I love speaking out about companies who've done wrong. I've done it with companies such as Serverbeach and Comcast, and plenty more. I'd say about 50% of the time, I receive a response from the company. When I hear from a company official, there's a 99% chance that my issue will be resolved and that my service will either be reimbursed and/or improved. Here's a list of my top three examples of companies doing the RIGHT thing to satisfy their customers:

So lets take bad service company #1: Serverbeach.

On the morning of October 20th, my ServerBeach services went offline. The reasons are beyond me and irrelevant to this topic. The company had a service level agreement that promised reimbursement for my services if there was any downtime. I blogged about my complaints, and I received an email from company officials within an hour. Since then, the company has provided me over $100 in reimbursement and my servers have stayed online since. I'll call this success and forgive ServerBeach for that mishap.

Lets make bad service company #2 Comcast.

Just a few days ago, my comcast service was shut off. The service has always been buggy, and their customer support was slow and non-existent at super late hours. Of course, I blogged about it. Within 24 hours, a company official contacted me to help address the situation. A customer rep called, my service was put back online, and my co-founder (who's using this comcast service) claims that our cable speeds have gone way up! I'll call this too a success. Yet again, it shouldn't take my bitching to fix the problems.

Last, but not least, I'll give my final award to Jajah.

Back in December, I was trying to make an outgoing call to my mom when all of a sudden my Jajah service cut off. Ended up that my account was out of funds, so I tried to make payment with a new credit card. It didn't work, so I blogged about it. Within two hours of posting my complaint, the director of marketing gave me access to a company account and fixed the issue by the next morning. Talk about good customer support! Why can't all companies be this good?

I've wrote negative reviews about plenty of other companies who never got back to me. Take for example United - I blogged about them a few days ago and no company representative has contacted me. I complain about AT&T quite often and they're yet to make me happy for the hours of my time they've wasted. I once wrote about how oDesk is better than Elance, but amazingly enough, Elance company officials invited me to their office for (beer) and pizza! It was surprising, yet amazing. Again, why can't all companies be that way?

I'm sure there are plenty of other companies I can add to this list. But for now, the three I mentioned deserve some praise for actually taking care of customer complaints.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

First and foremost, apologies for having slacked off on blogging for the past 2 weeks. Gosh, I've been busy being a kid!

ANYWAY, i flew Virgin America from JFK to SFO yesterday. It was my first flight with Virgin America, and they practically did everything right. I was reading a book on creating customer evangelists (for another topic) and the airline pretty much won on every point this book offered. Of course, many of those points are obvious: provide good service and create a memorable experience. It also helps not to set yourself up for complaints. Virgin only flies out of a few airports, so the logistics are much more manageable. American Airlines, on the other hand, will always have problems to worry about. In effect, they've set themselves up for more problems and more spending because of the massive growth into markets that Virgin or Southwest wouldn't dare touch.

However, Virgin could improve: I wrote about them about a month ago, and no representative contacted me or commented on my blog to note my existence. Many companies are being smart by tapping into internet conversations - take for example our friends at Serverbeach.com. Within an hour after I wrote a complaint about their downtime, a company official commented on my blog. Now THATS how you create loyal customer evangelists!

Virgin is still young and learning how to manage itself as an airline, but they're doing almost everything right. Next time you fly, go with Virgin! And once you fly with them, you too will become a customer evangelist :)

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

It's a pity that Rackspace, a company with a stellar reputation for uptime and "Fanatical Support" experienced hours of downtime for clients in the Fort Worth data center. After putting in millions of dollars into infrastructure, how could something like this happen?

First, disclosures: I used to be happy Rackspace customer. I studied the way they did business and implemented it in my own dedicated server solutions business back in 2004. I'm friendly with the founders/former management of Rackspace and Serverbeach, and I've learned so much from their advice.

Just a few weeks ago, Serverbeach experienced a power outage. They took the necessary steps to get people back online within a few hours, but it was sure to cost clients thousands of hours of man power and money to fix. The damage is still there - downtime puts full time businesses out of order.

