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Ask Slashdot: How Long Do We Give an Online Service To Fix Issues?
ncc189 writes "The Funimation Roku channel has been basically unusable during primetime for about a month now. With very little feedback from the company and no improvements to the service at all, I canceled my account. My question to Slashdot users is: how long do you give a service to fix issues before you cancel the service, and how much leeway do you give the service's representatives in communicating issue with us? It seems to me that a few days is more than enough in the internet age; 3+ weeks is beyond reason. How long do you think is fair for services like this?"
Is the "online service" Oracle?
More anime than what Funimation has on Netflix perhaps? Now you've given them free advertising, and I might just go sign up.
Morphing Software
If I pay for it, they better be telling me something reasonably accurate
If I dont, then they dont owe me squat and it will be back when its back
yes 3 years before they sent an AT&T person to my house to look at the wires. He then fixed it in minutes. It now works fine. Yes I still have DSL only because my Comcast cable TV goes out monthly. At least if I loose cable I can still watch netflix, hulu and online stuff.
Only 'flamers' flame!
I assure you there are folks who would give any service of their choosing as much time as they like if they think it's worth while to wait. Can be three weeks like for you or it can be maybe a few months even. Loyalty is a personal thing, but companies that do poorly with service tend not to have many clients/customers unless they offer something unique and/or interesting. And loyalty is very fickle.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
If it goes beyond 5 days I would expect a reduced bill for the time the service was unusable that month. If I didn't get one I would definitely cancel.
This is such a vague question that it cannot be answered in a sensible way. It depends on the service, and alternatives. If I have no alternatives, I am out of luck. On the other hand, if there are dozens of options, I'd switch as soon as I believe the alternatives would provide better value for money. If it is a critical service (depending on the application), even a few minutes might be catastrophic.
The re-compensation issue should be dealt with in the service level agreements/TOS (including no-cost cancellations).
As for communicating problems, I'd expect to be kept in the loop - each time they make a new estimate of restoration time, I should be send a notification by my medium of choice. It is unacceptable that a paying client have no idea when service would be restored. Obviously, as problems are discovered, the estimate will be modified. But I still would want to have the latest estimate (especially for work-related services).
My willingness to give them a chance would depend on a number of things:
ISTM that you're an unreasonable little snot, since the speed of the resolution of the problem is completely dependent upon the cause of the problem. What is reasonable, though, is timely customer feedback.
Sorry, but 100% wrong. Yeah, timely feedback (including the magic phrase "prorated refund for downtime") will buy you a few days (at most). But if I actually pay for your service, I don't give two shits if your only datacenter just got hit by a Tsunami - Get your service back up now, or by next week your competition will provide it for me.
> since the speed of the resolution of the problem is completely dependent upon the cause
The speed of resolution is dependent upon many things, including their competency, how well they *planned* for disruptions in advance and even how many employees they have. If they're just bottom fishers, a couple of guys running a service on an old Dell in their grandmother's basement, maybe I shouldn't EXPECT a quick resolution ... but then, they shouldn't EXPECT to stay in business.
Sometimes things happen that you can't plan for, but they have a tendency to affect a lot of other services at the same time. Hurricane Sandy knocked out a bunch of stuff Up Nawth. (The company that I do freelance writing had already scheduled me to do an article on transmitter efficiency, then disappeared: their mail service provider was underwater.) Fine; I understand and I can be patient.
I'd need to see evidence that the OP's outage isn't caused by stinginess (refusal to have backup systems for 'zample) or just plain incompetence.
Hate to say it, but speaking from experience, almost anytime you see a business go down and stay down for weeks on end, it's either because the Russians have invaded, or they're in deep money trouble and have to scrounge for the bucks to replace the dead stuff. I rather suspect that the latter is the case here for the OP. In that case, yes, I cancel and go elsewhere. Too bad, they have my sympathies ... but they no longer have my money, either.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
At first glance, I thought this was about Bank of America's day-long outage yesterday. On the first of the month, phone, ATM and online access was gone until late in the evening Eastern time.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Empathy has nothing at all to do with it. I can feel bad for a destroyed data center owner but that feeling does not negate the reason and purpose for using them in the first place. the bottom line is that there is no reason to have an ISP that doesn't allow you to get online, there is no reason to keep buying bus tokens when you do not ride the bus, and there is no reason to continue paying for an online service when they cannot deliver whatever it is that you needed in the first place. In most cases, if the service or whatever was needed, it will likely need to be usable therefore replicated when the service isn't provided. Being sad or feeling sorry for the service doesn't change that.
