Customer satisfaction index at Gandi
By Ryan on Friday 13 March 2009, 09:29 - Gandi - Permalink
At Gandi, our customers are our best advocates.
We do not put out any advertisements, contrary to our competitors, to sell our services. We rely on satisfied customers to be our sales force. Our objective is to concentrate on your satisfaction, not to pay for television ads or armies of sales representatives to recruit new customers.
This policy keeps us focused on quality. This is why we monitor your level of satisfaction carefully and do everything possible to treat you as we would like to be treated ourselves. Put simply, your satisfaction is an essential part of our success and our future. So how do we calculate this index?
Support requests
When you contact our customer support team via the online form, your case is read by one of our support team members, who will take care to answer you as soon as possible and as an individual as opposed to a number on a ticket. When they feel that you have received the final answer to your question and that your ticket is "closed", a special footer is added as a signature to the mail e.g:
--------------------------------
Are you satisfied with the quality of the reply you received?
YES: http://www.gandi.net/faq/feedback/yes
NO: http://www.gandi.net/faq/feedback/no
I would like to give more detailed feedback: http://www.gandi.net/faq/feedback.
--------------------------------
You can send us an opinion on the quality of the reply that you were given, through a simple click. You can also follow the links to give detailed feedback that includes your comments, suggestions etc.
We understand that you will not always get the answer you want (e.g. "...you did not renew your domain and so it was deleted"), however we do ask that you, as Shakespeare so eloquently put it in Henry IV, "Don't shoot the messenger", and use the feedback links as intended. There are technical and legal limits that we are required to work within, and even the 'Jedi' in Gandi's support team have limits to their powers 
If you would like to complain about a particular product or feature, we recommend using the full feedback form where you can actually leave your comments.
Good or bad, we take your voice into account. We do not exclude the extremes when we calculate the satisfaction index, in fact, it's the extremes that we are interested in. We are confident in the quality of our customer care service and we are happy to display the raw data of your feedback in real time on our Support page as testimony to this.
On this page, we display the satisfaction index as a bar graph, on a scale from 0% to 100%, in real time, for both the current week, as well as the average over the past 3 months. This not only "keeps us honest", but it's also a way to show everyone how you feel about the quality of service you receive.
So how do we use your feedback?
All of us here at Gandi use your feedback to compare changes in customer satisfaction and look for areas of improvement:
- for our support team, it indicates how changes in the volume or style of tickets changes your satisfaction,
- for our product teams it helps show the impact of product issues or where improvements can be made.
- For the management team it is a good litmus test to check all of our teams are collaborating in a way that maximizes the quality of our products, and as a direct result our key advocates: you.
When you take that extra step to provide more detailed feedback using our online form, your comments and suggestions are systematically read by senior management, who will analyze them and undertake the necessary improvements to services concerned.
Please give us your feedback so we can better serve you.
Comments
Hi Reactive Software team. I'm sorry you feel you've had a difficult experience.
I appreciate you've been upfront that you bought a set of domains which infringed on other company trademarks which is why (from what you have said) our support team will have suspended your domain names.
However, if your main business domain name was not involved in your trademark infringements and we disabled it inappropriately, then I can only apologise as I would also be extremely annoyed in the same situation.
I will check out the full case history with our support team and come back to you with a more detailed response.
With regards to customer support response times, we do provide a 24hr email response service which I believe is what you experienced. With regards to comparing our service with Go-Daddy, take a look at a blog article by another customer who has experienced both services, this provides you with an alternative view http://www.miconian.com/?s=gandi Essentially they can provide a telephone service but the costs are recovered by constantly selling other services to you including sales calls.
Get back to you soon.
Wendy
Hi -- could someone fix something? I can't read the home page for Gandibar because the background is dark grey instead of light grey. I use Opera on Debian mirrored from USC.edu ...HELP.
Hi Reactive Software team,
I've now got the full details of the case that you are referring to. It seems that you registered 13 domains relating to password recovery for major online providers, e.g.
hotmail-password-recovery.com
myspace-password-recovery.com
etc.
