Hover Phone Support will be closed on the holiday Monday September 6, 2010. We will have email support throughout the holiday, and we’ll be back to our normal phone schedule on Tuesday September 7.
Hopefully this weekend you can take some time to relax with a picnic, barbecue, take in a parade or fireworks display, or just spend time with friends and family.
John Metta!
John is a “programmer, anthropologist, hydrologist, and engineer.” (Sounds like a cool guy.) We ran a contest at Gnomedex 10 in Seattle. We picked John at random from a bunch of attendees who registered new domain names at Hover. John is now the proud new owner of a 64GB Wi-Fi iPad. (Or will be soon. John, I’ll give you a call.)
John registered wankmylife.com. The domain name made us a bit uncomfortable, but the page is actually a simple, beautiful example of a personal homepage. It’s the sort of thing we are encouraging Hover customers to do with their own name (at 15% off). We’ll get him to tell us what service he’s using there and Hover folks should consider it.
Congratulations John! And thanks to Gnomedex for including us (remotely) in a great event.
As I look around the blogosphere, the twitterverse and a few other Web locations named by combining two words awkwardly, it hits me that we have a lot of friends, affiliates, hosts and writers recommending Hover and offering their own unique promo codes. And that most of these promo codes offer the same exact discount. As Hover customers or shoppers, I can imagine you’d think “Unless I can find a promo code that gives me a steeper discount, it really doesn’t matter which one I use.” But I urge you to think about it a bit differently. These promo codes indicate to us where referrals are coming from. Of course, they dictate which affiliates get rewarded. But they also dictate which blogs, podcasters and other media will continue to get sponsored. Think of your promo code as a vote. You should support the individual or vehicle that truly pointed you in our direction. That we way know who is representing us well and who deserves our ongoing support.
Many of you already understand the value of our personal name email addresses (firstname@lastname.com) and how to put them to use. Some of you have never heard of them. Some of you find yourselves trying to explain them to people who have never heard of them. In case it is useful to you, we have provided a brief tutorial that explains what a personal name email address is, why you would want one and how to use, including how to forward email to any Inbox you want and how to send email using your personal name email address from any email program you want. The tutorial includes links to other lessons in our Help section that can guide you through the process.
Let us know if we can help.
Tutorial URL: http://about.hover.com/personalemail
Final (Belated) Update 5:11 PM, August 18, 2010 – Late last week, this issue was finally closed off. As indicated earlier, all mail had been refiled and reforwarded days earlier, but the OpenSRS Hosted Email team needed to make a few fixes to the core of the provisioning and anti-spam system to make sure that this error didn’t pop up and bite us again. To make a long story short, a small bug in the core email system reset the spam filters and forced all mail to be delivered to the SPAM folder instead of the inbox. This had the effect of making it look like all mail delivery had stopped, when it fact it was simply being misdirected. A set of fixes has been developed, tested and moved into the produciton email system so this specific issue should never pop up again. I’m sorry that this final update took so long to compose and post, but learning a few lesson from BP, I wanted to make sure that all of the proposed fixes had been implemented before we declared this particular well “capped”. Thanks for your patience, if you have any questions about this, please be sure to let us know.
Updated 4:55 PM, August 5, 2010 – All misfiled mail has now been moved into the Inbox for each mail customer. We are now actively working on forwarding any mail that was caught in the malfunctioning spam filter. I will be posting a complete run-down on the cause and circumstances related to the issue once we have completed delivery of all of the affected mail.
Updated 10:26 AM, August 4, 2010 – Proper mail delivery and forwarding has been restored. We are now investigating methods for re-forwarding and refiling the mail that was erroneously stored to your spam folder.
Updated 9:58 AM, August 4, 2010 – We have identified that the default spam filtering thresholds for customers with domain based email has been set incorrectly. It has been reset and will take effect within the next 30 minutes. Once we have confirmed that domain based email is once again being correctly delivered to the Inbox and not the Spam folder, we will look into whether or not we can move the misfiled email for you. We have also confirmed that no email has been lost, it has merely been misfiled. This is also affecting domain forwarding customers. We will undertake a similar investigation to see if the misfiled mail can be reforwarded.
Original 9:13 AM, August 4, 2010 – We are looking into an email delivery issue. Customers have been reporting that their email forwarding isn’t working or that their email is being delivered to their spam folder. We are actively investigating and will post an update as soon as we know more about the situation.
