Fighting crime could be a very difficult game; well played on an international stage with the power of voice. But on the local stage, erasing corruption could be a long route towards the end result. You may have to do what your normal self wouldn’t have thought of doing as a result of making right the wrong. And to even make the matter worse, the forces around may rise up against you, hence reducing your influence on the subject matter.
Not quite long ago, I wrote an article about DomainKing eloping with many Nigerians’ hard-earned nairas all in the name ofproviding ghost webhosting and domain name registration services. I was able to uncover this because I was a victim…and when I did research, all I could read online were well-crafted sales-pitch formed reviews detailing how beautiful and amazing using the service could be for anyone thinking of coming onboard. I tried to buy the good reviews but the reality before my eyes could not allow me to let that sink in until I realized that about hundreds other people were complaining about this.
But you know what?
Big uncle, Mr. Google! couldn’t help in bringing these people up, those voices weren’t heard because DomainKing is spending so big to stay on top of Google for almost any form of keywords about domain registration and web hosting in the country – and what do you expect when you hit search for the company’s own branded keyword “Domain King or DomainKing”?
That prompted me to use my contact to reach out to NIRA and other organizations concerned. Fortunately for me, my money was refunded but I can’t be certain about others until few hours ago that I received an email from the company CEO narating how everything happened.
Here’s the transcript for your reading pleasure.
Dear Olawale Daniel,
Warmest greetings of the Season from DomainKing.NG Team! We hope you are doing well!We are writing this email to apologize for the service disruption that occurred in February on our platform.
We owe you a big apology for our service disruption in February that had affected our support & services at DomainKing.NG. We really messed it up & we know it.
We know this apology may be coming very late from us, but we are sincerely very sorry for the inconveniences & problems caused to you by our service disruption. We seriously understand the trust you place in us & our responsibilities as a Hosting Service Provider. And I cannot express how sorry I am that we were not upto the level that you expect from us.
Reason for Service Disruption
Our services were affected because a client who had registered a domain with us, abused our services to defraud an organization in India. Being the service provider of the domain, we were involved in legal trouble with the authorities in India. Due to this, we were not able to provide full support to you in February. We have responded to the concerned agency and have provided them with the requested information on the abusive client.Our support & services were restored in March. But there were still some issues with our backend system which affected some of our services. It took a while for us to fully restore these services as we have been working on improving our system to detect abuse & fixing the bugs. All these issues have now been fixed.
You can now Register New Domains, Buy Hosting, Manage your Existing Domains & Hosting without any problem.
Data Safety
We know the importance of the safety & security of your website & your data. We assure you that none of the customer data or hosting data were affected by this situation.Keeping you Informed
Since our inception, providing the best quality services & support to you with complete honesty & and maintaining transparency through communication has always been our focus. But through the past few months we have fell short of these expectations. We are sincerely very sorry for not being at the level of your expectations & for not keeping you fully informed.We know that we should have kept you informed about this situation. We are very sorry for the lack of official communication in this regard from our end. In this regard, we have implemented a new Client Communication & Grievance Redressal Policy in which our Customer Service Department Incharge will issue the statements to our clients in proper & timely manner.
We are also very sorry that we were not able to come with an official apology sooner.
Measures taken by us so that any such incident isn’t repeated again
We know apologizing isn’t enough in this case. So we wanted to make sure that any such incident is never repeated again in the future.For this, we have made 3 main changes:
1) We have made changes to our company structure as per ISO 9001 standards. ISO 9001 standards focuses on better management structure & customer satisfaction. We are now ISO 9001:2015 certified company for which 3rd party has conducted the audit on our company.The changes in our company structure as per ISO 9001 Standards will help improve our efficiency even more & it will also help reduce the handling time for all technical & billing issues.
2) We have also made sure that none of the client grievances go unnoticed in future.
We now have escalation levels at each departments in which different management levels will look into each client issue. For this, we have created Level 1 Escalation (Department Heads will look into your issue & ensure to resolve your grievance), Level 2 Escalation (Manager will look into your issue if the Level 1 isn’t able to resolve your issue) & Level 3 Escalation (Management will directly ensure to resolve your grievance).
Here are the email addresses for each level of escalation in case you are not satisfied by the response from any of our support team.
L1@DomainKing.NG
L2@DomainKing.NG
L3@DomainKing.NGWe also encourage you to please post your feedback on Facebook & Form on our website so that we can improve our services by learning from your feedback. Every Positive or Negative Feedback matters to us.
Kindly post your review & feedback on: Facebook and Feedback Form
3) Further, we have now also implemented new Abuse detection system that is better in detecting potential abuse of service. We have also implemented what we believe to be clear policies in our terms of use that prohibit use of our service for any abuse. Our Abuse Team constantly monitors and exclude any such abusive clients from using our services.
With above measures in place, I assure you that any such incident will never affect our services & support to you in the future.
Making sure that you are fully satisfied with our products & services is our #1 goal at DomainKing.NG. We are more than positive that with these changes we will be able to offer even better services & support to you in the future.
Thank You for your Love & Support:
We sincerely want to Thank you for bearing with us in this matter. We are truly grateful for your loyalty & support during our difficult time.As our sincerest gratitude to you & for the inconvenience you had due to our service disruption, we want to offer you 50% OFF on all new Hosting Products & Hosting renewals and 10% OFF on Domain Registration & Renewals. This offer will be valid for next 10 days till 25 June, 2017.
Kindly use this coupon code: DKNGTHANKYOU for Hosting and DKNGTHANKYOU1 for Domains registration during checkout to enjoy your discount.
I once again want to express my sincerest gratitude to you for your continued support & understanding on this issue and for the confidence that you have placed in us. Your trust & love means the world to us. We hope that you will give us the opportunity to prove our commitment to you in the future as well.
I’d also like to thank you for taking the time to read this long email. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us anytime as we are here 24/7 for you.
From all of us at DomainKing.NG, it is an honour to serve you.
Yours Sincerely,
Karan Singh
CEO
DomainKing.NG
Upon reading this letter, I felt bad for Karan Singh too for what has so far happened, but on the other hand, I have to be realistic;
…what if I’d stay silent and nobody dare to hit the query button?
…what if I had given up my money because I have more?
…what about someone whose lives depended on the company’s service delivery?
I think I can justify myself for voicing out my concerns, and try to speak for others who have, one way or the other, lost the inspiration to use their voices.
The wisdom of my writing today is, no matter what, you can still stand tall against anything that’s not rightly done around you. That cannot make you a bad person but instead, the whole world will celebrate you for it.
And to round up, Karan Singh, I personally felt great that you are back with a big bang but unfortunately, I’D MOVED ON as a result of waiting for too long. But I am throwing this your offer to others to take advantage of it. I believe you won’t hate me for that!
But I promise you, I will be watching your progress and probably, very soon, I can recommend again, or come back over to your service.