Customer Service Horror Story

Don't smoke cigarettes...

And I thought Halloween was finished until next year. WRONG!

Globat.com (web hosting company), the parent company of Domains Are Free (domain name reseller), are the folks who sold me the kitlas.com domain. Great deal too – $21.97 for THREE years. Far better than the prices GoDaddy or NetworkSolutions were charging. However, on November 6, 2008 at 2:02:32 PM EST I get an auto-generated mass marketing email from them saying they sent me an “e-mail with our brand new, exclusive TeraByte Ultra(tm) package upgrade”. I looked through all emails (which I only delete after 6 months) and there was no email from them.

Then on November 13, 2008 at 11:50:03 AM EST with Subject: Important: Automatic upgrade for kitlas.com I get another email from them saying, “Congratulations ! As per our previous notices, today we have upgraded your hosting account for www.kitlas.com to our all new Terabyte Pro™ level and processed your invoice 3998591 in the amount of $39.95 through your credit card account on file”. Automatic upgrade? Whoa. I call them immediately and have this phantom order of theirs cancelled. They cancel it immediately, nice, and send me confirmation, nice as well, that they’ve cancelled the order.

I go back and re-read the emails from them and notice that in the initial mass marketing email, deep into it (3 paragraphs) there’s a link to cancel the order. Clearly I didn’t get that far or there would never have been the issue.

Now, I found that practice to be very sketchy – charging the customer for a product/service they did not choose THEN sending an unwanted email to a customer telling them that they have purchased the product.

Anyone else think this is lame?