Our team monitors registrations like these as they often related to phishing or spamming activity, which we at Gandi do not support or tolerate. We therefore took action and suspended the domains and the account.
The reason we suspended the whole account was that more often that not these types of registrations are done by professional fraudsters or spammers, and the whole account needs to be terminated.
If in your case if you had registered these domains without realising the consequences of the trademark and security infringements, I will take your word for that and assume it was innocent, but you must surely recognise that this looks very dodgy and understand we have an obligation to protect other people's trademarks and support internet security.
In any case we received a mail from you on Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:04:18 asking why we suspended your domains, and at Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:03:59 (10 hours later) we replied to you to inform you your mail domain was reactivated.
I apologise for the inconvenience this caused you, but in registering these domains that clearly violate our T&Cs and trademark law, you must understand that you put your account at risk. I'm glad we were able to get you back online with your main domain, and wish you all the best for the future whether it is with Gandi or not.
Thanks,
Wendy
Wendy,
My main point: there’s no way to get in touch with Gandi if there’s an urgent situation.
I am ok with Godaddy trying to sell me something else (which is not too obtrusive so far) in return for a 24/7 telephone number and a smaller fee (it’s not too much but why should I pay more if I don’t get more?).
Eugene
Hi Eugene,
Thanks for your comments. We don't currently offer 24/7 phone support, so you are quite right this is not something we offer on par with Godaddy. Your choice of registrar is indeed up to you, so if 24/7 support is your primary concern, then you would be right to go with godaddy. However, we believe that this is not the only reason to choose a registrar.
Gandi was founded on the principle of putting customers first, and to behave ethically in terms of our policy and treatment of customers. This is actually the same reason we took decisive action when you registered domains that infringed on trademarks, as we seek to protect the rights of others.
There are some registrars (and you can do your own research here, including the market leader) who engage in practices of domain tasting, domain speculation, front-running, and advertising on customer domains, even when they say they do not do this. Check out this Techcrunch article on the subject:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/0...
There is also the issue of whether they protect their customers rights and how they treat them when disputes happen. You can see this article where Gandi is compared to other leaders in this market and our policy evaluated.
http://news.cnet.com/Survey-Are-dom...
The domain market is evolving, and price is certainly one factor. But trusting your registrar is another, and this is one area that we will not compromise on. Think about your other purchases in life and which ones you only buy from the lowest cost provider. For some other factors are more important.
I hope that helps,
Joe
This is the best thread I've read in days. This is why I have been a customer of Gandi for 10 years.
Reading the responses from Wendy and Joe, I was lulled calmly into precise understanding of the situation. Not only were Wendy and Joe extremely polite in this scenario, they offered several articles and references which will assist many with understanding the challenges of finding a trustworthy partner like Gandi.
Thanks Andy, we're glad you've been with us for 10 years and hopefully for many more! Please let us know if you have any other requests or feedback, we'd value your opinion.
Wendy
The worst support that I ever have seen !
I'm trying to renew 2 domains on my account. Gandi has charged my credit card and then the order status switched to "Failed" with explanation "Renewal forbidden". Also the control panel says that I should contact Gandi tech support. I wrote three messages to support.
NOBODY HAS ANSWERED ME IN 4 DAYS !
I don't know what to do in this situation. I spent my money to renew domains and it seems that I spent this money for nothing.
Hello Andrey M
I regret but we found no email from your email's address in our technical's support.
the three domains were renewed correctly. If you have a ticket number, please give it to me.
Regards,
Soraya, there were three tickets:
3004312
3004786
3004908
The first two tickets have been answered in two days and contains dumb and incorrect answer "all seems OK". Nobody has checked the renewal orders and their status. Nobody has answered me when I replied.
The problem has been resolved after 3 days and I think that's a result of my messages to Gandi forum and feedback.
