31–40 of 267 posts
(PS: We've been a customer for many years but migrated away lately)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you in any way affiliated directly or indirectly with MailChimp ? Reason for my concern is that this is not a exemplary practice to do victim bashing either. Even if OP is "free" customer , He has some right to complaint. Companies usually don't provide "free" tier by goodness of there heart and have legitimate business plan to do so.
Nope, no connections whatsoever. In fact I work at a place a few orders of magnitude bigger than what MailChimps of the world would handle... Shit happens from time to time in business and the normal approach is you connect and discuss by whatever SLAs you align to. You don't scream publicly sullying reputations unless you've given resolution a reasonable shot. Waiting less than 1 business day doesn't seem like givin…
This the kind of apologetics I can't stand. These things happen because businesses knowingly take actions that negatively affect a small percentage of their user base, but they just don't care if the percentage is small enough.
Software businesses enjoy extremely high gross margins, which means they can afford first-rate customer service. "Bad things happen" isn't an excuse.
Hmmm... This poster has noticed an issue on 17th, mailed support and without waiting to see if there's any reply or resolution, decided to blog publicly about it the same day... seems definitely premature, maybe borderline of questionable professionalism. It appears MailChimp has a chat option for support on weekdays for paid users but since this hasn't been used, one would assume the poster is using a free plan - no…
Are you in any way affiliated directly or indirectly with MailChimp ? Reason for my concern is that this is not a exemplary practice to do victim bashing either. Even if OP is "free" customer , He has some right to complaint. Companies usually don't provide "free" tier by goodness of there heart and have legitimate business plan to do so.
* Make sure to have a plan B for all service providers that you use for critical services.
* Make sure you have a secondary copy of critical data, and that you store it responsibly in case a provider does something.
That still doesn't excuse not informing the account holder, but given the short time that has passed, it is possible that task has ended up in someone's backlog.
Hmmm... This poster has noticed an issue on 17th, mailed support and without waiting to see if there's any reply or resolution, decided to blog publicly about it the same day... seems definitely premature, maybe borderline of questionable professionalism. It appears MailChimp has a chat option for support on weekdays for paid users but since this hasn't been used, one would assume the poster is using a free plan - no…
So basically, if that person was a plumber, and a bath they installed worked perfectly, you'd now think maybe that was a fluke, because their professionality is "borderline questionable" (is that like borderline borderline, or questionably questionable?)
Yet you say you "don't scream publicly sullying reputations" -- so they're not professional, and now they're "screaming", both of which are things you are creating, while they're stating the cold facts, and they just don't happen to be flattering.
That you can be "professional" without being good, at all, just shows how meaningless that word is.
To people mentioning public shaming. I had a mailing list with them removed with all contacts lost and account banned without even notifying me. Customer support indeed responded, but with something like your account was banned because you are involved into cryptocurrencies (i had hashcash.io - no selling or buying of crypto is even close) and we completely wiped all your data. Only after a hint about possible public…
I hope everyone already using or considering using MailChimp reads this. Denying access to your mailing list even if you violated their terms is insane. Banning accounts with no warning is already bad enough - ideally they'd just disable your ability to send emails until the issue was resolved, but at least I can accept that.. but to steal people's mailing list in the process? What the fuck.
What is unreasonable IMHO, and the reason I want to bring this to people's attention, is deactivating an account without a warning, without even a notification, and with no way to recover. That is a ticking time bomb that I was simply unaware of. I never even imagined that a company as successful and popular as MC could have such an inane policy. Obviously, if I had know, I would have done things differently. All I can do now is sound the alarm so that other people don't step on this land mine. (And maybe public shaming will convince MC to give me my mailing list back, but I'm not counting on it.)
P.S. One of the problems here is that "inactivity" is ambiguous in this case. I had not logged in to my account in a long time, but people were signing up for my list. I assumed that would count as "activity".
So? Web is full of unhelpful error messages and bullshit workflows. Just use something else. One other funny workflow I was subjected to is unidirectional validation, where you are supposed to have something validated by the other party, and there's no possibility of feedback/responding to their determination. So you get a response "your website is down", when it clearly is not, and their crappy validator just can't…
The real problem is that support and service notification on the internet are often really bad. The giants can afford to do whatever they want without drawbacks. The really small players on the other hand can disappear without notice. Just the other day one of our VPSs went down, the web panel was also down, we discovered on twitter, posted by another user that the hosting company was closing in 4 days. They haven't…
Any recommendations on alternatives?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There could also be some selection bias here. I always wonder how many other attempts at public shaming never make it anywhere. I've been locked out of my Amazon and AWS account for more than two weeks despite numerous phone calls to Amazon support and desperate pleading on social media. "We are still looking into this matter for you." I could post some nasty blog post but I have really little faith it would get me a…
I can't speak for using AWS, but Amazon customer support in general is awful. Recently, my girlfriend was unable to get into her account. When she would try, it would say she had the wrong password. When she would try to reset the password, it would say the account didn't exist. When she gave up and just tried to recreate the account it wouldn't let her because it said the account already existed. During this process…
I cannot even sign into my Washington Post subscription. Thanks, Bezos!
To people mentioning public shaming. I had a mailing list with them removed with all contacts lost and account banned without even notifying me. Customer support indeed responded, but with something like your account was banned because you are involved into cryptocurrencies (i had hashcash.io - no selling or buying of crypto is even close) and we completely wiped all your data. Only after a hint about possible public…
Not defending Mailchimp, but keep in mind the perspective and context. To a customer support agent using some backend interface, it very well could be "completely wiped". To an escalation team, they may be able to pull it from backups in an "unofficial" manner.