Anecdotal comments about Hightail (formerly YouSendIt) customer service - are they representative?

I have a free YouSendIt account that I occasionally use to distribute large business files, but I haven't had occasion to use it recently. I had heard that the company was now called Hightail, but hadn't investigated much...until Hightail e-mailed me a survey.

I completed the survey, then re-entered my e-mail address (Hightail has an iPad drawing). Hightail made a point of noting that the iPad winner would be announced on Facebook's page, and by the way, why don't you like our Facebook page to receive updates?

Incidentally, as far as I'm concerned this does not violate Facebook's rules prohibiting forced likes. I didn't have to like the page to participate in the contest. However, I figured I'd like the page and see what types of announcements Hightail has.

But when I got to the page, the interesting part wasn't the stuff from Hightail (when I viewed the page, Hightail hadn't posted any new content in several days). The interesting part was the stuff TO Hightail - namely, comments from customers on Hightail posts. And it appears that things aren't going well in Hightail-land.

Diane McHenry Poormon
Maybe the team should work a little harder on getting your product to work since buying you send it.

Bill Match Frame
You have the nerve to send me an email titled "Last chance to get four months free"? You have one week to fix your well documented file transfer problems or I am an Ex Customer! And don't bother posting any more of those "this is our top priority" notes. You have been saying this since you made the jump from Yousendit to Hightail. ONE WEEK!

Annie Owens-Seifert
Yeah, what's the deal? Since yousendit became hightail we don't get our files on time or at all and have to turn to other sources. Your support responses are placating followed by asking me to 'further describe my problems if they persist'. They persist. We used to run our business using yousendit.

Brandon Hadley
Absolutely NO help through customer service yet daily Facebook posts. Super frustrating. I'm not sure if you could possibly try harder to lose my business.

Now these statements themselves may not be indicative of anything - anecdotal evidence is not statistical. And for what it's worth, the Better Business Bureau list of complaints (all resolved) predate the company name change from YouSendIt to Hightail.

So how will Hightail compete against Dropbox? After a search, I found a page at the Hightail website - http://learn.hightail.com/t5/Products-and-Features/Hightail-vs-Dropbox/td-p/53290 - that compared the two services.

I just completed a race between the two apps to sync 3gb worth of data. Dropbox was able to complete the sync three times over before Hightail was even finished (Hightail never finished - I gave up)

Now, I really love the idea having my express account and cloud storage combined, but I just dont understand why Hightail desktop is so inferior....

Can you please explain? When can we expect improvements?

As you can see, this is a forum comment. To Hightail's credit, they don't delete negative comments. Unfortunately, no one from Hightail Customer Support tried to explain the difference (if you view the thread, you'll see that Hightail did answer a subsequent person's question about customer support hours).

The interesting part is the perception. According to the views of several of the people above, the problems began when YouSendIt became Hightail. I doubt that Hightail made any technical changes when they made the name change (but I could be wrong), but people perceive it that way. And they're taking out their frustrations on Facebook.

Perhaps Hightail will respond in some way. And even if they don't, these glitches - provided that they're temporary - may not be fatal. I don't know if anyone even remembers how many "fail whales" Twitter had in its early years.

I'll monitor this to see if I learn anything more.