The service domain?

Last year sometime, I registered a handful of domain names with a South African company. Having finally got some of the basics done, I thought I would have some use for one of the domains. So I contacted my company, and lo and behold, someone else owned the domain name. I phoned the company and was told to send an email to [email protected].

A couple of emails to the support@ email address, and I got five different consultants responding to me. A typical email reads:

Hi there Ebrahim
Thanks for getting back to me.:)

I’m afraid that the domain has expired at the registrar. We had sent you renewal reminders to your contact email address that you previously provided us.

Thanks in advance.:)

Please feel free to let me know if I can be of further assistance
Warm regards
Derrick

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: XXXXXX
Department: XXXXX
Priority: Low
Status: Closed

There is some dispute over whether I informed them of changes to my email address, but get this, I got a birthday SMS from the company. They send me a birthday SMS, but not an SMS to ascertain whether I still needed the domain. The logic defies me. An SMS on my birthday might be good PR in some strange way; an SMS to tell me that my domain needed renewal would have resulted in another sale.

Another thing, do not expect to get business if you sign of an email saying that your clients’ query priority is “low” and the matter is “closed”. And drop the smiley faces, especially if five different people are going to respond to the same query. Instead, pick up the phone and give the client a call.

The irony is that this company has confused “customer service” with an automated reply service, plus some random responses from account managers. I am certain they will tick off on their key performance indicators that they responded to email queries within 15 minutes, and the account managers will pull out these statistics in their performance reviews. They will, however, not factor in the loss of a hosting account, design assistance and so forth.

(The other domains are still “parked”. This time I am trying to register the domains myself. That should be an interesting experience.)