[Rant] Customer Service

[Radon3k]

I wasn't sure where else to post this but I'm extermely upset about this. I made an agreement with a guy (I won't mention his name or his site) about a month ago for some custom vBulletin styles. The agreement was I would get three complete custom styles for $100 USD. That included images, button sets, template modifications, PSD's included, and coded. The guy is very good with his work, there's no question about that, and his prices were unbeatable. Several months before I had contracted the same guy to do another style (one) and he offered to do it for free and it was never done. Some may ask that if I didn't get the style the first time, why I would go back to him. Well for one thing, the price is the best I'll find anywhere. For another, I'm a nice guy and believe that people make mistakes and second chances are in order (most of the time) sometimes, and this was one of those times.

So I told him I needed the styles by July 30, 2003. I told him I'd like to have at least one of those by this past Friday (June 27, 2003) and he agreed and said it was no problem. Friday evening I get a message from him saying that he was having computer issues and needed an extra 12 hours. Well the site wasn't completely ready to go live yet anyway so I agreed. Saturday comes and goes and no sign of him. Sunday (today) comes around and I don't hear anything from him until he finally answers me at about 15:50 EST and says that he just decided last night (Saturday) that he wasn't going to be doing styles for vBulletin v3 yet until it goes gold. Well we had talked about this before and I told him I was more interested in getting a color scheme going that looked good than a full blown style until he was familiar enough with vBulletin v3.

Have I been unfair at all? I even told him I'd buy a vBulletin v2 style he did because I liked it alot and said I'd even pay him to upgrade to be a vBulletin v3 style when he was confident he could do it. Am I doing something wrong here? Sure, you get what you pay for, I know it's what some of you will say. But I haven't paid him anything yet, and now I'm not going to because I haven't even seen one shred of work that he's done for my site. I saw the one vBulletin v2 style, but he didn't create that for me, I just offered to buy it because I liked it.

I'm not good with picking out color schemes nor am I good with making graphics, hence why I hired him to do it. Not to mention I can't afford $500 bucks for a style. I believe people should be paid for their work, no doubt, and paid fairly.

To add to this, I was going to have the site go live on Friday, but due to him needing more time and me not being ready, I pushed it back until Saturday, with no problem at all. I have now had to post-pone the opening of my site until further notice. Why? Because this guy didn't have the guts to tell me that he decided out of the blue to not do styles for vBulletin v3. Not even color schemes! I know HTML, CSS, PHP/MySQL and even a little bit of ASP.NET, so I'm not stupid with programming or computers/internet but I'm just not good with graphics or picking out color schemes.

I am now on the hunt to find someone to help me out. No I won't be looking for three (3) custom styles for $100, that was a one-time deal, I'm almost sure of. However, if you are willing to help me out for a decent price then I'm willing to listen. You can email me or post here or PM me, whatever you feel like doing.

The moral of this story: Customer service in today's society sucks. Nobody knows how to take care of their customers anymore. When I was in retail if I had ordered something for a client and it was going to arrive late for whatever reason, I called my client right away to let him/her know what was going on. They may not have been happy that it was going to be late, but they were glad that I at least called them to give them a heads up. These days it's very hard to find good help without having to pay them your soul.

I'm sorry for the rant but I had to vent somewhere and I hope I did this in the most appropriate way possible (ie no excessive use of profanity or insults).

[Chris M]

Hmmm...

Can't say I've experienced this (yet), but I know a friend has...

I do agree that Customer service lacks everywhere, but at the end of the day I know that whatever I do, I will strive to provide the best customer service possible...

Unfortunately I do not know of any stylists out there (I myself an a Graphically retarded individual, who cannot even draw a simple Ms Paint picture), but I do hope you can find some simple colour/design that will suffice until you can find a good designer

I recommend [name]colicab-d[/name] (Artorg) for designs - His stlyes are very good (I just bought one and he is converting it to vB3), the more complicated ones may be out of the $100 price range, but I assure you they are worth it

He might not accept design requests at the moment, I'm not sure, but he still is a good designer, and get him if you can

Satan

[nuno]

I always say 'fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me'.

[Radon3k]

Thanks for the link, hellsatan. I'll see what he has to offer. To nuno, that's true, I won't be doing business with this person again. I'll think up a color scheme myself. I have a general one but I can't seem to get other colors down. The site isn't made to be a yaXay that revolves around graphics but having it look nice still helps.

[bharvey42]

drop me a message

[DrkFusion]

Today at 06:42 PM nuno said this in Post #3
I always say 'fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me'.

If I fool you once shame on you, fool you twice shame on you as well. Its our job to take care of ourselves. People in the world are ruthless and uncaring, over the week I have met over hundreds of people that are caring and nice. Anyways aside that. If you are fooled again you go somewhere else for any reason with what you need, why the hell would you go back to the same person even after knowing. I think if you go back to them you deserve to be fooled.

With stuff like business there are no second chance. Its the persons job to keep his word. if he or she doesn't there are thousands of them in the world you don't need them.

[Chris Gwynne]

So you haven't paid him anything... what's your problem here?

[Radon3k]

Today at 01:47 PM a-drive said this in Post #7
So you haven't paid him anything... what's your problem here?

I'm going to pretend like I didn't see this.

[Chris Gwynne]

Today at 07:22 PM Radon3k said this in Post #8
I'm going to pretend like I didn't see this.

Then I'll repeat,

So you haven't paid him anything... what's your problem here?

[filburt1]

Given the nature of this thread and how it only concerns the two parties in question, I'm closing it. Radon3k, if you want to get somebody to design a style, please post in service requests as a new thread