There are times clients contact us and must expect us to be mind readers. I thought I’d share some particularly baffling and just generally stupid things we see on a daily basis.
“My web sites are down!”
Generally we’ll see these from people who send us e-mails from addresses we do not have on file and from domains we aren’t hosting.
Would you be able to do anything with this information?
Neither can we.
“Help! my site: addondomain.com is down!”
We have ways of tracking this down, but really, is it so hard to understand that it’s best to give us both your master domain and your and also the domain you’re having problems with?
A lot of times we’ll get domains that are registered else where and forwarding through 3rd party service. (Why you would set something like this up I don’t know.)
“My site isn’t working”
We proceed to go to the site and it’s working fine, respond to the client and they come back with something like: “Well, it’s this small section of the site that you have to wiggle your big toes while standing on your head to get to.”
How the hell are we supposed to know that if you don’t tell us?
“Hi, my website is: xyz.”
First off, xyz what? .com, .net, .org, .biz, .co.uk, ie, .nl, .de, the list goes on.
To which the response is sometimes:
“Well .aero, of course! Are you stupid or something?”
Why yes, yes I am stupid. That’s why you’re calling me. Now what seems to be the problem?
“Well this, that, and this other thing.”
Okay great, why didn’t you tell me that up front?
A Step Back
Can you see a pattern here? We get asked something vague or some mysterious problem is reported that sounds pretty urgent most of the time.
We’d be happy to help, but well we need to know some specifics!
Save time, give us what would seem to be some pretty key pieces of information!
Related posts:
2 comments
Lurpy
August 5, 2010 at 4:01 pm (UTC -6) Link to this comment
Wow, all my frustrations! They’re being explained in one place!
SB
August 7, 2010 at 6:59 pm (UTC -6) Link to this comment
Information, information, information. Can’t say enough about how important information is. So often it is I have an issue without any explanation, logins, steps to replicate the issue or test it, etc. The more information provided the quicker the problem can be found and fixed, but no one seems to understand that. They would rather go back and forth for a day asking for more information.