Update: Customer Service - A Real Life Example Wed 04 Apr 07

Last Wednesday I wrote about a problem with Sitemeter the service I use to report visitor statistics that occurred the previous weekend.  In this post I reported on the problems I had and suggested a number of simple ways they could improve their service.  As indicated in the article I did forward a link to the article to the folks at Sitemeter.

"Sitemeter Support" responded,

Thanks for writing. We are constantly improving our service and appreciate your suggestions. I have forwarded your comments to the appropriate department for further review. Please let me know if I can assist you further.

Although this sounds like the standard form letter I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and hope for the best.

Wanna bet on what happened this weekend?

If you're thinking the same thing happened again you'd only be partially right.  It actually turned out to be 3 problems (only 2 of which affected me).  These were:

1. On Saturday I found I was unable to even access the Sitemeter website - it was down completely.  Their weblog on late Monday afternoon explained "We arrived this morning to find that the gremlins had been hard at work over the weekend.  Not only was the Sitemeter Website experiencing problems but we had a few server issues."  Again I wonder how you can claim to provide an Internet service with its implicit 24 x 7 service and only discover a major 2 day outage when you come into work on Monday?
2. The particular server I was on again stopped processing log files (same problem as the weekend before). The process of catching up started Monday evening.  Am I alone in thinking that a re-boot is not a problem solving technique?  It would appear that they have a problem somewhere but haven't yet tried to get to the root cause since they feel a Monday morning re-boot is sufficient.
3. Their email system supporting the signup process crashed.  Based on the last experience I didn't bother emailing them with a problem report which appears would have be useless anyway with their email system down.  They go on to say,

We’re not exactly sure how this has impacted the signup process over this past weekend or to what degree. If you signed for an account during the weekend of March 31 – April 1 and have yet to receive an email with your account details please email us and we’ll do our best to get you your account information. Alternatively, you can create another “new” account and you should now receive your account information normally, via email.

Hardly a confidence inspiring statement.  Call me crazy but losing a customer's order and then suggesting they may want to re-submit the order is not generally a great way to generate and keep business.

Keep in mind this isn't an issue about being a free user and "you get what you pay for" because this affected premium (paying) and free (non-paying) customers alike.

Tuesday evening I learned of another issue involving Sitemeter.  It's been reported (here, here and here among others) that Sitemeter is apparently placing tracking cookies on sites that use it services to provide information on visitors to a third party.

When we provide service like this people "vote with their feet" and move on to alternate providers.  For those of us in the corporate IT our actions such as the example above can be the best incentive for our users to go over to using "shadow IT".  As for me, I guess I need to look up those links for Statcounter, IceRocket and Google Analytics and take a hard look on whether or not to continue with Sitemeter.

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• Customer Service - A Real Life Example
• IT as Dentistry
• 'Sup Chumps and Why IT Sucks
• I apologize.
• Social Bookmarking and Making It Easier For Customers To Do Business With Us
• Or the posts in the "Customer Service" category