Yesterday was a bad mail day.  For some reason Apple Mail was grinding to a halt.  I have a PowerBook G4.  Since it is a laptop I purchased AppleCare.  It paid for itself as the hard drive went bad.  After messing around on their support site and in the forums I called AppleCare and they had me remove the mail.plist.  Problem solved.

Almost.

Removing the plist meant that I had to rebuild my mail accounts in the client.  No big deal. 

Until I got to my GoDaddy mail.  It would not enable me to send mail.  The server was rejecting the password.  So I changed it to reset it and waited a while. 

Still no luck.

So I called Godaddy.  First I spoke to a young lady that will remain nameless.  She told me it was not GoDaddy’s issue, that it was my ISP.  I have about 5 networks that I normally attach to so I knew this was not the problem.  When I mentioned EarthLink, she said that they would not allow smtp auth relay (which I know to be untrue).  Regardless, she refused to help me further.  Litererally refused.  Said it was my issue.

Called again last night and spoke to another person who shall remain nameless.  He told me that as long as I could log into my Web mail that it was a client issue and they could not help.  He quickly sent me away but requested that I fill out a survey.  Which I did.  Hopefully they will use the results to train him.

So I went and configured an email client on another machine to make sure that it was not machine specific.  I then sent an email support missive to GoDaddy. 

Jason P. sent me a note back after about 8 hours.  He told me that I needed to change smtp relay server password to match my email password.  Why they are not linked in the system is beyond me.  But he knew what he was talking about.  Shazam!  Problem solved.

So why the rant.  This is a perfect example of how not focusing on your customers creates bad will.  To focus on your customer you need to focus on the people that touch your customer and give them the tools and training to do their job.  Two people I talked to had no idea how to solve my problem and no real interest in fixing it.  I could literally feel them trying to get me off the phone to meet some ill conceived metric.

GoDaddy is generally pretty good on hosting tech support.  But, I have gone from being a satisfied GoDaddy customer and a decent word of mouth engine to someone who is thinking of switching their business to my friends at Web.com.

Focus on the people who touch the customer.  That is one of the rules.