This post isn’t aimed at anyone in particular – even though it was spurred by a recent email exchange with a long-time customer and member of our community, whose issue has been resolved.
We’ve been doing this for 13 years now, and we’ve prided ourselves on providing the best customer service possible.
Ask yourself – the last time you sought customer service from ANY company via email (or even by phone) – how long did it take to get a response? Hours? Days? Longer? It doesn’t matter whether the company is big or small, it usually takes (what seems to be) forever.
Well, it’s not unusual for us to get a customer service request at 3am, and have answered it by 3:10am. Not always, but as often as we can.
The issue that spurred this post was a customer’s inability to access a page on one of our sites – because he had an old page cached in his browser. We told him to clear the page from his cache, or to clear his cache completely.
He didn’t know how to do that, and sent another email asking for help with it.
The email arrived just after we had left the office for dinner – and when we got back two hours later, there was a another, somewhat edgy email saying “‘I’ve asked this once before, and I’m not going to type the whole message again.”
We responded by saying that we try to be available as close to 24 hours a day as possible – but we DO take time to eat dinner, and a follow-up email two hours later really isn’t going to accomplish very much.
As we way, he apologized and the issue has been resolved.
But the real issue is this: companies in our community are small. Very small. And it seems to us that almost every one of them responds to customer email in a timely fashion – in fact, light-years quicker than almost any other company you can name, whether it’s Verizon, AOL, Amazon or Sears.
We know this is now an “instant gratification” society – and email, IMs and cell phones have made it so even more.
But before you shoot off an angry email, please be reasonable. Everyone in our community has a life – and their business is, with very few exceptions, run by one person who can’t be waiting by the email box 24/7 for every customer email in order to answer it within minutes. (If they did that – not only would they have no life and no sleep – they would also have no time to shoot, edit and upload new material.)
We, and all the other members of our community, do our best. We hope that you realize that – and at least wait THREE hours before sending a followup email

The anti-smoking war may have begun for real in the United States, but it looks like Great Britain is trying to make up for lost time. Within the last few days, that nation has announced a fine of about $100 for stubbing out a cigarette on the street – and local officials there are now saying they’ll refuse to perform elective surgery on smokers. You can read the whole story here – maybe British sightings are about to become even rarer than American ones?