Why do people take isolated examples of uneducated, misinformed customer service reps, and blow them into raging complaints damning the entire company? I'm starting to see this regularly. Take a deep breath before you spew out some diatribe on your blog.
The author of this post is 100% correct in leaving a company she doesn't trust and warning readers that that behavior is entirely unacceptable.
There is no uniform customer service business or uniform training. Having worked in companies with support departments, there is a wide variance. Some are tightly scripted, others are given almost free reign and simply told to resolve issues quickly. edit: of course, password through email is big no-no.
If they didn't provide that and didn't explicitly say "never ask for password", that's really the company's fault.
"Wow, you are a hell customer."
I'm willing to bet Squarespace is happy the OP is leaving their service, I know I would be if I were in their shoes.
Granted, it is a case of bad support, but as Colin mentions, it is likely an issue with an under trained new hire, not a systematic failure.
If they've not been educated about not doing that, there's a fair chance they aren't going to be too smart around other big security issues either - such as resetting passwords with very little validation of whether it's the genuine customer requesting it or not.
Unless the customer is causing you a major amount of aggravation or costing you money, you shouldn't be happy to see one go.
Also, FWIW, I don't think citing a comment in which the commenter calls the OP an "egotistical bitch" twice is good support for an argument.
A hell customer would call them up, yell, demand answers, and refuse to hang up until the situation was "fixed" to her liking, threaten to sue and call CNN, etc.
Most support agents are probably ok with seeing a staunchly unsatisfied customer simply leave and allow them to help people who want to be helped.
1. Squarespace don't have the engineering to support their support team's work, therefore they need passwords. This is unlikely, but if it's the case, people should avoid Squarespace, or at least using their support system.
2. They do have the engineering support, but their support team don't know how to use it and just ask for passwords. Given how much they emphasize support, I find this unlikely, but again, if the case you should avoid using them.
3. A new starter on the support team hasn't been run through all of the details about how to use the support system yet. This strikes me as the most likely, and not grounds for avoiding Squarespace. It should be pointed out to them, privately, so that they can emphasize customer password security in their training process for support staff.
I was never asked for my password and I doubt very much if that's normal procedure. Without trying to sound like some shill account, I can tell you that Squarespace made a loyal customer out of me by giving me the kind of support they promise, but which I had previously assumed was sales-talk-BS.
I'm going to say it was a case of number 3 on your list.
Anyone knows how much traffic can handle such a site?
Sites like pancake.io, scriptogr.am or site44.com use the API, which don't have bandwidth caps on the Dropbox side
To be clear, it is our stated policy to not ask for security credentials over email. All of our 150+ customer care team members receive proper training, both during on-boarding and on an ongoing basis.
This incident was quite simply an example of human error. The support request was troubleshooting a mobile app interaction with our legacy Squarespace 5 product. This is a rare example of our team not being able to login as the user. One of my team members made a mistake, and for that our entire team apologizes. The proper action would have been to escalate to engineering or ask the customer to create a temporary password.
We will of course use this as a teaching moment and continue to strive each and every day to improve in our efforts to deliver world class support to all of our customers.
Sincerely,
Christa
Needless to say, I changed that password and jumped ship. If any service requires your password as verification, it's definitely a good idea to look into other services.
After some debate with more senior team members, I reset my password to something generic and gave it to them, but it sets a bad precedent for customers who should be educated into never giving their password, under any circumstances.
Yes, SquareSpace customer support actually recommended I switch from Mac to Windows to use their service.
