It will probably seem hypocritical to most people to mention this, but I really dislike the way that some companies handle customer service. Not that they provide no customer service, or that they don't do it well, but that they try way too hard. I'll provide a couple of examples.

I was out with the family recently for a lunch trip to Red Robin. Red Robin has unusually tasty hamburgers (they're a 3/3 on the Burger Scale) and the service is always pretty good. It's generally a good trip if you can ignore the price tag. I don't really worry about service there. You know that thing that waiters do after they serve your food; when they come back and ask you if everything's ok only when your mouth is full? That happened to us, but it wasn't the waitress.

The manager of the store came and asked if everything was ok. More than that, he stood there and waited for us to finish chewing so that we could give him an answer. He did this after the waitress had already been back once to see if the food was ok. This turned me off a bit.

It might be me my own thinking, but there's a certain number of visits that a waiter should make to your table when you dine out, depending on the complexity of your order and the duration of your stay. For a simple lunch order, that number is not six, and does not include a manager visit. Sometimes, you just want to eat your food and have the company you came with, not be bothered with "How are we doing?" questions throughout your meal.

What is really irritating about this is that it has happened before, and yet doesn't happen routinely. So do they only care sometimes? And on a prior visit, when they asked how everything was, because I am a mischievous experimenter by nature, I said that I needed a refill on my bottomless fries. In response, the manager called over a waiter to do it for him!

Are people who don't complain when something's wrong really in such overabundance that the managers need to hang out with you to make sure everything's rolling smoothly? I can't think of an alternate explanation. If they are concerned about satisfaction, they can observe waitstaff on the floor and make sure that a standard for attendance to customer needs is met, and - most importantly - be immediately available for complaints. If you absolutely need to make yourself known, so that diners know who to bother directly with complaints, do it at the door or before the meal - and potential dissatisfaction - starts.

Another example - I signed up for a Best Buy Reward Zone membership, and I was trying to access my account online. I detailed this experience in a prior post. Their automated system was overzealous in providing the best support possible, and annoyed me with many questions that were irrelevant to the initial request for support.

Another example - My mom's Treo battery's memory was busted, and it wouldn't hold a charge. When she took it to Verizon to complain, they suggested that she take it home and sync it (sensible to back things up first), then bring it back and they'd activate her phone insurance to replace the battery. The deductible is $50. Sure, this is basically theft on the Verizon store's part, but that's not the story.

I figured that there must be someone selling a replacement battery for her phone that cost less than that. After a very small bit of searching, I found a new one on eBay for $6 from The Blue Dot. I bought it. It arrived. No fuss. Oh, wait, they need feedback.

I got at least three emails from them asking for feedback. I got messages in my eBay account asking for feedback. This battery isn't even for me! I was going to ignore them, but then I clicked a link in one of the many emails they sent, and became very annoyed.

I think there's a concept here that requires definition. There's a case where a service exists that nobody needs, but if you don't have it, then you're not as good as any of the people that do have it. This is the case with eBay feedback. I'm happy with the idea of neutral feedback, since the thing arrived as expected and intact as far as I know, but I'm not the end-user so I'm just guessing. But allegedly if I give them neutral feedback it's a horrible blemish on their record, and I should be ridiculed for it. So I did.

The reason I cited was that they were too insistent after the purchase that I give feedback. Had they not badgered me, they wouldn't have the blemish. See how this works?

I think this concept also applies to Drupal developers who elect for Acquia partnership. No, I'm not an Acquia partner. Does that mean I am less capable than someone who's spent the money to get the logo and be listed in their directory? No. But unless I have this thing, I'll be less exposed than the dude down the street who just finished his 2-year associate course and decided that blowing cash on a partnership would get him leads that get his home business off the ground. It's valueless, and yet it's invaluable. Anyway, that's an entirely different post.

There's a key to providing good service, I think. There shouldn't be a problem with your service to begin with. You need to work out a level of service where there is a minimal number of issues. But when there is an issue, you need to attend to it immediately to the direct satisfaction of the customer. Ideally, you should only hear praise, and only after you hear complaints should you pursue remedies to the utmost to change those complaints to satisfaction. Asking after your satisfaction in the middle of your meal is not satisfying at all.

