123-reg - Look here comes the BBC and the Office of Fair Trading (123-reg.co.uk)

Member Name: tapiochre

Product:	123-reg.co.uk
Date:	28/11/07 (183 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Sort of easy

Disadvantages: Useless bunch of service providers

It's many years since I came across a business with such appalling responsiveness to customers. Ah - 'customers' - those gullible ones who give their hard earned cash in return for products or services. Or not as the case may be with 123-Reg.

I first started using them in 2002 when I bought my domain for my new business. Ok.. it was easy and still is sort of but its still as Fisher-Price as it was when they started. About as hi-tech as Mattel (or maybe less so).

But the real galling issue is the lousy, stinking, lazy, ignorant, arrogant, inward looking, belly button gazing level of customer support that they offer. At that they are true stars. 100% for each adjective.

Making this worse is their useless and dangerous e-commerce engine which broke when I was trying to purchase my blog space. On three separate occasions I got as far as pressing the "Rob me of a few quid" button but got the white screen of 123-death in response.

Now, I DO know that if this happens, you'd normally assume the transaction has completed. But when I looked at the "Manage Blog" feature, it was not purchased and pushed me to do it again.... and again...

It wasn't until the Credit Card statement came through that I saw three identical transactions on the same day from these jokers.

I've rung (gave up after 25 minutes of being told how bloody fabulous their FAQ site is), and I've used their support site but got no response.

Oh - I lie - and this was as funny as it was frustrating....

On one such "Incident Report", I got the automated "Thank you" message within a few minutes but no further reply, until a few days later when a certain "Peter L" sent me a message apologising for the delay which was due to the unprecedented number of support requests. Now why am I not surprised by that?

It DID suggest that if I wanted to re-open the incident (which thay has closed as "Solved" without doing sod all) I could 'reply to this email with 123-reg in the Subject". So I did....

About 10 minutes later I got the reply saying "This email address is no longer in use for support, please click on this link http://www.123-support.co.uk/ to submit your question". The email address in question being the address they gave in the first damned place.

What a rank way to run a ship.

I'm now worried to transfer all of the 14 domains I registered to another agency as - if others are to be believed, and why not - it may be even more painful.

I thought internic would help us by supporing complaints about registrars like 123-reg but no, they don't get involved. That's bloody half baked too!

Office of Fair Trading it is then, BBC Watchdog too??!

Who's coming for the ride?

You can contact me at chris at tapiochre dot co dot uk.

Chris

Summary: I'm not gonna take 123-reg lying down boyz!