Yesterday many of you got an email
from us encouraging you to get your firstnamelastname.something at a 15% discount (check out myname.hover.com). A lot of folks seemed to appreciate the suggestions and the price. A few folks complained. We are always grateful for either type of feedback. I wanted to quickly address the complaints.
Actually, first an admission and a promise. I admit that we need to sell some more stuff to succeed. And it’s tricky because we don’t sell that many services. As you know, we focus on doing a few things really well (managing domain names and email) and we hope that folks will register a few services, renew at a high rate and tell their friends. It’s also tricky because we have vowed to spare you the sort of barrage of cross-sell that many of you have experienced at our more well known competitors. So that leads me to the promise. I promise that when we market, we always make sure it is something that we really think our customers may not have thought of or something that could add real value to their lives. (We do not tell individuals and very small businesses to “protect their brand” across every TLD or to buy a domain name simply because it’s Columbus Day.)
For most of our customers, I think the suggestion to secure your own name and make it some sort of personal front door was indeed a helpful one.
I think this is even true for a lot of our customers that own personal name email addresses (firstname@lastname.com). You folks have great email addresses but very few of you are using the subdomain (firstname.lastname.com). So we genuinely believe that you should still consider firstnamelastname.com as a domain name. If you prefer, you could even get your email address at that domain (first@firstnamelastname.com) and save yourselves money when your personal name email is up for renewal.
There was one group we messed up with. That group is best represented by my new friend, Alex Budak. Alex owns alexbudak.com. (Check it out. Great use of a personal domain name.) He got an email from us suggesting that he register alexbudak.net. That was a complete mistake. We searched our customer list for available firstnamelastname domains but we failed to suppress anyone who already owned their own name. (So, good news, we’re stupid but not sleazy.) It appeared that we were encouraging people to buy more TLDs for no good reason. That’s a lame pitch. We weren’t doing that at all. We will keep working to avoid that sort of mistake.
So, an admission, a promise, a clarification and an apology.
We do sincerely want to build a business here that is successful, helpful and respectful all at the same time. Please keep communicating with us to help us do that.
(UDPATE: If you want to never receive these types of messages from us again, we understand – just visit this page and follow the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the form. You can also use this same form to update your profile if we got any of your information wrong in our database.)
We’ve made a small change to our domain management tools today that should help customers transferring their domain names to other registrars. I can already hear you saying “Wait, did he just say that Hover is making it easier for people to leave?”. Well, yes, that’s what we’re doing.
Previously, we had a two step “take your domain process”. First, you had to go through the transfer out process, and then you had to go through the “cancel services” process. Effective today, we’ve made that last step automatic. If you transfer your domain name to another registrar, we will automatically cancel the services associated with the domain at the end of the current billing cycle. Previously, if you forgot to cancel, billing would continue on forever – you can imagine how this might make you unhappy.
For those customers that want to continue to use Hover to manage their DNS and email, but want to use another registrar to manage their domain (we have thousands of customers that do this), we will send out a final cancellation reminder closer to the expiry date that includes instructions for renewing your account *but*, if you don’t explicitly renew the services, they will simply expire and the email and DNS associated with the transferred domain will stop working as a result.
We really strive to make all aspects of managing your domains and email as simple and straightforward as possible. This includes those last few steps that lead up to the point where you are no longer a customer.
As always, if you have questions or have feedback, let us know in the comments!
Maybe I’m just paranoid. I hate spam. I really do. But a company that I trust is doing a great campaign to donate food to a local food bank. You can “send a person a hug” via email – and then Kraft will match your email with a food donation. The only catch is that you must give your address and the intended recipient’s mailbox. I checked their terms and conditions, and they were very clear that they were not going to sell my address, but I worry that my email address will suddenly have tons of spam.
I decided to ask an expert. I asked a senior Abuse Administrator (anti-spam expert) from Tucows. He said “Hmmm. That’s a tough one: I like corporations giving to food banks, but I understand that the cost is your name on their list. I think that if you want to have a jar of peanut butter donated, it’s “cheaper” to donate it yourself.”
Maybe he is the paranoid one. We all have trusted relationships online. You give your email address to a friend, you sign up for services online, and we all must trust that the relationships that we build online are never abused. We search terms of service agreements and the legal comments on websites to protect ourselves. We commit to tweet, post on our blogs, and publish to our facebook walls if anyone breaks the relationship. I’m sending the hug right now….