Gandi, you are a disgrace! You pretend to be an International Company and get people outside of France to host domains with you - but when there is a problem - you only accept French style documents. I have been urgently trying to change my MX Records for over two weeks now (change of email provider), but having forgotten my password, you will only send it to the not working email because I do not have French style company documentation! Well - the world is not France - If you want to work internationally - you need to accept International Company Documentation. Your service is too parochial and way too slow - other registrants I work with in UK and US have resolved this problem in minutes for me not weeks as you have taken! Maybe you should stick to the French market and not irriate customers in other countries by pretending to be an International business!
Andrew: I would not consider it to be something to be proud of to have your domain with a company that is over-eager to change the email address of an owner handle, or give away its password to someone who just asks for it...
Gandi takes special care to assure that the request is coming from the person or company that is registered as being the title holder for the account. In some cases, yes, this can be frustrating when it does not go as quickly as you would like, and this is understandable. We have customers in nearly 200 different countries, and though each country has its own forms and procedures, we always find a way to assure the ownership of domains. In your particular case, we have not received documents that have allowed us to do this yet.
Your case is now being followed by a senior member of our support team, and we will be sure to help you find the quickest solution possible: one which also guarantees the security of the domain name.
I have been trying to transfer some domain names from another registrar to Gandi. The procedure mysteriously fails, but that's not the point. Your system to get support, sending mail only through the form, getting at least two useless automated responses, and not being able to follow up by replying to your (inconclusive) messages, and the fact that you do not allow phone calls, is driving me nuts. As I wrote this morning, I will change registrar, and bring the domain names from all my accounts to somebody who deserves my business. You don't want to talk to me and make it impossible to communicate with you? I will take my business elsewhere.
I really support Gandi policy, ethics and I'm supporting you. But I've to agree with Sebastiano's post. I have the same bad experience.
I suggest to:
- improve details on errors and processes states. For example. Right now I've a domain registration pending that failed couse owner's contact information. Which information? I checked all information and it seems ok.
- improve support ticket system. I can't follow the comunications with you.. The time you get to answer. The old tickets/requests.. etc..
- create some kind of real time support. Live chat is the best I think.
Sorry to say that if everything stay this way I'm not going to spread anymore your services to people in Italy and Brazil as I did until now. And I'm thinking on moving too..
Greetings!
Vince
If you're going to get anywhere in the hosting business, you really are going to have to improve your support processes.
"[...] who will take care to answer you as soon as possible and as an individual as opposed to a number on a ticket." Please consider the fact that most people would consider implementing a ticket system to actually be a feature.
"We don't currently offer 24/7 phone support" is technically correct, but it would appear to be more honest to state that "we don't offer phone support at all".
@Rob: Gandi does use a support ticket system - what we mean by "...who will take care to answer you as soon as possible and as an individual as opposed to a number on a ticket." is that we take care to treat our customers as actual people, rather than just a number.
We are starting to offer telephone support, which is now open to resellers and large volume customers. We are in the process of scaling our support resources, so we hope to be able to open this to a wider set of customers in the months to come, as well as expanding our other support channels. We'll
keep you informed
Gandi might use a support ticket system, but the implementation is so opaque as to lead to a very unsatisfactory customer experience.
For example, I believe I have a ticket open at the moment, but there is no way to actually confirm that; there is no way to see if anyone is working on the issue; there is no real level of assurance that any email I send to the generic support-en@ will be routed to the right person or assigned to the right ticket; I have no access to any definitive database of communication and activity for that ticket; and it seems that my initial report is not available to me (because it was made by filling in a form on the website) and so I can't double-check that it was precise, complete, and unambiguous.
A web front-end into the ticket database is common elsewhere, and I'm sure that you and your customers would benefit from Gandi implementing one.
"We are in the process of scaling our support resources."
Please do. I opened a ticket 3 days ago, it took more than a day for first-line to attempt to reproduce and escalate, and since then nothing.
(And poor manners on my part, sorry! Thank you for reading and replying, Ryan.)