I recently signed up for Reward Zone membership at Best Buy. Ever since they opened the nearby store, I've been shopping there more, rather than going to Circuit City. Could this be related to Circuit City's economic problems? I buy a lot of electronic stuff. Anyway...

I was trying to log in to my Reward Zone account, and I failed. I think the reason was that I had given my old Verizon phone number when I opened the account. I sometimes do this to keep from getting sales calls. Anyway, I couldn't log in, and I hadn't thought to try that number to process the log in, so I filled out their support form and explained my issue.

Within an hour or two, I got a response from their support department. The support guy had filled out the form for me and sent me login details. With that info I was able to login and change my account, just as I would have hoped. Support success -- who knew? And then things went awry.

A couple of days later, I got a survey request. Best Buy wanted me to fill out a survey to determine how well their support system worked. I'm happy to do these because I think they benefit the process. If you're interested enough to ask how things went, then perhaps you're interested in improving. Not that this support request needed improving, mind you, just that I thought they'd like to know that everything went "just fine".

The survey was a multi-part questionnaire that might as well have asked for blood samples. I guess the bottom line is that I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition. They surprised me with a ton of questions that had nothing to do with my support experience. They asked me if I was likely to recommend shopping at Best Buy to family and friends. Not just one question, but three: one each related to consumer electronics, large appliances, and computer equipment.

I just wanted to tell them that everything went as expected, and I ended up in a marketing survey. I suppose I could have simply quit the questionnaire, but I started to get to the point where I needed to tell them that their questionnaire sucked. Here's what I told them:

I couldn't log in to my Best Buy account. I asked to have access to the account. The representative sent me access instructions. It wasn't exemplary service or poor service -- the porridge was "just right", and it was also "just porridge".

This was not rocket science. This was not an angry customer request. Frankly, this survey has upset me more and wasted more of my time than the entirety of my customer service experience. If anything has lowered my opinion of Best Buy, it's that they're asking questions about whether I'm more or less likely to buy things because of what amounts to a password reset on a rewards account. Stupid.

I don't mean to turn this into another online Best Buy rant. There are plenty of those and Geek Squad trouble stories online that I don't need to contribute to that. What I'm trying to address here is the weird reaction to support that companies now have. It's like a support request is an excuse to inundate with a ton of unrelated questions.

The moral of the story: If you're going to take customer support seriously, then don't intermingle it with marketing and brand opinion.

Ah, the heck with it. I don't write a lot about a whole lot here any more, because most of what I am excited to share revolves around Habari. But then, all of the people who talk about what to write about on a blog tell you to write about things that you have passion about. And I've never not done that, but I'm purposefully filtering out a lot of Habari stuff because I feel like my audience doesn't care. Which is just a weird thought. Anyway, no more of that madness.

Something that has been tryingly amusing lately are a certain type of email that shows up on the mailing lists. As I've mentioned to people in person a few times, Habari certainly isn't talked about as much as some other blog software, but I've been tracking the usual channels for Habari buzz, and there are usually 50 to 70 new people noticing Habari every day. Which I think is pretty good, and would love to see increase.

As a result of that ramp-up of attention, we're seeing an influx of new users. A lot of Habari's users are polyglots and English isn't their first language. So when folks start messages with, "Habari is bad," I am forced to wonder whether they're using their limited English skills as best they can, or whether they're coming from some other software and just looking to pick a fight. Either way, let's talk about a better approach.

Habari has a better approach, one that applies to pretty much any open source software. In fact, it's probably why the software you're familiar with has the feature you're looking for in the first place: You take it to the community, they listen, and together you find a solution.

What's interesting about this in respect to Habari is that when you bring something to the community, you become part of the community. Sure, there are people who just want to drop off their complaints and move back into the comfort zone of familiarity with their old software. But with Habari we take at least an interest in people willing to foster an idea through completion. Propose some solutions. Interact with others to come up with something that is most useful for the whole community.

It's also weird to talk about Habari in terms of other software. I mean, I realize that sometimes it's more convenient to talk about a feature by saying it's like some feature in other software. But you have to be careful with this. In many cases, the reasons Habari does things differently is specifically to not be like that other software.

