Iomart responded

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I received an email from Iomart in response to this posting about problems I'd had which, amongst the expected said this:

Customer Service is extremely important to us and as you can imagine the extended maintenance was disappointing from our own internal viewpoint, however it was at the same time unavoidable and we did everything in our power to restore services as quickly as possible.

Which is fine as it goes, but if they actually read the post they will see that my anger is directed at three things:

1/ We were not expecting to be affected, this wasn't "extended maintenance" for us it was unplanned downtime. Iomart advertise 100% uptime, how can they do that if they don't even know when things aren't working.
2/ Even if we had been expecting this we were not given enough time to come up with contingency arrangements.
3/ We couldn't contact anyone for several hours after we discovered the problem, and neither did they contact us to tell us that there even was a problem, therefore clearly not doing everything in their power, and it took several more hours to finally restore our services.

My correspondent also said:

is there anything we can do to perhaps help you find alternative solutions or ease the frustration you have clearly experienced with the maintenance on Sunday 27th January.

Which is nonsense because the two things which might have made a difference are clearly not going to be on Iomarts agenda,
a) compensate our clients who lost tens of £000's of revenue
or b) turn the clock back and warn us at least 10 working days before this happened.

Now don't get me wrong, I know that things can and do go wrong at times, I'm not complaining that things went wrong, I'm complaining that we weren't in the loop.
Customer service is about making your customers priorities and concerns your priorities and concerns. In this case Iomart's priorities and concerns were clearly their own.

Oh and if anyone from Iomart should choose to respond to this post, please use comments, and if anyone does choose to email me, don't try to be clever and use an address you discover, use the one advertised, find it using the "contact me" link, that's what its there for.

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