Today is a good day for cell phone users. Effective Tuesday, modifications to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) make it legal for you to unlock your cell phone so that you can use it with any carrier that you wish. Coupled with number portability, you will soon be able to choose what phone you use with which cellphone provider. Want to use your iPhone on T-Mobile? No problem. Your Droid on AT&T? Coming right up.
This may also bode well for domain name owners. In theory, ICANN rules make it possible for domain owners to pick which registrar they want to do business with. If you made a mistake and picked the wrong registrar to start with, the rules are designed to allow you to move your domain to a new provider with very little hassle.
In practice, it doesn’t always work out that way. Using many of the same arguments that the cell phone companies have made to keep cell phones locked, some domain registrars make it really difficult for you to move your domain to a new registrar of your choosing.
To the extent that these new consumer friendly rules signal a shift in US policy, it may quickly become harder for registrars to play games with their departing customers, and easier for domain registrants to transfer their domains between registrars.
Do you have any domain name transfer horror stories? Sound off in the comments, we love to get your feedback.
I recently had a terrible customer service experience with my mobile phone company. It prompted me to write a note to our customer service team, imploring them never to treat a Hover customer in this manner. The short version is that I’d love it if we never said “Sorry, that’s our policy” in response to any questions or concerns you have. We’re here to help, so we should help. The line about policy is a weak crutch and is almost never an appropriate response. So, I’ve asked our team never to use those words ever again.
The reason I’m sharing this email is because you each can help me make sure we don’t serve our customers in this same terrible way. If anyone on the Hover team ever says “Sorry, but that’s our policy” then please drop me a note so that I can try to make the situation right.
The full text of the email I sent out to the team is reproduced below. I changed the names of the mobile phone company, but the rest is unedited. If you have comments or questions, please sound off in the comments section, I love hearing from our customers.
From: Ross Rader <ross@hover.com>
Subject: Phone Company Horror Story – Please Read
Date: July 23, 2010 2:43:16 PM EDT
To: Hover All Hands
Hey everyone –
I want to share a quick story with you all before we head out for our respective weekends.I recently signed Amanda up for a cellphone plan with PhoneCo. For years OIdPhoneCo has been charging us too much for way too little service. Typical cellphone provider I suppose. Anyway, we went with PhoneCo because our home phone, television and Internet service are all with them which qualifies us for some modest discounts and makes billing much easier. When we signed her up, the clerk at Costco told us we’d have to call PhoneCo to sign up for the consolidated billing.
A few days ago I called PhoneCo to take care of the consolidation. After navigating their phone tree and sitting on hold for a few minutes, a rep picked up the phone and after re-answering all of the questions that I had already answered for the automated attendant, I was informed that the bill consolidation had been taken care of and that I would start receiving my discount in two months.
Two months? That’s certainly not what I had expected when I signed up. Now keep in mind, we’re only talking about a $5 per month discount, but it felt wrong to me. They had told me that I would get a monthly discount when I consolidated my bill, but now I was being told that I wouldn’t get it right away.
I pushed back with the call center rep, and she told me that there was nothing she could do in any event because all discounting would have to be handled by PhoneCo Mobility, and she was part of another part of PhoneCo. To make a long story short, I eventually ended up talking to a PhoneCo Mobility representative who flatly informed me that I would have to wait the full two months, that no interim credit would be issued, that no I couldn’t talk to a supervisor and finally, that she didn’t know why I was complaining, as the policy she was abiding was very clear.
Which brings me to the point of this note – there’s something really simple we can do to avoid sucking as much as the phone company.
To avoid that terrible fate, all we need to do is avoid using the phrase “because its our policy”. When a customer asks us for something that might not make immediate business sense, avoid the easy way out and instead, try to figure out how to make something positive happen for them, even if it means breaking the rules. Sometimes this might be hard – we work with a lot of ICANN and registry rules that are created by someone else, and we’re supposed to enforce them. Try to be creative and look for the most positive way that the conversation can end. Promise me that you’ll never end the conversation with a “Unfortunately, that’s our policy.”
We’re all working very hard to make sure that our customer’s get a better experience than they will with any other registrar or mail provider. This can be yet another unique way to prove that we are the best place to buy and manage domain names and email. Its also an easy way to put a smile on your own face – its way more satisfying for you to put a smile on a customers face, than to quote policy back to them. And amazingly, it makes for great business to treat people like people, instead of treating them like opponent’s or numbers.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you’d like to talk more about this, please drop by my office. I’d love to share some of the juicier parts of my PhoneCo story with you
Have a great weekend,
/r