We like to think things through. Was what we saw in that other software the best approach to the issue? Is that implemented in The Habari Way? If not, then it deserves reconsideration.

Just as an example, I was talking online tonight about tags. Why the heck do we call them "tags"? Why not "keywords"? Now, I'm not suggesting that we should re-label all of the fields in the interface from "tags" to "keywords", but I think that it's interesting that some word like "tags", which has a completely different meaning to people who are not into the blogging world, suits better than "keywords" which is really what those tags are.

Sure you could argue the point that tags are more category-like, and keywords would be culled from raw content. That's really not the point in what I'm trying to convey here. What I'm saying is, isn't it strange that we gloss over this term when we see it now? I think everything deserves to be questioned. Everything can be looked at in a new way. And for those cases where we've gone the other direction, don't assume that we did or did not think about something when we were designing a feature. Sure, ask about it, but don't simply assume that because it doesn't look like everything else that it's inferior or that a significant change or improvement isn't on the schedule.

The idea is to be better. Your idea may meet some resistance, as many great ideas do at first. You might not even convince anyone to include your idea. But I think we've been pretty good about providing explanations in those cases for why we've decided to do something else, and we're often very encouraging about making other people's ideas come across clearly.

At the end of the mailing list messages, we'll typically see a question asking for a solution. I'd say 95% of questions like this have some solution. And perhaps what Habari needs is a better way to connect potential users to the answers to those questions. I'd not say that they're "frequently asked". No, they're mostly uncommon. But there should still be someplace and some way to connect users to the answers before they need to hit the mailing list.

Perhaps we'll put some thought into solving this problem next.

I had a strange confluence of events over the past couple days. In the mail, I have received a few notices about services that I can attach to my Fios connection at home. I don't have interest in Fios TV now that Verizon dropped the ball and we went ahead with satellite instead, but the new 15/15 service is very attractive. I would love to be able to push as much data out as I pull down.

The same day that notice arrived in the mail, I got email on the Verizon billing account. Apparently, the credit card attached to that account is about to expire, and if I want the autopay to continue then I need to update the number via the site they provide. So I decided to update my billing info and see if there was a way to update my service to 15/15 at the same time.

I logged into the site, and to make a hideous story short: I couldn't do it. I'd get as far as entering some information, and it would tell me that the tool (for payment, mind you) was unavailable. Also unavailable was my ability to read email through their web interface. What kind of ISP is so broken that they don't let you pay or read email? Verizon, apparently.

Not really shocked by this, because that feature of their web site has never worked when I tried it, I moved on to looking on their web site for the billing phone number I could call when I can't get their site to work. This number is not conveniently located on the "sorry, payment processing is down" page, nor any page that I could really find. The help pages I did find were really annoying, though.

On a few of the pages that were set up for "help", the site told me that they didn't support Vista (which is what this PC runs) or Windows 98, but that efforts were being made to keep up with the latest technology, blah blah blah. Why does my site need to run XP to view a web site? All I want is a phone number and a couple of simple questions answered. Lesser ISPs would put up a wiki, for Pete's sake.

Alrighty, the web option was doomed, I went to the kitchen to retrieve the postcard with the 15/15 notice on it. Surely there was a phone number there, right? Yes. I called. Within moments, some guy answered and asked for my "Verizon phone number starting with area code". I gave him my Vonage number, because I don't have a Verizon number, just data. He asked what he could do for me.

I told him that I wanted information on the 15/15 service, whether it would require hardware changes or incite downtime, and how much more it actually cost than I was already paying because, as I said, I don't actually have the Verizon phone service to obtain the bundle price in the flyer. I also wanted to sign up immediately - aka, pay Verizon more money - if his answers met with my approval.

That's when he told me that his computer was down, so he couldn't really do any of that stuff for me, and I was really left wondering why he bothered asking me how he could help when clearly he was impotent.

I got another email from Verizon today telling me that they're going to cancel my online service if I continue to fail to operate their impossible site and customer service.

