Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Everyone has their registrar of choice and prefers to register their domains with them.

For the purpose of organizing one’s domains, it’s prudent to keep your domain names with as fewer registrars as possible.

Register.com is not my choice of registrar, although it belongs to the first group of domain registrars to become available after Network Solutions lost its monopoly in 1999.

I acquired a domain at Register.com and having had an account there I unlocked and attempted to transfer it to Fabulous.

Apparently, Register.com implements a tight security regarding the provision of authorization codes; five days later I received an email that my request had been denied and I had to call them.

So I did call them, on a Sunday morning.

The phone was answered promptly and I was patched through to their tech support. At the other end of the line, Gary was understanding and resolved my issue quickly and efficiently.

I had the authorization code in an email within minutes and proceeded with the transfer.

I feel bad when such positive experiences occur at a losing registrar but at the end of the day it’s all about cost of registrations.

Still, I’d give Register.com ten out of ten for customer support efficiency, on a Sunday no less.

Quite often, I wonder if my definition of quality customer service is too demanding but the answer comes back as a flat “no”.

Having used the services of many companies over the years – from retail to banks – I can honestly say that I’m just an average Joe with regards to what I expect from their procedures, workflow and customer support.

Today I will discuss an incident that, despite my goodwill and thorough participation in the process, kept me on the phone for 60 minutes; all while three companies involved in the domain business did less than their allocated part to assist me with resolving the issue.

A few hours ago I received an email from Register.com with regards to authorizing a domain transfer to them. The email did not list which domain was being transfered; the subject line simply stated “Transfer of .com”.

My first thought was that this was spam; after examining the email headers it was proven legit. Since I had not personally authorized a domain transfer to Register.com I felt compelled to call their support department.

I was able to get through their inbound transfers department quite easily; the wait time was barely a minute. The support associate was polite and explained to me that the domain had been authorized for transfer via the use of the auth code; she would just not let me know which domain that was due to their protocol. She advised me to contact eNom and talk to them, as they’re the losing registrar.

Usually, I don’t sweet-talk female associates on the phone. Being “neutral” and professional is the best way, however, when my property is at risk I feel that anything is permitted. So I sighed, explained that out of thousands of domains I’d have to guess the one that’s at risk of being lost; so judging by her voice that she was so friendly and nice, could she please (PLEASE) help me out?

The Register.com associate laughed, then disclosed that the domain was unlocked; a quick search at my eNom account narrowed that down to 9 domains. I applauded her professional skills and laughed jovially at the same time; this got me the TLD in question: it was a .biz

Not sure if she crossed the line of information disclosure but at that point I was left with 4 potential candidates. I thanked her, got a reference number and called eNom.

Going through eNom’s phone queue took about 5 minutes, at which point a live person got on the phone. After explaining the situation and while he was researching for any unauthorized access, it literally hit me. I asked him to put me on hold and went to Whois.biz – the official WHOIS for the .biz Registry – at which point my hunch was confirmed.

It was a matter of eNom not having synced the WHOIS info with the .biz Registry; the culprit was a .biz I sold via Sedo almost 3 weeks ago. Although upon pushing the domain to the Sedo account with eNom I had opted not to retain the contact info, the domain’s contact info was never updated at the .biz Registry by eNom; it was still mine, according to the WHOIS.

Gotta love false alarms.

Still, I called Register.com and this time I waited 20 minutes on the phone to get someone at the other end of the line, in order to update the ticket. After that, I went ahead and authorized the transfer via the link that had arrived at my email.

So who’s fault was it that I spent one hour on the phone over a situation that I did not initiate?

eNom.com – When I pushed the domain to the Sedo account, they didn’t sync the WHOIS with the .biz Registry.

Sedo.com – When they got the Auth code for the domain from their account, they did not first confirm the WHOIS at the .biz Registry.

Register.com – They would not give me the domain name – which was not mentioned in the email either – but I had to extract bits and pieces by social engineering their associate on the phone.

It’s clearly the fault of every company involved – all three are guilty of doing less than their expected part in a process that involved a buyer and a seller of a domain. Had I not taken an initiative to resolve this, these companies would receive additional inquiries and complaints from the buyer for days to come.

After all this was done and finished, I felt good for an extra reason: I had material to write a blog post on this otherwise slow and boring Sunday evening.

Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/acroplex