Free Technical Support? Nope.
I like to give free advice on how to manage a website to people who really need it. Often I’ll go on Craigslist and write pointers to help people out with stuff on their sites.
One thing I won’t do, give free advice to a client who cancels their service with me. For some odd reason, I’ve had a couple of post-service advice calls recently.
One guy called me up concerning his Facebook advertisement fees not going through. I could feel my face scrunch up in confusion as to what in the world I had anything to do with his problem, as he no longer paid for services from me. I waited in a slight anticipation of him saying something about paying me, but no, he just waited for me to walk him through a solution to his problem.
I paused, looked up at the ceiling for a moment and told him what he should do. “Do you see the help button on Facebook?” “Yes.” He replied.
“Well, click that.”
“Okay.” He continued.
“Now, type in your problem and get Facebook support.”
Silence.
“You need to get Facebook support for your problem, do you understand?”
“Uh, yeah, um, okay...”
The call concluded with, “Have a nice day.”
Next, is the famous and never boring call, where the former client or their new “#webdev” can’t figure out what a nameserver is.
It usually goes something like:
“Please release our domain. This is our domain and we can not get it to work.”
The general response, “We are not holding your domain. Please change your DNS settings to default.”
That almost always gets the same answer, which is, “How do we do that?”
Now, while I am obviously willing to help change a person’s DNS to point to my server, I’ll admit I’m not the most helpful person when it comes to hand holding a cancellation.
“You have to call your domain name registrar and they will walk you through that.”
After all, they are actually getting paid for such a call. So, no, no free walk-throughs after cancellation. These people played ghost when their renewals were up, then they call me up like I owe them a favor. Psh.