I've been hosting my own content on the web since, oh, 1995. I've been on many hosts over that time, moving sites from host to host. During that time, I've been on some good hosts and some really awful hosts, and I have really yet to find the ultimate host that I can recommend unreservedly.

Perhaps you have been having sites hosted long enough to have acquired some horror stories. A while back, I had my sites hosted with a company called A World Wide Mall. AWWM was pretty reasonably priced, but as with most hosts, the customer service was pretty lousy. And one day, the guy who ran the service decided to fold up the company and move on without notifying any customers. He just took his datacenter and left. With all of my data. Lovely.

I'm sure that folks have similar (or worse) stories. I have had service where I thought I was getting protected backup and redundant storage, when really it was all on one box and when the box died, I lost a lot. I tried hosting at 1&1 once, and after playing with it, I immediately filled out their cancellation form. Total time with their service: about 5 minutes.

I signed up for VC hosting with TextDrive. That was one of the worst investments I've made. It sounds like a good deal, a fixed high amount for lifetime hosting - for as long as the company is in business. But it seems they put all of their lifetime hosting customers on the same lousy server. Running this site on WordPress took more SQL resources than all but 2 of their lifetime customers. Eventually, they throttled performance, and I was forced to move back to non-shared hosting after paying for that whole lifetime account.

I've got another lifetime account on A Small Orange. Since my experience with TextDrive, I haven't tried to host anything intense there, but it has been doing a good job for what I use it for. But one thing that bugs me about CPanel shared hosting is how it's configured to generate names for everything using your CPanel user account. So all of the database names are prefixed with "owinkler" and all of the database users are prefixed with "owinkler" and the web logins all require the domain name in them. What a mess.

I used to have an account at Dreamhost. It has similar issues, but that's to be expected from shared hosting. Still, the reliability of Dreamhost was fairly poor during my hosting there. You would think that separating the database hosting from teh web hosting would improve performance, but for Dreamhost it caused nothing but problems. There's some kind of latency that you can feel, but would require more investigation to determine the exact cause. Anyway, the database connection is also bothersome because you can't connect directly to it remotely, and that's how I prefer to use MySQL rather than through phpMyAdmin.

My primary hosting takes place with two hosts that use VPS technology. VPS is my preferred hosting technology, after a brief stint with dedicated. Dedicated was too much trouble. VPS is cheaper, easier to upgrade, easier to maintain and backup. The dedicated server was great until things started to go wrong, and then troubleshooting those issues became problematic. With a VPS, if there's an issue, you push a button and you've got backups restored.

UnixShell is the host that I described before, the one that was hosting backups on the same server. I've learned my lesson with that, and now have a separate dedicated service for housing backups. Most other things about UnixShell are decent. The problem with them at the moment is that they aren't offering new hosting accounts. There's something unsettling about a company that offers service but has no room to expand.

SliceHost is the VPS host where this site runs. SliceHost has been great, really. Their backup options are nice, with separate timed snapshots. The administrative interface is nice, too. But once again, it seems like they've got allocation problems.

In SliceHost's case, I couldn't recommend them to a client, because there's no option to install any kind of user-friendly control panel at the VPS-level. You'd have to add email accounts and configure the server entirely form the command line. This is not the best option for clients, although the flexibility of the server is relatively unmatched.

And this is where my issues with VPSes break down. I need something that is flexible enough that I can modify things at the shell, but friendly enough that clients can configure some settings like email and backup via a web interface. Where things usually don't work out with VPS software like Plesk is when Plesk has its own idea of how things are configured, and you need to work out changes around what Plesk requires. Maybe what I need is software that manages some of the server elements, but not all of them.

In any case, these hosts aren't perfect for clients. If something goes wrong, the client has no recourse with the host. Not that I mind getting requests for support, but it's the emergent support that usually happens that makes me think that this isn't the greatest situation. I don't want to get calls in the middle of the night when someone can't figure out why their server can't do one thing or another.

In any case, I've been wondering if there's a host that is supportive of web developers. Something that a developer can tweak, but a client can still easily manipulate for simple every day tasks. It would also be nice if the host would have a management interface that understood the client/contractor relationship.

Any suggestions?