How To Drive Away A Happy Customer

Some companies are happy to take your money. Others have not mastered this yet and so I spend my money elsewhere. Posted 4 March 2012

Simple, ignore them and send only scripted replies to their questions! It really is that easy.

Corporations listen up: If your bank has complained about the vault overflowing with your money again, or if you are just plain tired and want to slow things down, here is a tale that may interest you.

I registered a domain a few years ago with eNom through Google, and Google Apps and a blog were set up. Everything was configured easily for me, I was satisfied. The only thing I wanted was renew the name for five years. Since I purchased it through Google using Google Checkout (now Google Wallet), I had only the option to do one year at a time. I saw this as a possible point of failure each year, and wanted to correct it.

Not easily done. I wrote eNom and Google recently, and they said it can’t be done with the current registration setup. I would have to transfer the domain name. I had good experiences getting telephone support from eNom (Google clients call +1 425-974-4623, file that away somewhere) so I was keen to keep the name with them.

Here’s the first email I sent:

Hello,

I want to have my domain registered for multiple years, and not have to renew each year. This does not appear to be possible with the current arrangement.

Is it possible to transfer to a registration directly with you, and then do a multi-year registration with my domain? Your service is fine, no complaints.

If this isn’t possible then I need to unlock my domain and transfer it to another registrar.

Can you explain the best way to handle this please?

Thanks,

Tom

I got a canned response describing the unlock procedure, which I expected. I thought I better clarify once again that I preferred to keep eNom as the Registrar, since they had taken good care of me. I follow the steps they describe in their reply, and write back to make my intentions explicitly clear:

Thanks for the fast reply. The current domain password is (redacted)

It looks like you sent me a ‘canned’ response, which is fine. I hope you understand that I wish to transfer the domain for the purpose of doing a multi-year renewal. You (eNom) can still be the registrar, I just need to remove Google as the middleman here to do a longer registration.

If you understand this and can explain how this works, I’ll go ahead and do it. Otherwise, I will just go ahead and move it to a completely different registrar once it’s unlocked, since I know how to do that already.

Hope I’ve explained that well enough. eNom support has been good and I don’t need to just leave unnecessarily. Email back if you have any questions about this.

Pretty clear, right? I got another canned response a few hours later telling me the domain was unlocked and ready for transfer. There were no details on how to keep it with eNom. So I transferred it.

To another Registrar. One of their competitors. Nothing personal, strictly business. When you ignore me I go elsewhere.

Nice job there, too busy for me I guess. eNom is a decent Registrar, I can still recommend them. Just don’t expect a response to your specific question if you email them. If it does not fit in the rigid framework of their pre-formatted response algorithm, you are out of luck. Oh well.

While I’m at it, I should probably also recommend the Registrar I transferred to. I have domains at Gandi.net already, so that’s where I moved this one to. They are great, no complaints. As an added bonus they don’t roll over for the US government and hand over customer info without a warrant or even due process like GoDaddy does, so that’s good.

I hope this post helps out a stressed-out or overworked executive somewhere.