Last week’s billing mistake by server hosting company DreamHost caused a lot of grief to a lot of people.
Every customer, it seems.
I’m one of those customers and I was hit for the double billing which saw $340 unexpectedly charged to my credit card. The wrong amount and at the wrong time.
Emails and blog posts followed from DreamHost explaining that the incorrect billing was rapidly spotted and refunds quickly processed.
It took five days including a weekend for that refund to hit my account.
I’m philosophical about it. Mistakes do happen especially of the human kind as was the case with DreamHost. I liked the way in which they quickly addressed the issue and their responsiveness to email I sent in.
Yet I can well understand that many people were extremely unhappy and were asking questions on things like who would reimburse people for additional interest costs or if they had penalties for going over their credit limits because of DreamHost’s error.
Try asking those questions of almost any company I can think of who makes such a mistake and see how far you get. Not far, basically.
DreamHost, though, accepts their responsibility in such a situation:
[...] If this/these erroneous charge(s) by us resulted in you having any sort of overdraft/bounced check/nsf fee from your financial institution, please contact our support team from the web panel. We’d just like to request that you include a copy of your statement with the necessary info showing the fees. It can be either a paper statement or a print out of your online statement, or even a screenshot of your online statement and it can be scanned and attached to your support message via our support form or faxed to us at 714-990-2600. If you fax it, please be sure to write your domain name or DreamHost account number on the fax. When we get this, we will put money on your credit card equal to the amount your bank charged you, as well as give you a DreamHost account credit for the same amount on top of that.
Now that is customer service.
It’s one reason why I will remain a DreamHost customer and continue to recommend their excellent hosting services to everyone I know.
Finally, a word about communication.
The irreverent style of DreamHost’s initial apology post did not sit well with a large number of customers as indicated by many of the comments to that post (over 650 comments in total).
It was followed up by a post with more subdued and conservative wording which many think looks far more appropriate in the circumstances.
I think it’s a good example of where informality in communication might not be the best approach in certain circumstances even when informality is always your communication style.
Do you agree? Shel and I discussed this in FIR #311 on Jan 17.