Funimation has had ongoing problems with their website for over a year. They continually have problems with site performance, video player performance and have pretty routine crashes. They have been calling their website Beta since 2011.
This is plus 5 Insightful? More like plus 5 Sad. Or are most people here Americans with scientifically proven zero empathy.
"Empathy" means the ability to understand and share the feelings of a fellow human. Mitt's assertions to the contrary aside, "businesses are [not] people too". So empathy has nothing to do with it.
A business exists solely for the exchange of goods and/or services for money (or other goods and/or services). If a business can't provide me with the goods and/or services I want, they have no reason to continue to exist for all it matters to me. I would only even give them that few days I mentioned to restore service, as a matter of convenience to me - If I could realistically switch ISPs, for example, 15 seconds after discovering my internet had gone down again, Verizon could kiss my hairy white ass goodbye.
Now if you want to talk about loyalty - I have loyalty to my friends. I have loyalty to my family. I have loyalty to people that have given me a reason to care about them. The company that, despite my opting out of everything possible on their privacy policy still has their "partners" send me life insurance offers once a month? Yeah, not so much loyalty there - More like "simmering resentment" that such complete bastards manage to have the best game in town.
I have dsl in dc from verizon now, and service started getting worse about two years ago, and is now really bad. There are half days and sometimes full days when the connection drops and cannot be maintained, tho it will connect again for a minute or so, which is enough to get mail. My understanding from the bloomberg articles by Susan Crawford http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-25/merger-made-comcast-strong-u-s-web-users-weak.html is that it's a capacity problem caused by monopoly collusion between Verizon and Comcast: Verizon makes more money from smartphones, so Verizon is letting its dsl capacity go to hell while increasing wifi capacity. Of course, Verizon stopped extending fiber in dc before it reached my neighborhood (same lousy collusion), so that's out. I was taking online classes in Japanese, and sometimes it seemed to help if I called Verizon and begged them to "shift me to the good network" -- I'd have an hour or so to take my class. Unfortunately, I believe my only alternative is Comcast, which I believe is limiting capacity and trying to force everyone to use its movies, which don't count against the monthly limit. I really hate that -- I'm old, I remember IBM, Ma Bell, AOL, all the other monopolists (now I think Google and Facebook are heading that way). It's a case study in Acemoglu and Robinson's "Why Nations Fail" -- the U.S. won't modernize to fiber because of powerful economic groups with congressmen in their pockets. Sorry about the rant, but this is a very sore point with me!
Case in point is Sirius Satellite Radio. last year just before I paid for the next year they dropped a station that happened to be what I mostly listened to. When I called them up, they offered a reduced rate. This year when it was time to renew, I called them up and they again offered me a discounted rate. I'm still with them because I am paying what I consider is fair for the service. If they do not offer me a discount next year I will drop it.
I found that if you disable auto-renew, then when it's renewal time they don't cut you off for a few weeks while they try desperately to contact you. After a week or so, finally answer the phone and tell them their service is too expensive. Every year, they "check" with a retention supervisor and then offer me a reduced rate of ~$6/mo if I prepay for a year. That's less than 1/2 of their regular rate.
I lived with broken DSL for 3 months before I sent a letter to the FCC complaining. I copied the line owner and the service provider, and the problem was fixed within 48 hours of me sending the letter, probably before the FCC even received my complaint. And yes, the FCC did follow up on my complaint.
Learn to love Alaska
This is kind of situational. Overall, I would agree with what you say, but there are some limits. For example, say I have a subscription to a business. It has always had great service and customer service, and I've been with them for years. Then their data center or whatever gets hit by an earthquake, but they assure me they will be back up soon. You feel I should cut my subscription and go with a random other business I've never used, just because my preferred company is offline briefly?
I have Comcast, and they're too cheap to use [proper materials for the climate]. They have a government-granted monopoly in the city where I live so I can't replace them.
When you reported Comcast's failure to use proper materials to the local government, what reply did you get?