statement is just completely wrong, and more like the sort of statement we expect from a politician, and not from a supplier we are paying to provide a service.
The truth is that Fasthosts support is appalling, and always has been. With very rare exceptions, support staff talk to you like you are an irritation, or a moron, and always with an underlying sense of ‘Fasthosts Word Is Final’. Let’s make that absolutely clear – there is no ‘Help’ from Fasthosts Help Desk.
I was once told by a FH Techie that most phone calls were a waste of their time since the problem is generally covered in an article in the Knowledgebase, and that all they could do is point me to it. So what? I’ve paid for the call, and my subscription pays their wages, so what if I want someone to tell me what to do over the phone? That’s my decision.
Behind this blog is four people, each of whom hold accounts with most of the most popular hosting companies in the UK. Fasthosts support falls way behind anything we would call a basic standard, and I am sure that the other companies with whom we hold an account would be embarrassed to know that Fasthosts claim that their effort is ‘industry leading technical support’.
Listen up Fasthosts – your support is terrible. It’s not about the information you give, but your attitude. I challenge you to go through your phone logs and find a greater percentage of calls where the technical support person sounds like they want to help, and the customer ends the call sounding happy and confident that they now know what to do.
We’re going to record all our support calls now, and we ask that anyone who ise reading this please do the same. Post them on YouTube with a Fasthosts tag and post a link to it here. Make sure you make a note of how long it took you to get an answer after dialling the number.
If we get enough recordings, we’ll compile the links with your notes, and we’ll see just how good Fasthosts Support is.
If you send an email for support, make a note of the time you sent it, and when you had a final resolution. For resellers, Fasthosts quote a max two hours for final resolution of a problem – let’s see how many even receive a reply in that timescale.
Say NO to Fasthosts 
December 13, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Nice site by the way, I always wondered if someone would do this – some of it’s very funny, the rest is just the sad truth of normal Fasthosts behaviour. If it wasn’t for the thousands of small businesses that would suffer, I’d wish these guys shut down tomorrow.
I called Fasthosts today with a question about Broadband. Nothing technical, nothing hard, just asking if an existing FH broadband customer moves their office and needs to re-provision on a new telephone line, is this a migration (and therefore free), or is it a completely new provision, subject to a £50 fee. In other words, how much will it cost for this customer to move.
The person I spoke to told me that they didn’t know, and the only people who know are Technical Support, and there is a long holding queue…
When I mentioned that this was non-technical and someone else might know, like a colleague or a manager, he told me that he *IS* the sales manager and all he can do is sell me broadband, he can’t tell me anything about how it works, or what the packages mean… In other words he can only take orders if you know what you want.
I didn’t have the heart to continue the call, but if I had the chance again I would tell him – Great “Sales Management” there mate – personally, if you were on my sales team I would fire you on the spot for a reply like that. I have 20 year old trainees with a better understanding of sales and how to win business – they think you are hilarious.
January 7, 2008 at 7:52 am
Hi, would you link to me at http://fasthostshell.blogspot.com/ , I have linked to you. PS, Nice site.
November 1, 2008 at 11:38 am
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