When a hosting company goes down, so many levels of the business chain are hurting. For example, I used to have servers at Sagonet, and when they had problems, all of my racks there were down. When my racks were down, thousands of websites were shut off from the world. Thousands of websites shut down mean that not only are my clients mad at me, but their clients are mad at them. And those clients may have to use these websites to serve THEIR clients, and so on. The loop can go on forever, and it all comes down to a datacenter hickup.

At that point, there's nothing you can do but wait for the machines to come back online. And once they're online, a shit ton of complain emails are bound to go to the datacenter, the leasers, the resellers, the clients, and even the clients of the clients. Companies like Rackspace who manage both the datacenter and the actually sold services are forced to compensate for lost time, or face terrible press and a huge loss of clientele.

It's particularly frustrating for Rackspace that all of this happened from a stupid truck accident that brough a transformer down. The open letter says that they had to shut some infrastructure down just to get to the accident victim. I'm sure the high level Rackspace clients wouldn't have minded leaving that poor soul to suffer if it meant keeping their websites running.

When I was in the business, problems weren't as terrible, because I targeted small businesses. Many of them wouldn't even notice downtime! Rackspace, on the other hand, serves clients such as Motorola and JC Morgan Chase. And when their services go down, the entire world is bound to know.

I'll give Rackspace credit for doing the right thing. They wrote an open letter to their clients, took responsibility, and promised compensation.

Unfortunate for them, their reputation may be somewhat tarnished from this stupid accident.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

Serverbeach was awesome enough to contact me just an hour after my blog post below. Here's what the community evangelist, Charnell Pugsley wrote to me:

The current situation: All our guys are out there now doing nothing but bringing servers online and the power is stable.

Within the next few days, we will be investigating what's taken place and coming up with a solution to keep it from happening again. We'll be following up with all of our customers in the Virginia data center with an official explanation soon.

... and then provided me my compensation in the form of credit to future invoices. Not bad, considering I didn't have to do anything more than just write this blog post and email her!

In any case, this is way better customer support than most I've seen in the past. When shit hits the fan, it's often difficult to get compensation let alone receive a reply from any company representatives.

Well, cheers to ServerBeach! I'll continue to be a loyal customer :)

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.

Ugh. ServerBeach killed our server this morning at about 4AM PST. Their support forums tell us there was a power outage, but then our mysql server wouldn't boot up and all of that means lost users and lost revenues over a stupid power failure.

Our first reaction was to go ape shit and yell at them, but having been in the hosting business before, I understand what they're going through. Most of this isn't directly their fault, but they do promise us almost perfect uptime. Serverbeach hosts companies such as Youtube; and when infrastructure goes down, a lot of money is lost by everyone. Even if the root cause of the power failure was environmental, fingers will be pointed at ServerBeach because of their promises of superb service towards businesses.

Although I did say I'd forgive them, I would like some reimbursement. Their SLA reads:

In the event ServerBeach fails to meet the Replacement Guarantee or customer experiences Infrastructure Downtime or Network Downtime as outlined herein, provided Customer follows the procedures outlined herein, ServerBeach will apply a credit ("Credit") to customer's account in an amount equal to five percent (5%) of the Net MRC for the affected account for each half hour of downtime or fraction thereof. "Net MRC" means the monthly recurring charge for hosting service for the server experiencing the issue excluding any add-on or optional services which are not included as part of the standard hosting plan but are included as part of such customer's monthly recurring charge.

That's just lame. I want 3 months of free service!!! Now I remember why I got out of the dedicated server business back at age 14... because I had to deal with customers like me.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.

EDIT: As of 10/18/07, we're making $600/month from ads!

I'm sorry I haven't been around the past few days. The facebook application that Alex, Aaron, and I created has been having some pretty awesome growth! Here are the basic statistics:

Friday: First listed in app directory. 400 users as of 6AM, 1,200 when I went to sleep at 2AM.

Weekend: Barely 300 users added. The weekend drop in growth was expected.

Monday: Surpassed 2,000 users by midnight. Growth resumed, but not as fast as first day listed in app directory.

Over the past few days, we've used 350mb of bandwidth and very little server juice on our Serverbeach box.

Currently, (assuming our CPM doesn't change) we're making $250/month strictly from silly advertisements and we're expecting our income to increase with growth. It's not a lot, but it's still something.

Anyway, I'll keep you guys updated when we learn more!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.