Foreign Perspectives

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It’s taken three days and in the end I had to send an e-mail to their sales department saying that I wanted to cancel the hosting account to get any action. Now they’re saying that they are expediting the work on it.

It’s still not working though and, supposedly, they’ve now been working on it for around half a day.

I’m persisting with the cancellation as I’m wondering how long it will take them to get around to getting the account fully operational (I’m assuming that I’ll find more things that they’ve not set up properly).

Popularity: 45% [?]

1and1 have something of a reputation of making it difficult to transfer domains away from them and rightly so as no matter how much you look around their website, you’ll not find how to do it.

It’s actually fairly easy once you find the site that you need to do it from.

1. login to your 1and1 account and unlock the domains that you want to transfer (you’ll find the unlock option on clicking the info tab on your domain management screen);
2. it’s a good idea to change the name servers at this point to point to those of your new hosting service and, of course, to upload your site to it’s new location if you’ve not done that already;
3. if you’re using whois privacy you’ll need to disable that before proceeding; 
4. register the domain with your new registrar and acknowlodge the request when you receive the e-mail (this is sent to the e-mail address recorded for your domain so check that it’s correct by looking up the domain on whois);
5. go to the 1and1 contracts site and cancel the parts of the contract referring to the domains that you want to transfer (set the cancellation options to “as soon as possible” and “on “change provider”;
6. acknowledge the e-mail that 1and1 will now send you.

OK, so it’s a bit convuluted but once you know the address of the 1and1 contracts site at least you can do it.

How long does it take? It’ll take you about 15 minutes to work through all that plus a few minutes per additional domain. The transfer itself can take anything from a few hours to several days.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Whilst I’m sure you think that you’re providing great customer service and perhaps you even have a comments book filled with glowing remarks about how great it is, the fact is that you just don’t know that it’s great.

What about those glowing remarks? Hard as it might be to believe if you’ve sat on a Customer Service desk, the majority of people really don’t like to make negative comments and will usually only write nice things in a comments book. Unfortunately, that’s really no good as an indication of how well you are really doing.

For that, there’s really only one solution which is secret shopping solutions ie employing mystery shoppers. They’re more expensive than the e-mail surveys which these companies generally operate too but I’m sure you already know that surveys are far from perfect and those participating can quickly get fed up and just click whatever’s sitting under the mouse pointer just to get to the end.

Mystery shopping programmes on the other hand provide real feedback based on a genuine shopping experience. You’ll hear the uncensored comments from shoppers who’ve actually used your service. What you’ll not get is the feel good comment book style comments but rather honest constructive criticism and assessment of how your service is presented to the customers.

Popularity: 10% [?]