Monday, October 20, 2008

Support woes

I rag on Scott Adams for being cynical, but sometimes I understand him. Oddly enough, it's usually the companies handling my subscription e-mail newsletter which make me feel this way. I started with a nimble, small company back in the nineties. Great customer service. Then they got eaten by a large company, then that got eaten by Yahoo. Goodbye customer service.

Yahoo deleted my list, and I couldn't even get the addresses. So I took a paid service. Small company, but it turned out their support got worse and worse and worse. So I had to change.

So I went to Sparklist. Rumored to be the best. And they were good... and then they got eaten by Lyris. A couple of years later, it seems Lyris is a huge company with many operations, and I can't get good support out of them. They don't do email support. I got a "support case" on their website (about having lost *all* my yahoo email subscribers because their email server got blacklisted), but now I can't access it, my login does not work. I got on the phone, but all the "help" I got was that since my login works on his computer, the error must be on my machine. But I've tried two different computer, three different browser, and two different Internet connections, and I still get "You are no longer logged in. Your session may have timed out. Please login again to continue."

In addition, this support case has been going on for over a month now, it's like pulling teeth just to get them to answer anything. I can't believe that any service can be so lousy.

Does anybody know a company who does email newsletter service and has good support?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

A company called Constant Contact was just recommended for this purpose. I have no personal experience with it so I can't gice you an endorsement.

IanS

Anonymous said...

What do you mean by "email newsletter service"?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

The service which sends out my weekly newsletter to those who subscribed to it, on Domai.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a mailing list to me. I am not sure why you need a company for that.

AWeber offers e-mail marketing services.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Thank you very much.

I need a company because I'm not a geek, and even TidBITS, who are all geeks, admit that running a mailing list is much harder than they thought.