Open Response To Utiware’s Comment/Email Request

After months of waiting for the management of Utiware Web Hosting to tender some form of apology for the bad service I received while trying to host with them last year, they leave a comment and send me an email that’s TOTALLY unexpected.

Here goes their comment/email and my response in bold letters.

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Dear Udegbunam Chukwudi,

http://www.strictlyonlinebiz.com/blog/utiware-web-hosting-experience/713/

I am writing to ask you to delete the above blog post that you posted against Utiware last year. While we understand that your particular communication regarding the installation of WordPress didn’t go well at the time, you have expressed your grievances. You have also received additional information from other Utiware customers who have not experienced the issue that you complained about (not being able to install WordPress). We have numerous customers across Nigeria who use WordPress on our servers. For example, this is a link to the WordPress Blog of Jide Ogunleye, our customer who responded to your post several months ago: http://www.jideogunleye.com/blog/

After 8 months of that post being up, you finally decide to pay attention to my grievances. Your damage control efforts are quite futile and late. Instead of apologizing for the f**kups of your customer care representatives, you give me the impression that my airing my grievances via that blog post = the apology you are supposed to be tendering.

Your customers aren’t complaining because they didn’t have to go through the anguish and lost deadline I did due to logistics from your end. You people just played dumb to my plight probably because it was a measly #3,500 ($22). Your present customers are having a ball hosting with you guys. Well I say good for them. I’m sincerely glad that they are having a better experience than I did.

We understand that at the particular time you were not happy and a negative post like this one might help other people avoid the same issue. But, leaving such negative information on your blog indefinitely is not right, especially since the particular complaint you had is not an issue. You have also copied our Company Logo to your blog. Our Company Logo is copyrighted material and should not be used without our permission.

WTF! Did you just say my complaint is not issue? Humph! I reserve my comments with respect to that. My apologies for using your company logo which as you say is a copyrighted material. I’ve taken it down.

That post was a call for attention to the management, so they would know what their customer service reps were up to. It was NEVER to get people to NOT host with you.

This world is a small place. You don’t know who is reading that blog post and not responding to it, and you don’t know which opportunities you may have lost as a result. Such a negative message can backfire. Utiware is a well loved company. At this point, we ask you to examine why that particular post should still be valid. If the goal was to warn potential customers against signing up with Utiware, then there is no reason for such a message to continue to exist. If the goal was to get back your N3,500, that is not a big deal either. We hope that the goal is not to put up a permanent negative message against Utiware as that will violate all ethical reasons, and greatly undermine your credibility.

Opportunities lost because I aired my grievances about some crappy customer service that I experienced? I do my best to keep it as real as possible and not go about fooling my readers. You can check out my review of Web4Africa which has received an update after I moved to blogger (PatchworkOfTips Moves To Blogger Platform). If the opportunity in question was coming from you guys, I would most definitely pass. I don’t promote companies with whom I’ve had SERIOUS ISSUES! It goes against my own principles.

I sincerely don’t see how that blog post could backfire because right till this very day, there’s no iota of lie in that post. My credibility as a Nigerian blogger remains intact and if that post undermines it, so be it. A mi me da igual!

Please delete the above blog post from your blog and carry on with life without such strong grievances.

This is one of the major problems we have in this country. Companies especially foreign ones like MTN treat us like jerks and nothing is done. For example, you pay for 30 days internet service and the damn network goes AWOL for 28 days and you’re NEVER compensated in any way. The money is gone. Carry on with your life without grievances against the company.

Instead of small businesses like yours, to take the initiative and do something about this "Customer is a fool" trend in Nigeria, you’ve decided to join the big corporations in their hot mess.

I can’t really blame you guys. It’s the government officials that sit down and watch their citizens taken for a ride, that I blame.

Finally I sincerely would have taken this post down if you had apologized and asked politely but getting this kind of response from you, I doubt if this will be happening anytime soon.

My plan is not to ruin business for you guys because with a monthly traffic of just over 2,000 unique visitors and a bounce rate of 66%, I have no influence on the net. The goal is to get you to get your acts together and hire competent customer care reps not the half baked ones like those @ GLO that will argue like mad men to establish their claim that EDGE is faster than 3G and those @ MTN that will tell you BlackBerry can’t be configured for GPRS. What black blondies! (no offense to my blonde readers. Les quiero )

Thank you very much.

Utiware Web Hosting

BTW since you’ve got numerous customers across Nigeria who use WordPress on your servers and are overly excited about your services, here’s a free promotion tip.

Contact them all and get them to blog about Utiware’s GLOWING services and then teach them some sound search engine optimization which would help their reviews, send my own review off the first 10 pages of Google, thus maintaining your clean image and earning more customers for you

Do have a great week. Ciao!

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