4SmartPhone customer service
It’s about 14:45 EDT on Sunday, March 25, 2007 as I begin this post. My hosted Exchange service from 4SmartPhone has been unavailable since about 22:00 EDT on Friday, March 23, 2007. Sometime Saturday afternoon, all pages on their Web site were redirected to a page which states the following:
4SmartPhone is experiencing technical difficulties. This is causing inflated loads on some of the machines, as a result making our website unresponsive.
Our technical personnel are diligently working towards resolving this issue. Due to these issues, the 4SmartPhone website will be temporarily unavailable.
We are well aware of the situation and so we ask you to not send an email to support. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. We will keep all of you updated as often as we can.
That message has not been updated since. Customers have no idea if mail is still being received by the backend server and the frontend is what’s down, or what. People who have called to leave voicemails have not had calls returned, e-mails have not been responded to, and there is no way to get any kind of status aside from just trying to connect. You can still connect to the Outlook Web Access login page, but attempts to log in are met with a “503 Service Unavailable” error.
Fortunately, Outlook 2007 is running in cached mode on my laptop, so it has all my e-mail, calendar, contacts, etc. as of Friday afternoon, which I have just exported to a backup PST file. But since Friday afternoon I have been without e-mail, can’t update my calendar, can’t sync my PDA, and don’t know if I’ll ever see messages that were sent to me this weekend. I’ve spent the last hour or so researching other hosted Exchange providers, but I’m not sure if 4SmartPhone will refund any of my pre-paid year of service or not if I cancel my account with them.
This is not how good customer service works. 4SmartPhone, at the very least, please update the message on your Web site. Let your customers know that you haven’t closed up shop and that you’re actually working on whatever the problem is. Clearly it’s more complicated than “inflated loads” on your server. Let us know whether messages are still being delivered to our mailboxes. Tell us something so we know there’s some hope of service being restored. At this point, any loyalty I had for the company has been destroyed and it’s going to take a lot to earn it back.
March 25th, 2007 at 16:21
I couldn’t agree more! I’m another 4smartphone customer stuck in the same situation!
July 7th, 2007 at 12:29
I’m just stuck with 4smartphone also…I couldn’t sync with my mails calendars,contact…. do you know how to contact 4smartphone by phone number?
July 7th, 2007 at 13:35
I don’t have a phone number for them. It looks like they might have some sort of Skype Voicemail box, but the thing on their contact us page isn’t coded properly. Their Skype username is “smartphone4″. I don’t know if they actually use it or not, but that’s what I could dig up with a Skype directory search for their support e-mail address.
In fairness to 4SmartPhone, since they got the problems taken care of, things have been working pretty well for me. It’s sometimes a bit slow to sync during the week, probably because they have more users on their servers than they should, but the service has been very reliable for me. I’m still sticking to my plan to leave them if they have another major outage, but so far I haven’t had to act on that. They still have an uphill climb to regain my trust in their service. If I do find a phone number, I’ll post it here or e-mail it to the address you left in the comment if that would be okay with you. In the meantime, maybe you could give the Skype Voicemailbox a shot and see how they respond. (I would definitely be interested to hear if they respond!)